January 5

What is your load?


“And hast borne, and hast patience” (Rev. 2:3).
“Bear ye one another’s burdens” (Gal. 6:2).

Many things in common use these days have markings to indicate the load they can support. The great cranes on our quay sides display on their large boards: “Load 20 tons.” The bridges by which we cross rivers and railways are marked in the same way, forbidding vehicles of more than a certain weight to pass over them. Steamers have their plimsoll-line for the same purpose and can be loaded only to that limit. Even the very humble fuse from my electric amplifier—a thin, silvery strand of wire, so frail that it must be protected in a glass tube—proudly boasts its capabilities with “Load 1 ampere” marked on it.
Now that which counts in God’s higher order of things is known in the same way—by its load or burden. What do you carry? What is your load? “For the Kingdom of God is not in word but in power,” that is to say, not in empty profession and lip-service, but in power-carrying power—ability to get under the load and move something. We can all talk, but can we lift one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ?

Of the greatest of all burden-bearers, even the Lord Jesus Himself, it is said: “He bare our sins in his own body on the tree.” Amazing burden! “He beareth away the sin of the world” with agony and bloody sweat. Was there ever such a load? All the blasphemies and disobediences, the envyings, jealousies and strifes of men, and every sin imaginable to the fallen sons of Adam, borne right away, as far as the East is from the West, to be remembered against us no more for ever.
Now where do you come in all this? Are you carrying anything? What is your load? Can the Lord say of you as He did of the Church at Ephesus (Rev. 2:3), “Thou hast borne and hast patience”? How much can the Lord put upon you? What is your crumpling-up point? Will you squeal and grumble and grouse, or will you take it all and more besides, and still say like Paul, “this light affliction”?—John Harrison.

Now the two kinds of people on earth I mean
Are the people who lift and the people who lean.
Wherever you go, you will find the earth’s masses
Are always divided in just these two classes.
And, oddly enough, you will find, too, I ween,
There is only one lifter to twenty who lean.
In which class are you? Are you easing the load
Of overtaxed lifters who toil down the road?
Or are you a leaner and let others bear
Your portion of labor, and problems, and care?
—Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

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