Cast Your Home-Cares

What burdens are you carrying around your home this January day? Whether nagging or crushing, may this gospel truth compel you to cast them on the Lord, who daily bears us up (Ps. 68:19):

Perhaps, your home-duties, trials, and needs, form your burden. Every home is an embryo kingdom, an epitomized world, of which the parent constitutes the sovereign. There are laws to be obeyed, rules to be observed, subjects to be governed, cares to be sustained, demands to be met, and "who is sufficient for all this?" is often your anxious inquiry. Who can tell what crushing burdens, what bitter sorrows, what corroding cares, what pressing demands, may exist within a single family circle, deeply veiled from every eye but God's? You are perhaps a widower -- bereaved and desolate. Or you are a widow -- lonely and helpless. Your children are an anxiety. Your domestic duties a trial. Your necessities are pressing. Your whole position one of embarrassment and depression.

What shall you do? Do even as the Lord who loves you enjoins -- "Cast your burden upon the Lord, and He shall sustain you." Your Heavenly Father knows all your home-trials, for He has sent them! Jesus, though he had no home on earth, yet sympathized with the home-cares and sorrows of others, and is not a stranger, nor indifferent to yours. Bring all to Him, tell Him all, confide to Him all, trust Him in all. You have no family trial too great, and no domestic need too little, and no home-sorrow too delicate, to take to Christ. Obey the precept, "Cast your burden upon the Lord;" and He will make good the promise, "and He shall sustain you." O costly and blessed home-burden that brings Jesus beneath our roof! . . .

Jesus is the great Burden-Bearer of His people. No other arm, and no other heart, in heaven or upon earth, were strong enough, or loving enough, to bear these burdens but His! He who bore the weight of our sin and curse and shame in His obedience and death -- bore it along all the avenues of His weary pilgrimage, from Bethlehem to Calvary -- is He who now stretches forth His Divine arm, and makes bare a Brother's heart to take your burden of care and of grief, dear saint of God, upon Himself.

Octavius Winslow, The Ministry of Home (London: 1847), page 351–352 (emphasis mine)

HT: Tony Reinke