Saturday, October 18, 2008

Bear Your Own Burden

Galatians 6:2 KJV
Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.
Galatians 6:5 KJV
For every man shall bear his own burden.
There are those who complain that the Bible has contradictions and they, therefore, assume that means the Bible has mistakes. This is one of those passages where there is an apparent contradiction within the very same book of the Bible. Obviously, the writer was not contradicting himself. He had a point to get across and it is our place, not to criticize what he said but to understand and then obey what he said. I would suggest the same is true of any of the apparent contradictions we might find.

First, we are to carry our own burdensWe have a responsibility and our place is to fulfill those responsibilities. We are to feed our own families. We are to pay our own bills. We are to earn our own income. On a spiritual plane, we are to follow Christ ourselves. We are to take our own families to church. We are to study our own Bibles. We are to pray for ourselves. We are to bear our own burdens. A Godly man, a person who has open eyes to the Bible gets this. He bears his own burdens.

We, who bear our own burdens are then to reach out to bear the burdens of those who do not bear their own.
We are not to complain and say since they don't bear their own burdens, we will not help them. God's Word tells those of us who have seen our responsibility to bear our own burdens, to then get up and help bear those burdens of others.

There are some who do not bear their own burdensBear them fro them, Get the gospel to their families, Get their children to church. Pray for them. Even help them financially when appropriate.
There are some who cannot bear their own burdens
For whatever reasons, their burdens are greater than they can carry on their own. Come alongside them. Be there for them.

One of the burdens we are to bear on our own is our burden to bear one another’s burdens.

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