Then how about bearing our own burden?—Ah, it is the Divine “power that
worketh in us” that bears it! “I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless
I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” It is I, and yet it is not
I, but Christ. Now I have learned the secret. I will not weary somebody
else with the story of my burden, but will bear it myself, yet not I,
but Christ in me. There are people enough in the world who have not yet
learned this lesson of Christ, so that every child of God will always
find work to do in bearing burdens for others; his own he will intrust
to the Lord, to find whom he has no further to go than to his own heart.
Is it not blessed to have “One who is mighty” always under the burden
which falls upon our shoulders?
This lesson we learn from the life of Christ. He went about doing good,
for God was with Him. He comforted the mourners, He bound up the
broken-hearted, He healed all that were oppressed of the devil. Not one
who came to him with a tale of sorrow or a distressing malady was turned
away without relief; “that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by
Esaias the prophet, saying, Himself took our infirmities, and bare our
sicknesses.” Matt. 8:17. And then when night sent the multitude to their
beds, He sought the mountain or the forest, that in communion with the
Father, by whom He lived, He might find a fresh supply of life and
strength for His own soul. “Let every man prove his own work.” “Examine
yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. Know ye
not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be
reprobates?” 2 Cor. 13:5. “Though He was crucified through weakness, yet
He liveth by the power of God. For we also are weak with Him, but we
shall live with Him by the power of God.” Verse 4, margin. So if our
faith proves to us that Christ is in us,—and faith proves to us the
reality of the fact,—we have rejoicing in ourselves alone, and not in
another. We joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, and our joy does
not depend upon any other person in the world. Though all should fail
and be discouraged, we can stand, for the foundation of
God—Christ—standeth sure.
Therefore let no one who calls himself a Christian be content to lean on
somebody else, but let him, though he be the weakest of the weak, be a
burden-bearer,—a worker together with God,—in Christ bearing quietly and
uncomplainingly his own burdens, and those of his neighbors also. He can
discover some of the burdens of his uncomplaining brother, and bear
them, and the other will do likewise. So the rejoicing of the weak will
be, “The Lord Jehovah is my strength and my song; He also is become my
salvation.”
[Sidenote: Communicating Good Things.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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