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Paul wrote Galatians 6 to a community where people were taking on each other's loads in ways that were collapsing the distinction between their own responsibilities and others'. He gave two instructions that appear to contradict each other: "Bear ye one another's burdens" (v.2) and "every man shall bear his own burden" (v.5). The Greek resolves it: the first uses baros — a crushing, extraordinary weight — and the second uses phortion — a load that belongs to the individual. You are called to help someone carry what is crushing them. You are not called to carry the load that was designed to be theirs alone.
Get These Verses Daily — Free“For every man shall bear his own burden.”
The Greek phortion — 'burden' — is a personal pack, a load designed for the individual carrier. There is a load that belongs to each person that cannot be transferred. Carrying someone else's phortion does not help them; it prevents their growth and costs you yours.
“Thus saith the LORD; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the LORD.”
The Hebrew zeroa' — 'arm' — is the thing you lean on, your structural support. Codependency builds the entire weight-bearing structure of your emotional life on another human being. This verse names why that structure eventually collapses.
“Truly my soul waiteth upon God: from him cometh my salvation.”
The Hebrew damah — 'waiteth' — means to be still, to rest in expectation. The soul anchored in God is the soul that can love another person without being controlled by them. The stillness before God is the interior condition that makes healthy love possible.
“For do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men? for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.”
Paul frames approval-seeking and serving God as structurally incompatible. Codependency is approval-seeking organized into a lifestyle — managing another person's feelings to avoid their displeasure. Paul says this orientation and serving God cannot coexist as primary.
“Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.”
The first commandment places God as the primary love that organizes all others. When another person fills that structural position in a life, every relationship downstream is distorted. God first is not a limit on love for others — it is what makes healthy love of others possible.
Jeremiah 17:5 describes what happens when a human being becomes the structural foundation of your emotional world: "Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the LORD." The word "arm" — zeroa' — is the Hebrew metaphor for the thing you lean on, the structural support of your weight. Building your emotional stability on another human being is not loving them better. It is asking them to hold a weight only God was designed to bear.
Psalm 62:1 offers the alternative interior posture: "Truly my soul waiteth upon God: from him cometh my salvation." The Hebrew damah — "waiteth" — carries the sense of being still, being silent before something, resting in expectation. The soul that waits on God has its primary orientation toward something that will not shift. This is the interior condition that makes healthy love of another person possible — love that does not require the other person to be your stability.
Commentary is from a charismatic Protestant perspective, drawing on KJV text and public-domain sources including Spurgeon, Andrew Murray, and Matthew Henry.
Galatians 6:4–5 connects the idea of self-examination to the idea of personal load-bearing: "But let every man prove his own work... For every man shall bear his own burden." The Greek dokimazeto — "prove" — means to test by examination, to assess honestly. There is work that is yours — your choices, your growth, your responsibility. That work can only be examined honestly when you have stopped absorbing someone else's. Codependency makes honest self-examination nearly impossible because the self is entangled in another's load.
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