The cursory reader of the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ will tell you that the pilgrim lost his burden from his shoulders when he gazed so trustfully upon the cross. But the more careful reader, who notes Christian’s infirmities, and frailties, and stumblings, and falls, will tell you that the pilgrim bore his burdens right through to the end, and that they weighed him down even when crossing the stream.
We have our burdens in our frail bodies – frail in the nerves, the head, the bones, the lungs, or yet more secret organs. Each one has a real “thorn in the flesh,” which has influences far wider and more serious than he thinks. We have our burdens in our dispositions and characters – burdens of despondency, or of impulsiveness, or of carnality, or of masterfulness, or of vanity, giving a bad appearance to all our work and relationship. And the problem of our life is just this: “How true, how beautiful can we become, with that burden, under the pressures and hindrances of that burden?”
There is divinely arranged a great variety and wide distribution of burdens and disabilities, both in the sense of infirmities and calamities, so that we might come very near to one another, and really help one another. As we meet and feel “I am a man with a burden,” we look into the face of our fellows, and he is a poor face-reader who does not say, “And my brother, too, is evidently a man with a burden.” Perhaps a suspicion even crosses our mind that our brother’s burden is heavier than our own.
Burdens when rightly borne, never separate men from each other. The sanctified bearing of our own makes us so simple, so gentle, so tender-hearted, that we can bear the burdens of others, in the spirit of our meekness and sympathy, and so fulfill the law of Christ. …
Our great power is our power of sympathy. We can come so near to our brother in his weakness, his disability, even in his sin, that he shall feel as if another shoulder were put under his burden, and it felt to him a little lighter. We all yearn for sympathy; we all want some other human heart to feel in our trouble-times;
“Oh what a joy on earth to find
A mirror in an answering mind!”
But we can often enter, as a relieving power, into the circumstances that make the burden. The doctor takes the sufferer into his interest and care, and deals helpfully with the circumstances that make the burden. And every one of us can be a doctor for the moral difficulties and distresses of life.
We have all more power over the circumstances that make trouble than we think … Beautiful in time of national calamity is the help which the poor give to the poor. Beautiful ought to be the help which each gives to each, and all to all, in the ordinary burden-bearing of family and social life.
The Pulpit Commentary, Isaiah I p. 394, Isaiah 24:2, (R. Tuck)
Gold Nugget 255
Burdens Rightly Borne
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