I. We must take this text into the sphere of realism; that is, we must not touch trouble sentimentally. There are some people in the world who are curious about a trouble. Be very careful with these people. Many a man has been sorry afterwards that he has admitted the curious into the privacy of his thoughts. Bear ye one another's burdens, and you will know how heavy are the things which you touch.
II. We must do this with great tact and delicacy of feeling. There is a pride that is honourable and beautiful. Men dislike patronage, and to patronise is a subtle fault, a common fault. Very delicate must be our relation to one in trouble, in order that we may reverence the soul of our brother, and never lower his honour while we are helping his need.
III. We must do this as the law of life. It is not to be a solitary action, however beautiful, because separate actions do not make good men. The beauty of the Christian spirit is this: that we have no escape from its common constancy; there is nothing occasional in it.
IV. We must look at this great teaching along the line of true social economy. Let your sympathy with the burdened begin where there is sorrow, shame, and grief; then let your pity go, and then you will find that the Bible, instead of being an empty social economy, is the only true social economy in the world.
V. We must do all this with a tender sense of brotherhood. In sympathy with and bearing one another's burdens, we realise the great fact that we shall have burdens to bear ourselves. Everything is to be in the spirit of mutuality.
W. M. Statham, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxv., p. 58.
The way of self-isolation, in other words of selfishness, may present itself as the more excellent way to some; it may seem the most prudent course: and yet we act not less blindly than guiltily when we choose it.
I. This same selfishness, this same isolation of ourselves, which shuts us up against the sorrows of others, shuts us up also against their joys. If the one fountain is sealed, so will also be the other. He who will not weep with them that weep, neither shall he rejoice with them that rejoice; and thus there are sealed from him the sources of some of the purest and truest delights which the heart of man can entertain, namely, the pleasure which we derive from the happiness of others. But then, further, it is a course as blind as it is sinful, because all experience proves that the man who lays his account to live an easy, pleasurable life by knowing nothing, by refusing to know anything, of the cares, troubles, and distresses of others, is never able to carry out this scheme of his to a successful end. In strange ways he is sure to be baffled and defeated in this his guilty dream of a life lived like that of the Epicurean gods, the life of one looking down as from a superior height upon a vast weltering world of labour and sorrow and pain beneath him. "Care finds the careless out." He who resolves not to bear any part of the burdens of his fellows resolves not to fulfil the law of Christ.
II. Bear ye the burden of one another's sins. In one sense Christ only can do this. What must we do, if we would bear this burden for another? We must not soon be provoked; we must be patient towards all men, accepting that which their sin may lay upon us as part of that burden which sinners dwelling among sinners must expect to bear. So, too, we bear the burden of other men's sins when we take trouble, endure toil and pain and loss, in seeking their restoration, when, at however remote a distance from our Lord, we too follow them into the wilderness, that so, it may be, we may find, and having found, may bring them home again.
R. C. Trench, Sermons in Ireland,p. 77.
I. Poverty is a burden which we may lighten. It cannot be reasonably questioned that poverty is a great disadvantage and constitutes a great pressure on the poor. It prevents the acquisition of knowledge; it quenches the nobler strivings; it wears the body with toil, withholds the sustenance of strength; it makes life a drudgery. When very deep it is twin sister to famine, and behind them both are the darker forms of crime. "Lest I be poor and steal," is the argument by which the wise man's prayer, "Give me not poverty," is sustained. No thoughtful loving man can say that that is a state in which men ought to be content or in which we ought to be content to see them. It is a great burden, and we are to bear it with them and for them.
II. Infirmity is a burden. The list of human infirmities is a very long one; the category of faults does not soon come to an end. Now, taking the more evident among them, how are we to deal with them? This passage tells us clearly. Whenever restoration is possible we are to restore in the spirit of meekness. If a man shall fall in any measure from integrity, or from charity, or from truthfulness of speech, or from purity of behaviour, restore such a one in the spirit of meekness. Bear his burden until you bear it away, and it is his burden no longer. Go to him on the side of his infirmity, not to reproach and curse, but to heal and help.
III. The burden of trouble. All that we understand by trouble may be borne more or less by one for another. If every Christian man would put himself, according to the measure of his ability, in sympathy with all the trouble of his friends, what a lightening of that trouble there would be, what a dropping away of burdens, and what a glory cast around the burdens that remain! It would be as if the Saviour were personally present in ten thousand homes. There is, perhaps, nothing in which we are more deficient than in due readiness and fulness of Christian sympathy.
A. Raleigh, Quiet Resting Places,p. 315.
References: Galatians 6:2. F. D. Maurice, Sermons,vol. iii., p. 253; C. Kingsley, Village Sermons,p. 149; Homilist,3rd series, vol. i., p. 343; T. M. Herbert, Sketches of Sermons,p. 86; W. J. Knox-Little, Characteristics of Christian Life,p. 140; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. i., p. 283; T. L. Cuyler, Ibid.,vol. xx., p. 33; Bishop Temple, Ibid.,vol. xxxv., p. 264; E. M. Goulburn, Occasional Sermons,p. 18.
I. St. Paul combines in this passage the two great ideas on which all previous morality had been based: the one self-preservation, self-development, that is to say, that out of which the sense of responsibility grows; the other selfforgetfulness, that is to say, that out of which all effort for other people grows. It combines them in a complete harmony. "Bear ye one another's burdens," is the rule of selfforgetfulness; "Every man should bear his own burden," is the simple rule of self-preservation. And because the harmony between these two statements is so hard to preserve, because in the agony that is caused by self-reflection we are so liable to be carried away by the one to the exclusion of the other, it may be well to consider this apparent paradox.
If. This apparent diversity between "Bear ye one another's burdens" and "Let every man bear his own burden" is always meeting us and always challenging us. It looks at us under the name of individualism or humanism in every modern philosophical treatise that we read, or it comes to us in some of the smallest personal questions of our daily life. The solution of the problem was the despair of the old world before Christianity came. Greek philosophy, from beginning to end, is rampant individualism. The very antithesis to this is the Buddhist system. On the face of it, Buddhism appears to be the most refined form of what is called humanism. But about the theoretical self-abandonment of Buddhism there is this fatal defect: that directly it becomes practical it is found to aim at mere self-crushing, at what is neither more nor less than suicide. Christ's religion escapes mere Buddhist universalism. Go out, says St. Paul, from yourselves to help others; bear their burdens, restore them by the magic touch of fellowship in the spirit of meekness. Fling your soul away into the struggles and sorrows of others, and so fulfil the law of Him who, in the highest sense, bare their sorrows. The more sympathetic you become, the more will self-reflection grow; the more will you find the truth of the great paradox that those who lose their life for Christ's sake even now will find it.
Prebendary Eyton, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxix., p. 49.
References: Galatians 6:2-5. S. Pearson, Christian World Pulpit,vol. iv., p. 154; Homiletic Quarterly,vol. ii., p. 560; W. Williamson, Contemporary Pulpit,vol. v., p. 330. Galatians 6:4. Homilist,3rd series, vol. vi., p. 322.