Burdens

 

In many places in Scripture, Christ promises peace and rest. As Christians, however, we often let the cares of the world slip into our lives and rob us of that peace. We become burdened down with our own weaknesses, emotions, frustrations, fears about the future, anxieties about the present. We worry about our loved ones, our homes, our health, and our friendships. As these burdens grow heavier, our eternal perspective grows dimmer and we find ourselves increasingly wrapped up in life on this miserable, sin-filled earth.

If you are like me, I often read passages like Psalm 55:22 or Psalm 37:5 and become convicted of bearing my burdens instead of trusting the Lord. I then hand my cares off to the Lord, but somewhere along the way, I take them back and all the worries and fears flood me afresh.

Over the last couple weeks, I have been reading Hannah Whitall Smith’s classic work The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life. Published in 1875, it is still in print and has been a source of encouragement for believers for more than a hundred years. In chapter three, she defines the Christian life and addresses the problem of burdens in a frank way that I found wonderfully refreshing and convicting.

In response to the often glum picture of Christian life painted by those outside the faith and unconsciously accepted by many Christians, she writes, “The Scriptures do set before the believer in the Lord Jesus a life of abiding rest and of continual victory, which is very far beyond the ordinary run of Christian experience; and that in the Bible we have presented to us a Saviour able to save us from the power of our sins as really as He saves us from their guilt.” The chief characteristics of the joyful Christian life are “an entire surrender to the Lord, and a perfect trust in Him, resulting in victory over sin, and inward rest of soul; and it differs from the lower range of Christian experience in that it causes us to let the Lord carry our burdens and manage our affairs for us, instead of trying to do it ourselves.”

Instead of striving to “work out our own salvation” ourselves, we are to let the Lord work in us, carry our burdens, and “manage our affairs.”

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He cares for us. Dwell on that for a moment. Your heavenly Father, who loves you with an everlasting love and looks upon you with infinite lovingkindness, wants to bear your burdens for you. He is pleading with you to give them to Him.


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Hannah Whitall Smith continues,

 

“In laying off your burdens, therefore, the first one you must get rid of is yourself. You must hand yourself, with your temptations, your temperament, your frames and feelings, and all your inward and outward experiences, over into the care and keeping of your God, and leave it all there. He made you, and therefore He understands you, and knows how to manage you; and you must trust Him to do it. Next, you must lay off every other burden – your health, your reputation, your Christian work, your houses, your children, your business…everything, in short, that concerns you, whether inward or outward. . . .Let yourself go in a perfect abandonment of ease and comfort, sure that, since He holds you up, you are perfectly safe. Your part is simply to rest. His part is to sustain you; and He cannot fail.”

 

Not only must we bring our burdens to Christ – that is just the first step – we must leave them there, which is perhaps the hardest part, particularly for me. As soon as the anxieties reappear, the fears rear their ugly heads, and I shoulder the burdens again, I must hand them back to Christ.

In Edges of His Ways, Amy Carmichael writes, “Psalm 37:5, Kay [translation]: ‘Roll thy way upon the Lord.’ Way means a trodden path, the journey of life, today’s life. Often when we cannot lift a thing we can roll it, and so the Hebrew uses this simple word which we can so easily understand. Roll everything that concerns thee upon the Lord. Roll it again, no matter how many times you did so before, and then rest, ‘assure thyself in Him, and He, He Himself, will work.’”

 

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I love how one of my favorite worship artists, Jami Smith, takes several of these verses and puts them together in her song "Cast Your Cares." When we entrust our burdens to Christ, He gives us the peace promised in passages like Isaiah 26 and John 16. Our part is to trust.

 

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It is really quite simple when we think about it: cast and trust. Just like salvation, daily Christian living comes down to faith. Do we really believe the Lord will fulfill His promise to bear our burdens? As Hannah Whitall Smith states, "Until we believe that we are loved, it never really becomes ours." She concludes, "The gist of the whole matter is here stated; and the soul that has discovered this secret of simple faith, has found the key that will unlock the whole treasure-house of God."