Do you know how heavy the Law is? If I read this verse right, the Law weighs exactly as much as the burdens of my fellow believers. Now, let’s break that down a little bit.
We are to carry one another’s burdens. That demands fellowship, just as I spoke about in a post a few days ago. When you participate in fellowship, you make friends, and friends share burdens, struggles and sufferings they are dealing with. Ok. So as friends, we share in the carrying of other’s burdens. That is called love. We love one another and so pray with them, weep with them, listen to their stories, offer to help as we are able, and in general try to lighten the load our friends carry with them.
Paul says that when we do these things, we are fulfilling the Law of Christ. That law is the new commandment He have to us, to love one another. The distinctive of the Christian community is that we live each other. Our religion isn’t about every person trying to be perfect for themselves and their own salvation. True Christian religion is that we give freely of ourselves for the sake of each other. We love one another as Christ loved us.
I have been in “Christian” churches where this was not the case, or better, when there were enough who ignored the law of Christ as to make the rest ineffective. But Christianity forms it’s beginning has always been about you, not about me. It has always been other-centered. Jesus didn’t die for Himself, but for the whole world. When we love and give and share, we don’t do it to earn salvation points, but because we’ve already been saved. And we simply extend that grace to others. This is why Christianity is different. It doesn’t focus on the self in its religious “duties”. It focuses on those outside of ourselves. To live our neighbor as ourselves, to love one another, especially those in the Christian community, as we love, support, and encourage.
If you don’t have a community like that in your church, I am very sorry. I would say to start one, even within the church, but it seems so foreign to many churches I don’t know where I would even begin. I feel that my own church where I attend is doing a good job at this, and I would love to invite you all to know what that feels like. You might check out http://www.betterlife.church and see what the fuss is about. But I encourage you as a fellow Christian. There are churches like this, even if you haven’t found one yet, that loves people, rather than forces them to pretend to be perfect.
God bless you today.
Meritt Musings 