ENCOURAGE ONE ANOTHER
A sermon by George R. Pasley
1 Thessalonians 5:1-11; Matthew 25:14-30
I know about thieves in the night.
Well, not thieves, but drunks. And not night, but morning.
Five a.m. to be exact. That’s when a drunk rang my doorbell, about eight years ago. I sprang from bed and ran to the door, expecting n emergency, and whoever he was proceeded to cuss me out, before he turned and walked away.
Life happens just that way all too often. Good news delights us but bad news surprises us, and usually at the most inconvenient moment.
Try 10:00 on a Sunday night. That’s when Marc called me to say his mother had been in an automobile accident, and his brothers were waiting for her outside the emergency room.
Marc’s mother was one of the new members at my church, the most enthusiastic, the elder with the most ideas, AND our best evangelist. Two days later she died, and it was the worst sort of news. My friend Tom, pastor at the Baptist church, knew I would need some encouragement and he called and gave me words filled with sympathy and compassion.
These weren’t the words he offered, but they might have been: “For God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. He died for us so that, whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with him. Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing.”
Now, Paul offered his particular words to encourage righteous living. He reminded his correspondents that we have something wonderful and extraordinary to live for and to look forward to, the gift of God’s love and eternal friendship with Jesus. He contrasted the Christians in Thessalonica with those who knew nothing about that extraordinary gift, and who could be found wasting their lives away in all sorts of unhealthy activity.
He had a point, and he still has one. There are plenty of people for whom the end of life will come prematurely, like a thief in the night, because they are living angrily and recklessly and dangerously.
But I’m worried about something more subtle and more widespread. It’s not necessarily unrighteous living, though their lives may be more carnal than holy.
No, I’m thinking of something simpler than that, and it’s just plain losing track of the gift we have been given.
A person can be living rightly, but all caught up in the latest technologies and gadgetry, or in watching every sporting event, or in always looking their best, or in doing the very best job they can of raising their kids, or in making their business succeed, or in just plain being busy that they forget what an incredible gift we’ve been given.
Just to be alive is pretty darned incredible, but to add to that basic condition the love of God that we know in Jesus Christ takes the immeasurable and multiplies it exponentially.
Look at the parable Jesus told. What you need to know is that a “talent” was a certain weight in gold, and it was equivalent to 20 years wages for a day laborer.
So one servant was entrusted with 5 talents, or one hundred years wages!
The second was entrusted with two talents, or 40 years wages!
And the third servant was entrusted with only on talent, but it was 20 years wages!
Mind you, these were servants- not financial advisors. None of them had an MBA, and they likely had not even gone through and H&R Block training course.
So each one was actually given two incredible gifts- a huge sum of money, and the incalculable degree of trust that went along with that gift.
Over and over, that’s what scripture wants us to know- we’ve been given something incredible. We’ve been given a meaning and purpose to our life, but it’s so very easy to lose track of it, and settle for something less, and even to end up with nothing.
So we need some encouragement- some declarations of how important we are to God, some reminders of what is really important in life, some fingers pointing to tangible evidence of the things we hope for, and some cheers to help us keep our faith when a thief has found us in the night.
Therefore encourage one another and build each other up.
Sometimes, when I find myself in a situation that really challenges my knowledge and my skills, I say to myself, “God must really love you, to give you this job,” and I am reminding myself that in every way I am like one of those servants, given something to care for until my master returns.
But I am not always my best cheerleader, and it’s really nice when I hear a cheer from someone else, sometimes even a stranger.
The other day I saw a woman who looked vaguely familiar, and she told me she had been a customer at our food pantry when she was in really hard times. But she made it through those times, she said, because of our pantry, and those words were like a cheer for the work that our church was doing, and they buoyed my spirit. But what buoys me even more is the knowledge that I met her at a place where she was volunteering her time for charity.
I think that God set it up this way on purpose, that we would need encouragement from each other, and having received it the whole community would be built up in love. So let me tell you a bit of a story about another pastor, and what happened when he preached a sermon on the parable of the talents.
This story was passed on to me by Lorie Luck, and I passed it on to several pastors who are using it as part of their stewardship sermons today. It really happened, in a place called
More than $80,000 was brought back in seven weeks time. But it wasn't the money; everyone said so. It was something else, something far less tangible but yet so very real. For seven weeks an almost magical sense of excitement and energy and camaraderie infused the church, spilling over into homes and hearts as the parable of the talents came alive.
Church members discovered different sorts of talents- skills and abilities they had long forgotten, and as one member and then another found a creative way to invest the $50 entrusted to them, other people were encouraged.
When Lorie sent me this story I wrote back and asked her if she was going to donate the $2000 I would need to repeat the story here. But I wasn’t really asking, I was teasing, because we have something better. We have the love of God, made real and powerful and experiential in Jesus, who died for us.
So from time to time, take the same encouragement that I do: say to yourself, “God MUST love me very much.” Then pin your hope to that affirmation.
THEN, live in a way that is faithful, and loving, and hopeful, and so share in your master’s happiness.
Just one more thing: Along the way, stop and encourage someone else. After all, our master has plenty of happiness to go around.
In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Amen.
