God’s Word for You
Galatians 6:1-2 Bear one another’s burdens
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Tuesday, August 13, 2024
6:1 My brothers, if someone is caught in a trespass, you who are spiritual should restore such a person in a spirit of gentleness. Be careful that you yourselves are not tempted. 2 Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.
This final chapter begins with a call to be gentle with the way we deal with sinful brothers and sisters in Christ, and even among others, since Paul switches from “brother” to “someone” in the very first words. What is more human, after all—more characteristically human—than to fall into a sin? For as Luther paraphrases Moses in Leviticus 6:2-4, “Human beings make a habit of sinning.”
The word for sin that Paul uses is “trespass,” which is to cross the line of a command. This word is used of Adam’s one transgression (Romans 5:15 ) and here in the sense of any transgression, as a general word for a sin against God. For what human being hasn’t fallen into some terrible sin, impatience, envy, wrath, error, doubt, or even unbelief? The devil constantly attacks each and every one of us. He attacks on many fronts: the purity of doctrine, the integrity of human life, and the protections offered in the three estates of church, family, and government, and many other weak spots in each life. One person is more compassionate, another more self-serving and arrogant, yet another person is rather indifferent but bookish, but another is completely consumed by creativity or inventiveness. The devil has battle plans against all these. For some, one or more of these is a much hotter contest than for others, since we all have different strengths, different weaknesses, and we are used for different purposes in the kingdom of God, just as a man’s limbs and organs are used for different purposes in the body.
Paul tells us to be careful not to be tempted as well. He could mean don’t be tempted by the very same sin, like the wicked judges in the apocryphal story of Susanna who, after catching each other lusting over a married woman, simply agreed to try to find a time when they could both force themselves on her (Susanna 1:14). But Paul could also be warning about being tempted to dismiss a sin we see as being not so bad, and failing to call that man to repentance. Or again, we must be careful not to think that a sin is so awful that the sinner could never possibly recover from it, would never repent of it, and therefore we would have no reason to call him to repentance. Therefore falling to a lack of caution is as bad as falling into wickedness. That is, casting a blind eye to robbery is just as bad as robbery itself.
And Paul uses a wonderful word here to help us in this task. He says, “You who are spiritual.” What better way could there be to remind us that we, who are spiritual in the true sense, which is to say that we are temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19)—being such, we will want to do what spiritual people must do and should do. What is it that Christ does for us? He covers over our sins with his own blood, and he forgives. He calls us back to faith when he would be within his holy rights to condemn us and toss us away into the trash heap. Therefore, is this not just the very thing he would have us do for one another?
I should show my brother that he has sinned (Matthew 18:15). I should, if he questions my words, compare his sin with the will of God in the commandments, for the whole duty of man is to fear God and to keep his commandments (Ecclesiastes 12:13). If he cringes in grief and begins to despair, I must pick up his spirit once again with the gospel of Christ, the gospel of our forgiveness in his blood, which was poured out as the ransom payment for all men (1 Timothy 2:6). I will not lord my own puny life over his, or act as if his sin is so revolting that it makes me physically ill, although some sins may do just that. No, I must hold out Christ, as a Christian. The ancient Gregory said, “True justice has compassion. False justice is indignant.”
Christ bore our sins, not with accusation and disgust, but with patience, kindness, and self-sacrifice. “He dealt with us just as if he himself had done those things which we had done. He paid for what he had not robbed” (Luther, thinking of Exodus 22:4, 7, 9, 12 and similar passages). For this is just what the Lord says in Isaiah 40:2, “Jerusalem has received double from the Lord’s hand for all her sins.”
Don’t be worried or confused about Paul mentioning “the law of Christ.” What a strange thing, you might say, for Paul to bring up at the end of this letter in particular. Are we not free from the law? This is precisely why Paul brings it up in the same letter, so that he will not be accused of forgetting about this expression. It is the law of love—what else could the law of Christ possibly be? This is the law that says, “Love one another (John 13:34).” James calls it the “royal law” (James 2:8), the one on which all of the law and the prophets hang: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Paul shows us that this even means being gentle with the way we correct one another when it comes to sin. Bear each other’s burdens; imagine what it must mean for that person to be confronted about that kind of sin, to have it out in the open, to be so shamed and so convicted. If they are indeed shamed, if they are obviously willing and want to make a change in their life, then our use of the law of God to convict them must end, right there and then. Do not use the law as a sledgehammer to pulverize the sorry and the grieving. Hold out the gospel, for this is what God has held out to you. Remember the verbs in the Fifth Petition of the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” We don’t pray, “Keep clubbing us when we sin, as we keep clubbing away at those who sin against us.” We pray, “Forgive, as we forgive.” Luther teaches us with a kind phrase: “We daily sin much and surely deserve nothing but punishment. So we too will forgive from the heart and gladly do good to those who sin against us.”
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.