Glad When You Are Glad

Word Unpacked: Devotionals in Romans

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Romans 15:1-3 (NIV)

We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves. Each of us should please our neighbors for their good, to build them up. For even Christ did not please himself but, as it is written: "The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me."

Think of the happiest you've felt this year. Chances are, it was something that happened for you — good news, a rest you finally took, a day that went your way. That's the joy most of us know. But picture a parent choosing a gift for someone else, wrapping it carefully, keeping the secret for days. Nothing is coming to them. And still, something in the room lights up anyway.

Paul points to that second kind of joy in Romans 15, and he says it's the only kind Christ actually lived. "We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves," he writes — not as a rule to grit our teeth through, but as an invitation into a joy most of us have never tasted.

That joy cost him something specific. Quoting an old psalm, Paul says the insults meant for God fell on Christ instead — a blow that was never his, taken on purpose. And there's a reason Paul tells the story in that order. Before Christ ever asked anyone else to carry a weight that wasn't theirs, he carried one first.

Before we ever carried anyone, Christ carried us. That's the order this whole passage has been quietly building toward — and it changes what carrying someone else's weakness today can actually feel like. There's a weakness near us right now that needs carrying. Someone's anxiety we don't fully understand. Someone whose words always come out wrong. Most days, we treat that as something to just get through. Paul is standing somewhere else entirely — and by the end of the passage, people who'd been pulling in completely different directions end up singing the very same song.

That's the turn. But...