Bearing One Another's Burdens

“Brethren, even if a man be overtaken in any trespass, ye who are spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness; looking to thyself, lest thou also be tempted.” Galatians 6:1

The case Paul puts is a fall, not a campaign: a man overtaken, surprised by temptation rather than settled into rebellion. The church’s work with such a man is restoration, the word used of setting a broken bone or mending a torn net. The manner is fixed by the verse itself: “a spirit of gentleness” (the KJV’s “meekness”), the same gentleness just listed among the fruit of the Spirit in 5:23. And the sentence ends with the restorer’s own heart, since no one doing this work stands beyond temptation himself.

“For if a man thinketh himself to be something when he is nothing, he deceiveth himself.” Galatians 6:3

“But let each man prove his own work, and then shall he have his glorying in regard of himself alone, and not of his neighbor.” Galatians 6:4

“For each man shall bear his own burden.” Galatians 6:5

Three verses after commanding believers to bear one another’s burdens, Paul writes that each man shall bear his own. English hides what Greek shows: the two verses use two different words. In 6:2 the word is baros, a weight, the crushing load a brother cannot carry alone. In 6:5 it is phortion, a term for freight, a task or service, the load appointed to each man. The commands sit side by side without strain: share the crushing weights now, and remember that before the Lord each man answers for his own appointed work, which is why 6:3-4 forbid the self-measuring that compares itself with a fallen neighbor.

“Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” Galatians 6:7

“For he that soweth unto his own flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth unto the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap eternal life.” Galatians 6:8

The warning is planted in the middle of a paragraph about money and ministry, and the oldest expositors kept it there: the man excusing himself from 6:6 with empty words is the first man 6:7 has in view. But the law itself is as wide as life. Every act sows into one of two fields, flesh or Spirit, and each field yields its own harvest, corruption from the one, eternal life from the other. A man may mock the preacher; the harvest cannot be mocked.