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Galatians | NASB

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Application:

Where a spirit of censoriousness, malice, and bitterness prevails, there is no application of the principle of grace to self. It will be too late to correct this attitude at the judgment seat of Christ. There, every tub will sit on its own bottom. You will have no one to blame but yourself. Each believer is responsible for their spiritual production. We will not be able to blame others at the judgment seat of Christ. It is crucial that we allow the Lord to harness us while we still have our health and opportunity to serve the Lord. We need to come out of our religious reclusion. This isolation is a luxury that we cannot afford. Jesus will give us His report card one day. Some of our grades will be less than an “A.” Allow God to make you a blessing to someone else. Have you lately tested yourself to ascertain whether you are a blessing rather than a curse? ~ Grant Richison

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PRAYER: Gracious Father in heaven, hallowed by your name, and humbled be our own. We come to set your name above all others, for you alone are God; yours is the power and the glory and the honour. You are worthy of all praise and adoration for the glory of your character, for the goodness of your actions, for the grace of your salvation.

And so we ask, O Lord, that you would keep us from bragging. Keep us from thinking that we are really something, when we are nothing. Let us each test our own work, bear our own load, and correct fellow transgressors with a spirit of gentleness, keeping a watch on our own selves. Support us in doing good to everyone, especially to those who are of the household of faith. Prevent us from growing weary; prompt us to remember that in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.

And even as we ask that you would make us better servants, we beg that you would keep us from boasting. Stop us from boasting in anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to us, and us to the world. Make his suffering the talk of our day, his sorrows the source of our joys, his work, and not our own, the comfort of our hearts. Help us to walk by this rule. And may your peace and mercy, and the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, be our salvation in this life of trouble, our consolation in times of discouragement, and our aspiration as we seek to be like him through the help of your Holy and powerful Spirit.

This we ask for our own sakes, so that we would be encouraged; and we ask if for Christ's sake, so that he would be glorified, and you in him. AMEN. [Dr. Chad Van Dixhoorn]

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Group burdens and Individual loads…

Galatians 6:1-2, 5, “Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the Spirit should restore that person gently… Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ… For every person will have to bear [with patience] his own load [of faults and shortcomings for which he alone is responsible].”

The word ‘overtaken’ suggests that some sin, like a tiger in a jungle, springs upon a man and overpowers him by the suddenness of the assault. The word so rendered may perhaps be represented by some such phrase as ‘discovered’; or, if I may use a ‘colloquialism,’ if a man be caught ‘red-handed.’  That is the idea. And Paul does not use the weak word ‘fault,’ but a very much stronger one, which means stark staring sin. He is supposing a bad case of inconsistency, and is not palliating it at all.

Here is a brother who has had an unblemished reputation; and all at once the curtain is thrown aside behind which he is working some wicked thing; and there the culprit stands, with the bull’s-eye light flashed upon him, ashamed and trembling. Paul says, ‘If you are a spiritual man’—there is irony there of the graver sort—’show your spirituality by going and lifting him up, and trying to help him.’ When he says, ‘Restore such a one,’ he uses an expression which is employed in other connections in the New Testament, such as for mending the broken meshes of a net, for repairing any kind of damage, for setting the fractured bones of a limb. And that is what the ‘spiritual’ man has to do. He is to show the validity of his claim to live on high by stooping down to the man bemired and broken-legged in the dirt.

We have come across people who chiefly show their own purity by their harsh condemnation of others’ sins. One has heard of women so very virtuous that they would rather hound a fallen sister to death than try to restore her; and there are saints so extremely saintly that they will not touch the leper to heal him, for fear of their own hands being ceremonially defiled. Paul says, ‘Bear ye one another’s burdens’; and especially take a lift of each other’s sin.

But there are burdens that cannot be borne by any but the man himself.

There is the awful burden of personal existence. It is a solemn thing to be able to say ‘I.’ And that carries with it this, that after all sympathy, after all nestling closeness of affection, after the tenderest exhibition of identity of feeling, and of swift godlike readiness to help, each of us lives alone. Like the inhabitants of the islands of the Greek Archipelago, we are able to wave signals to the next island, and sometimes to send a boat with provisions and succor, but we are parted, ‘with echoing straits between us thrown.’ Every man, after all, lives alone, and society is like the material things round about us, which are all compressible, because the atoms that compose them are not in actual contact, but separated by slenderer or more substantial films of isolating air. Thus there is even in the sorrows which we can share with our brethren, and in all the burdens which we can help to bear, an element which cannot be imparted. ‘The heart knoweth its own bitterness’, and neither ‘stranger’ nor other ‘intermeddleth’ with the deepest fountains of ‘its joy.’

Then again, there is the burden of responsibility which can be shared by none. A dozen soldiers may be turned out to make a firing party to shoot the mutineer, and no man knows who fired the shot, but one man did fire it. And however there may have been companions, it was his rifle that carried the bullet, and his finger that pulled the trigger. We say, ‘The woman that Thou gavest me tempted me, and I did eat.’ Or we say, ‘My natural appetites, for which I am not responsible, but Thou who madest me art, drew me aside, and I fell’, or we may say, ‘It was not I; it was the other boy.’ And then there rises up in our hearts a veiled form, and from its majestic lips comes ‘Thou art the man’; and our whole being echoes assent—Mea culpa; mea maxima culpa—’My fault, my exceeding great fault.’ No man can bear that burden.

And then, closely connected with responsibility there is another—the burden of the inevitable consequences of transgression, not only away yonder in the future, when all human bonds of companionship shall be broken, and each man shall ‘give account of himself to God,’ but here and now; as in the immediate context the Apostle tells us, ‘Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.’ The effects of our evil deeds come back to roost; and they never make a mistake as to where they should alight. If I have sown, I, and no one else, will gather. No sympathy will prevent to-morrow’s headache after to-night’s debauch, and nothing that anybody can do will turn the sleuth-hounds off the scent. Though they may be slow-footed, they have sure noses and deep-mouthed fangs. ‘If thou be wise thou shalt be wise for thyself, and if thou scornest thou alone shalt bear it.’ So there are burdens which can, and burdens which cannot, be borne.

Alexander MacLaren

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The pack which is individually his own

The phrase, "the pack which is individually his own," implies that men's responsibilities vary, each one having such as are peculiar to himself. This "pack" is to be carefully distinguished from the "heavy loads" of verse 2, Our Christian obligations Christ makes, to them who serve him well, light; but our burdens of remorse, shame, grief, loss, which are of our own willful procuring, these may be, must needs be, heavy. One part of our "pack" of obligation is to help each other in bearing these "heavy loads;" and we shall find our joy and crown of glorying in doing so; not only in the approval of our own consciences and in the consciousness of Christ's approval, but also in the manifold refreshments of mutual Christian sympathy. On the other hand, our Christian responsibilities, including these of mutual sympathy and succor, we must not attempt to evade. One man is able to do more for others than another man can; the truly "spiritual" man, for example, can do that which others may not even attempt to touch: each one has his own part and duty. And Christ's mot d'ordre to all his workmen, or possibly the apostle means to all his soldiers, is this: "Every man carry his own pack!"

Pulpit Commentary

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LOAD: This word was applied to the pack usually carried by a porter or a soldier on the march. In Matthew 11:30 Christ employs this figure to describe the burden which he lays on each of his disciples, For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light;“ and here it denotes the regular daily burden laid on Christians.

Expositor’s Greek Testament

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Galatians 6 | NLT

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This the apostle says to take off men from dwelling upon, and censuring the actions of others, and from making use of them to set off their own, and buoy themselves up with vain hopes, because they are better than others; and also to engage them to attend strictly to their own actions, and consider them simply and absolutely as in themselves, and not as compared with other men's, since they will be accountable for their own actions, and not other men's; and will be judged according to their own works, and not in a comparative view to others. ~ John Gill

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"No one will be, in his own consciousness, free from the moral burden of his own sinful nature, which he has to bear."

Heinrich Meyer

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Galatians 6 | KJV

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Every wicked man...

Every wicked man will bear his own burden; that is, the punishment of his own sins, and not another's; so the judgments of God, inflicted on men in this world, are often called "a burden"; and so may the punishment of the wicked in another world, which will be grievous and intolerable.

The saints will be exempt from bearing this burden, because Christ has bore it for them, even all their sins, and all the punishment due unto them; but another burden, if it may be so called, even an exceeding and eternal weight of glory, shall be bore by them; and every man shall receive his own reward, and not another's; and that according to his own works and labor, and not another's; not indeed for his works, but according to them, the nature of them, according to the grace of God, from whence his works spring, and by which they are performed. ~ John Gill

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Prove his own work; for at last his eternal joy and rejoicing, or sorrow and mourning, shall be according to what he himself hath wrought, not according to what others have wrought. If ever they enter into the joy of heaven, they shall rejoice in their own work. And if eternal sorrow be their portion, they shall groan under their own burdens; they will not be the sins of others, but their own sins, which will sink them into eternal misery. For though superiors shall answer to God for the sins of their inferiors, yet it shall not properly be for their inferiors’ sins, but for their own sins, in neglecting to warn and to reprove them, and to do what in them lay to have hindered them in their sinful courses. ~ Matthew Poole

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"Instead of "thinking himself to be something," he shall feel the "load" of his own sin: and this will lead him to bear sympathetically with his neighbor's burden of infirmity. ÆSOP says a man carries two bags over his shoulder, the one with his own sins hanging behind, that with his neighbor's sins in front."

Jamieson-Fausset-Brown

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How do Galatians 6:2 & 6:5 complement each other? | Bridges Community Church

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Soon to stand at the judgment-seat...

Let a man feel that he is soon to stand at the judgment-seat, and it will do much to keep him from an improper estimate of his own importance; let him feel that he must give an account to God, and that his great interests are to be determined by the estimate which God will affix to his character, and it will teach him that the opinion of the world is of little value. This will restrain his vanity and ambition. This will show him that the great business of life is to secure the favor of God, and to be prepared to give up his account; and there is no way so effectual of checking ambition, and subduing vanity and the love of applause, as to feel that we are soon to stand at the awesome bar of God. ~ Albert Barnes