Unload

“Cast thy burden upon the LORD, and he shall sustain thee: he shall never suffer the righteous to be moved.” (Ps 55:22 AV)

 

David knows of what he speaks.  A man who was acquainted with disappointment and failure.  He lived with constant threats to his life and kingdom.  David did not have an easy life.  He had the greatest responsibility of any soul in Israel.  He was the first godly king of a rising nation.  He has earned the reputation of a formidable adversary.  Conquering what was left of God’s enemies in the land of Palestine, he burned every bridge leading back to a heathen world.  David bore the responsibility well.  With that responsibility and the troubles of his own personal life, he was laden down with burdens no one else could ever understand.  These burdens, at times, were overwhelming.  We know this because of many of the psalms which David wrote.  David knew what it was like to carry burdens.  He knew what it was like to carry many at the same time.

It is harder to walk with a burden than without one.  It is particularly harder to walk with a burden on uneven ground.  If the burden is not balanced, the one carrying it can lose his.  In all those years I spent camping and hiking, I can tell you a burden is not easy to carry.  We used backpacks and learned to balance the load inside.  There was a belt one would wear that put all the load on the legs and not the shoulders.  We hiked many miles like that.  Our burden was a heavy one.  Even if the load was balanced, if we attempted to cross a fallen log or traverse uneven terrain, the center of gravity shifted.  No matter how well the burden was balanced, any change in one’s footing could shift the entire load and down the climber could go.  There were certain activities that required us to carry our own burdens.  It could have been an objective of the outing.  Or perhaps there was something to earn.  Carrying your own burden had a purpose greater than the burden itself.  However, no matter the burden, we never truly carried it alone.  Whether it was a hip belt, a staff, or another hiker who offered to lighten our load, our burden was never carried without some type of assistance.  The greatest assistance came in the form of an adult who would come up behind us and allow us to throw all our gear in the back of his pick-up and finish our course with him carrying our burden.

We go through life carrying our burdens on our own shoulders without realizing there is a Savior who desires to carry it for us.  All we need to do is to unstrap it and throw it in the back of a pick-up.  The more burden we attempt to carry by ourselves, the greater the risk for harm.  The thing about a backpack was the weight of the burden was higher than our natural center of gravity.  The bulk of the weight was not in our legs, but about shoulder height.  This means the more burden we carried, the more top heavy we became, and the more likely we were to topple.  This is exactly what we do.  We carry more and more burdens on our own shoulders and become top-heavy.  Then we crash under the weight of that which we carry.  We need to unload it all.  By the way, the more you carry, the higher it gets.  Why not let it go all the way to heaven?  The promise that follows the advice is priceless.  God will not allow those who wish to unload their burden to stumble, or to be moved.  Unloading the burden on the one who had infinite shoulders is a matter of survival.  We will crash if we do not.