Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 240, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 October 1917 — BURDENS WE BEAR [ARTICLE]

BURDENS WE BEAR

How Each and All Carry- the Three Chief Burdens of Life. In the Christian life the forms of warfare may vary but the fight is one. Burdened people in apostolic days. were carrying just the same loads our burdened people are carrying through our streets today. The burden may have been done up differently, it may have had an unfamiliar cover, but if we stripped it of its wrappings we should find a modern commonplace. If a hundred Romans of the olden days and a hundred Britons or Americans of our own day could meet together like pilgrims at some friendly hostel along life’s way, and if they could just unwrap their burdens and display them, they would look at one another in surprise, for their sense of nationality would be swallowed up in the profound, consciousness of a vital kinship. And I will begin with the burden of sin. Sin is revolt against the holy sovereignty of God; it is enlistment and allegiance on the side of the enemy of God. Sin is essentially a change of flags; it is a deliberate desertion from the flag of the holy God to the black flag of mammon and darknes's. I need not elaborate this. I would only repeat that at the root of all sins we shall find the common sin of rebellion. Now, the revolt against the holy flag of God marks the entrance into bondage. I know that the bondage may be concealed, just as we may intertwine flowers and greenery through the links of a chain until it looks more like a garland than a fetter. But let any-man try to escape from the broad road and he will find that the gay wreaths disclose themselves as mighty chains. On the broad way th*e present is a tyranny and the past a debt. Such is the burden of sin. Well, how can we help to bear one another’s burdens? First of all perhaps we had better say’ that we cannot do IL No man can touch the burden of his brother’s guilt. We cannot get back into his yesterdays and make the crooked straight. We cannot go back and sweeten the fountain of an evil from which guilt derives its bitterness. We can do nothing for souls who are burdened with the guilt of sin except to bring them to the Savior, to the fountain that is open, for sin and uncleanness. But that is a glorious sharing of the awful load. We can share it by counsel. We can share it by gentle guidance. We can share it by mighty intercession. Let us now look at another burden which was found everywhere in the ancient world, and is equally commonplace in our own time. I will call it the burden of temperament. And this is what I mean: Even when a man has found the cross of Christ, and sin has been forgiven, and the great act of renewal has taken place, he has still to work out his own salvation. When the seed of the regenerate life has been Imparted it has still to be nurtured and matured, and it has to be matured amid the special constitutions and conditions of the individual life. That is to say, conversion does not annihilate differences of temperament, and thereby make us all alike, reducing our warfare to one certain form of strife. Every regenerate man has to fight the good fight of faith. Now can we help a brother to. carry the burden of his own temperament? Most assuredly we can. Take the man who is like a powder magazine, explosive, inflammatory, full of dry and touchy material, always ready to go off. What can we do with that man’s burden? Well, we can very easily increase it or we can relieve and lighten it. We can help him into liberty, or we can help to sink him into servitude. We can throw lighted matches about his magazine, or we can spray cooling influences about his life. And the real meaning of helping one another is to consider one another from the standpoint of chivalry and love, and to determine that by our conduct and demeanor we will help to fashion the knight in our brother and give him strength in the realms of grace with holiness. There is one more burden which I wLI name, and which can be found, everywhere —the burden of incompleteness. Ayd what I mean is this: No man is an integer. No man is more than a fraction. The New Testament teaches that no man is the whole body; he is only a limb. Humanity is the body, and the individual is only a member. One man is an eye, another Is a foot. And so I speak of the burden of incompleteness. God has made us dependent upoh one another, and every man is designedly incomplete. It is therefore the love design of our God that we surrender ourselves to one another in order that we may bear one another’s burdens, and by our own individual fullness complete the gap in another man’s needs. To live a selfish and exclusive life is to rob humanity of its due, and to dwarf and sterilize ourselves. —J. H. Jowett, in the Christian World.