"The burdens of one another you [all] be bearing and thus you [all] will be fulfilling the law of Christ."
-Fulfilling the law of Christ. Surely it doesn’t get any better than this. Surely all who follow Him would aspire to this. Paul had just mentioned this fantastic possibility in Galatians 5.14, the law of neighborly brotherly love, the one by which all men come to know that we are true followers of Jesus Christ (John 13.33-34). But here’s the point - there are no lone ranger burdens in the body of Christ. We are family, and my brother’s burden may as well be mine. Ours are shared burdens. Any rock with space enough for one to be under is big enough for at least one (or two) more to crawl under. Two are better than one, are they not? The kind of apathetic or distancing ‘good luck with that’ has no place in the family of Christ. We journey together, arm in arm, towards Aslan’s land. Note that we’re not talking about tiny managable backpack-size burdens - we’re talking about the big ones. The word is baros - meaning heavy, a heavy weight, heavy enough to create a burdensome level of pressure which one person cannot reasonably handle by themselves. These are BIG rocks we're talking bout. So it could be a trespass, one which is too heavy for my brother to get out from under and escape on their own. But it could be some other life circumstance, some other form of brokenness which has reared its ugly head in the life. They’re going under under the weight of it, and they need help.
-Of course, it always helps if they would let us know when they are under that heavy load, but therein lies the importance of living into God’s design for the body - that we enter into and maintain vital connections within our local assembly, that we do journey and do life together - for the long haul - with a true spiritual family, that we move beyond this Sunday-go-to-meeting once a week mentality which is so pervasive in the modern western church. Where we don’t need each other. We don’t hardly even know each other. We zip in and zip out like it’s Czechoslovakia or something, barely getting the whiff of another person’s life in our nostrils, much less a hint of their dirty junk under our spiritual fingernails. We come in a bit late, sit and stand and sit and listen and pay our spiritual toll tax and we exit not much worse for wear, mostly unchanged, untouched and unloved (but unscathed), perhaps mildly entertained by the music and the lights and the hopeful message but otherwise unstimulated in the least by any other warm blooded fellow pilgrim towards the love and good deeds which a broken world around us so desperately needs (Hebrews 10.24). Everyone has a story, a journey, something in their life which is more than they can (or should) carry. The law and love of Christ compels us forward (or should) towards a family which desperately needs one another (or should). This is ground zero - it all (so much of it anyways) starts right here. We bring our burdens to the foot of the Cross, and there, standing right beside us, are brothers and sisters, a would-be heavenly family, God’s answers to our prayers, His divine provisions for our need. God help us... to help one another...
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