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The following message is brought to you by Preaching Today, a resource of Christianity Today International. This edition of Preaching Today begins with a sermon by Bruce Thielman, pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh. This message was preached before an audience of college students. The sermon, based on Galatians chapter 6, verses 1 through 4,

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is entitled "The Comradeship Christ Commands." From Paul's letter to the Galatians, the 6th chapter, I begin the reading at the verse numbered 1. "Brethren, if a man is overtaken in any trespass, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Look to yourself, lest you too be tempted. Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. For

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if anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself. But let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor." And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

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From these brief verses, I lift up for our thinking this morning the second verse, "Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ." Now on the face of it, the intent of that verse is obvious. We are to bear one another's burdens. We are to assist one another with the heavy loads of life. We are not to stand by and watch those who know

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vicissitudes struggle alone. We are to be at their right hand to help them. And a whole host of corroborative scriptures immediately come to mind. If the first commandment is to love God, the second commandment is to love our neighbor. Even as we help the least of the brethren, we are helping our Lord Jesus Christ. By this will all men know that you are my disciples,

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that you have loved one for another. The explicit intent of the verse is so obvious that I intend to say no more about it. I would ask you to think with me instead on that which is implicit in the verse, namely, that you cannot bear another person's burdens if you do not know of them. You cannot assist someone if you are not aware of the need for assistance in that life. Prior

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to bearing, there has to come sharing. Now the Apostle Paul, who wrote these words, we often think of as a great burden bearer. He was regularly taking up collections for churches which were in financial difficulty. He was writing letters of personal counsel and theological advice. He lifted the loads of other people, quite indisputable. We do not so often recognize that the Apostle

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was also a great burden sharer. He never hesitated to articulate his need to others. Pray for me, lest I myself be a castaway. Please come and bring my cloak and also the books and especially the parchments. Receive Onesimus as my own son. Paul, you see, did not hesitate to express his needs to other people. He gave to them what is perhaps the most costly gift that any of us have

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to give the gift of our vulnerability. Now, I think this is a particularly hard truth for us as American Christians to learn. We've been raised in a kind of stoic tradition which honors the rugged individualist, the woman or man able to lift herself or himself by the bootstraps. We do not so often recognize that the rugged individualist often ends as a ragged individualist.

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I've been caught by Keith Miller's story of a woman who was Christmas shopping and involved in what she was doing. She didn't notice her little girl who became bored and got down on the floor and began to play in the dust. And a man walking down the aisle in this department store, not expecting a child to be in such a place, stepped right on the child's hand.

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And she let out a terrible cry. Her mother bent down, scooped her up and said, "Don't cry where all these people can see you." Now, get the picture. Here's this little girl looking at her crushed and swelling hand. And her mother says to her, "Don't cry where all these people can see you." That's the American way. Never cry where anybody can see you. Anyone who

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spent any amount of time counseling other people knows that many times that counseling will go on for many weeks or indeed months. And then there might come a moment which is powerful in its cathartic nature. And suddenly everything that's been bottled up and contained inside spills out. And most often when that moment comes, it's accompanied with tears.

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And when those tears come, almost invariably a comment like this comes from the one who was weeping. "Oh, I'm very sorry, Pastor. I guess I was beside myself." When in point of fact, for the first time, the person was not beside herself, but was actually being herself. Or they'll say, "I was carried away." When actually they were not carried away,

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they were carried back to that kind of honesty which is to exist between Christians. Christians, you see, are to bear, and that means they are to share. And there is to be that openness and vulnerability which makes bearing a possibility and a reality. And it is laid down for us here by the Apostle, not as some option of the Christian life, but as the law of Christ.

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"Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ." Now, Paul, of course, is not establishing a new legalism. The whole movement of Galatians is away from that kind of thing. But he is saying to us, I believe very clearly, that a basic principle of the Christian experience is to be this, "No Christian need ever bear anything alone, for there should

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be sharing, and thus caring." I think this is the most elemental principle of Christian unity. We hear a lot of talk about unity in the church today, and some people when they speak of unity, speak of it in terms of organizational unity. They think that one great denomination would give the unity of which Scripture speaks. I don't think that's true. The Roman Catholic

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Church has had organizational unity for a thousand years, yet anyone who knows that church knows that there's tremendous discord and tension and disagreement within it. Organization is not necessarily unifying. And some people talk about the mystical unity of the body of Christ, and that certainly is a truth of Scripture. But as I read of the unity that

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is described upon these pages, I find it woven of the warp and woof of very concrete things. So there must be more to unity than that which is given us by the Spirit. And some people talk of positional unity, and some people talk of legal unity, but Jesus gives us the purest definition of the unity which is to be ours. He says, "By this will all men know

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that you are my disciples, when you have love one for the other." And loving means sharing and bearing. Now please do not do me the disservice of arguing in your minds against what I'm saying by proposing that I'm proposing that we're supposed to go out and belch the most personal dimensions of our lives to everyone we meet. I'm not suggesting that. But I am

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suggesting that there is to be an intimacy with one another in the Christian walk. And I will be precise enough to say this, that every one of us as a Christian ought to have at least one person with whom we share absolutely everything. And it's out of that sharing that real bearing comes. The recognition of this has affected every dimension of my ministry.

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It's affected my preaching. There used to be a great minister in the Southern Presbyterian Church whose name was T. DeWitt Talmage. And on one occasion he preached a sermon in his church on a Sunday morning which was mightily used of God. And that night in a neighboring community he preached exactly the same sermon. And it landed like an overdone souffle right

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on the chancel steps. And some of his elders who were with him said, "How is it that the same sermon given with almost the same words could be so powerful in the morning and so nothing in the evening?" And he replied with words that ought to be emblazoned on the front of every chapel and sanctuary in the world, "Poor preaching is God's curse on a prayerless

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congregation." But how can a congregation know to pray for its pastor if its pastor never expresses to it what his needs are? How can a congregation scratch if they don't know where their preacher itches? The fact of the matter is the pulpit is not supposed to be some kind of couch where the pastor gets up on Sunday morning and barfs all of

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the personal dimensions of his life. But at the same time, the pastor who does not articulate his need to his people cannot express to have their prayer power at his disposal. Now, I'm a fat person, that's very obvious. But I'm also on a diet. I've been on it for 21 weeks and I've lost 21 pounds and that's right on schedule. And I knew from the very... I am

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only moderately offended by that. And I knew from the very beginning that I was going to lose weight. In any case, I've shared this with my congregation. Now, I have an exercycle on which I ride 20 minutes every morning. It's one of those ones that stands still, it doesn't go anywhere. But I have a bell on it that was given to me by my session to

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warn oncoming traffic. I have fox tails, I have a lamb's wool seat, and I even have a rear view mirror so I can watch my own rear disappear. And these have all been given to me by members of the congregation. I've even had a wonderful collection of texts. I never knew that the Bible had so much to say about dieting. My favorite is that one in Genesis

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where the devil says, "Surely the Lord has not said thou shalt not eat." But out of the sharing has come the bearing. This has affected my counseling ministry. When I went to seminary they didn't teach a great deal about counseling, it was an elective matter. I've studied it elsewhere and since that time. But I think if someone pressed me, I would have to say

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that the man who's taught me the most about counseling is Paul Tournier, the great Christian Swiss psychiatrist. And in his very first book on the subject, The Meaning of Persons, he talks about the fact that it's essential that the counselor not play the role of "monsieur de docteur," coming in with a white coat and prepared to answer every question that's put

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to him, but rather he should go in and make himself vulnerable, for it is only as he opens himself and makes himself vulnerable that the one with whom he is talking will feel free to do the same thing. Girard calls this the dyadic effect. William Glasser, whose reality therapy is so popular across the country now, says that the essence of effective counseling

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is responsibility. You cannot expect a person to come to the threshold of their mind and meet you there unless you are willing to be as responsible as they are. This truth has affected the way I deal with people in the counseling chamber and let them deal with me. And this truth about bearing and sharing has affected my personal life. I'm not married.

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All the world loves a fat man, but nobody wants to marry him. And therefore, loneliness is a problem with which I deal. And I've always been very close to those with whom I've served. Because of that, they become a kind of family to me. When I was serving in Southern California, there was one time when all of my colleagues in the pursuit of their ministries were away,

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and I found myself caught up in a deep loneliness. There was a new man who had come to our town about six months before. We'd met on a couple of social and ecclesiastical occasions and found ourselves to be kindred spirits, so I thought I would call him and propose that we get together for lunch and a time of sharing. I dialed his church and was quite surprised

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when he answered the phone. It was a large church. I thought I'd get a secretary, but it went right to his desk. I said, I'd like to have lunch with you. He said, we'll have to do that someday. I said, how about today? Well, he said, I said, do you have a luncheon appointment today? No. What are you getting ready for something this afternoon that you're

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not going to take time for lunch? Well, no. Is there any reason why you can't have lunch with me today? And he said, no, we'll meet at Churchill's at eleven thirty. Now, because I had come on so very strong when we got to the restaurant and we're seated, I explained to him that I was feeling a deep loneliness I needed to share, and I hope that we could

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be beginning that kind of relationship. And he looked at me and stretched his hand across the table and put it on top of mine and said, last night, when I got home from the church, I found my wife in the arms of another man. It is the worst thing that has ever happened to me. I came back to the church. I have not returned home since. I haven't taken any calls.

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I don't I don't know how you managed to get my inside number. I had misdialed when I dialed the telephone number by one digit and went right past all the secretaries to his desk. That's one of the reasons I'm a Presbyterian. I noticed there are more people here who are for thinness than there are for the Presbyterians. Now, the interesting thing is that if I would

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have passed that minister on that street that day, I would have probably said, hi, Joe, how are you? He would have said, I'm fine. How are you? I said, I'm great. How are things going at the church? We're packing them in. Yes, we're doing very well also. And we would have passed like two lonely ships in the night. But because there was sharing, there could

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be bearing during the course of the counseling to save that marriage. It was proposed that for a period of two months, this man and his wife not live together. During that time, he lived at my home. We have become very close. Six years ago, when I had coronary bypass surgery, the surgery itself went very well, but I contracted a very serious staph leukotic

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infection which brought me very close to death. And in those dark hours, when there was considerable anxiety, can you imagine what it meant to me in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to have a knock on the door? And through the door came this pastor from Los Angeles, California, to make a pastoral call. We have shared, and therefore we bear. And it's a beautifully

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important thing in my life. Honesty requires that I say, however, having given these positive illustrations of what comes from sharing and bearing, honesty requires that I say to you, it is not always so pleasant. It is sometimes incredibly painful. I think of a young man, David, who was your age. He was a student at the University of Redlands in Southern

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California. He was the captain of the basketball team and a good student, one of those very well-rounded young men. He developed ulcerative colitis. He went into the hospital, then into intensive care for six weeks. During the six weeks, he received 72 blood transfusions. I was called to the hospital six times because David was not expected to make it through

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the day. Six times he made it. But the seventh time I was called, well, I knew right away that this would be the time. And for the first time, David was showing considerable fear, not fear about his salvation. His personal relationship with the Lord had been sealed many years before. It was fear about dying itself. And if there is a modicum of honesty

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in you, you must recognize that there is some question and anxiety concerning this thing which each of us must do. And he was trying to talk about what it must be like to die. And when he questioned his father, his dad responded by saying, "Now, look, we're not going to talk about that. You've made it through every time. This is a team effort. We're all

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here, the doctors, the nurses, your mom and I, Bruce is here. We're going to make it." And maybe that's all a father can say at such times. And he tried to talk to his mother about it, and his mother would just bend down and kiss him and put another cool cloth on his hot brow. And I moved beside his bed and I sat down and I took his hand, and it was

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very white and thin now, but still quite strong. And it had those blue and brown spots that come from the needles and the tubes. And we talked about what it must be like to die. We talked about separation from loved ones and reunion with loved ones gone before. We talked about what it must be like to meet the Lord Jesus Christ, to stand before the

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judgment bar of God with him at our side. We talked about what it must be like to move out of time and into eternity. And as we would talk and share these things and bring scripture to them, he would drift off to sleep. And then he would waken again and we would continue and then to sleep and he would waken again and we would continue. But never once, even

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when he was asleep, would he relax his grip. And one of those times when he was asleep, Jesus came in the spirit and he said, "David, come with me. You don't need those tubes and needles anymore." And David, in the spirit, got up and went with him. And that was very hard because I loved him very much. I think I learned that night what it means when it

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says "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." To comfort means to stand with. So bearing and sharing can sometimes be incredibly painful. But it is what we are called to do in fulfilling the law of Christ. Let me leave you with this. The Apostle Paul, who wrote these words, began the Galatian epistle by saying, "Paul, an apostle." Just

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like that, he laid claim to the highest office in the church, apostle. But seven years later, he wrote a letter to the Corinthians. And in that letter, he says, "Paul, the least of the apostles and the one not worthy to be called an apostle." And eight years after that, he wrote a letter to the churches around Ephesus. And in that letter, he says, "Unto

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me, less than the least of the members of the church is grace given." And at the very end of his life, writing to his young son in the faith, Timothy, he said, "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief." He had not laid aside his apostolic office. But you see, as he deepened, he opened. As he matured, he spread his sharing more

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widely, and thus was attuned more to the bearing power of his brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ. This is the comradeship which Christ commands. For you see, we're like islands, and we're separated by waters. And sometimes they're wide waters, and they're dark with misunderstanding. And sometimes they're tempest-tossed with anger. And sometimes they are so deep

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that there seems no way at all that we can fathom them. But Jesus is the bridge over the waters. And he unites island to island until you have an archipelago, and archipelago to archipelago until you have a continent, and continent to continent until you have a kingdom. And the name of that kingdom, the name of that kingdom, my young friends in

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Jesus, by the name of that kingdom, is the kingdom of God. May God bless to you this simple witness in his name. Amen.