Encouragement

You are all children of the light and children of the day.  We do not belong to the night or to the darkness.  So then, let us not be like others, who are asleep, but let us be awake and sober.  For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, get drunk at night.  But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, putting on faith and love as a breastplate, and the hope of salvation as a helmet.

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.

1 Thessalonians 5:5-11

The whole thing about Christianity that I don’t think most people who call themselves Believers like to admit is that we’re kind of instructed to be non-conformists.  We’re not supposed to be like everybody else.

We take the words of the Bible and shape them to fit our personal ideologies and say that we’re not supposed to be like “the world”. You know the “World” — that nebulous group of people that don’t act like we think they should.

That’s not necessarily a bad way to look at it, provided we can always guarantee that WE act like God would want us to.  And that’s where the problems kind of creep in to our line of thought.  It never — or rarely, anyway — matters to us how WE act, we just know that the World acts like they shouldn’t.

Seems to me, though, that the Lord spends quite a bit of time telling us in His Word not to be conformed to the World.  It’s almost as if He detects a problem.  It’s like He sees us acting like the World too much and has to continually say, “Hey, cut that out!”

You don’t have to fix what ain’t broken, but God seems to have to keep saying, “Don’t be like that.”

And it never seems to be instructions to quit smoking or drinking or dancing.  He always seems to focus on inconsequential things like faith and love and hope and encouragement.

Even in 1 Thessalonians 5, where God uses Paul to write about being awake and sober in contrast to being asleep and drunk, the characteristics He uses to describe sobriety are exactly those:  faith, love, hope, encouragement.

In other words, if we’re going to be diligent non-conformists like we’re supposed to be (and sober ones at that) we’re going to have to really work at exhibiting faith, hope, love and encouragement.  My whole problem with many people who claim to be Believers is that their interpretation of being “children of the light and children of the day” seems to focus on the opposite of these things.

Sure, none of us would ever come out and say we don’t really believe we should be filled with faith, hope, love and encouragement.  But we sure live like it…and we do it in the name of the One who actually tells us, “Hey, cut that out!”

Am I really going to be a follower of Jesus?  Here’s the checklist I have to go through today and every day:

• What am I doing to exercise my faith? What am I doing that I can’t see the outcome of? What am I trusting God to do that I can’t do?
• How am I conveying an attitude of hope?  Where is the ‘hope of salvation’ evident in my life, my words, my actions?
• Who am I showing love to? Who knows I care about them?
• Who have I encouraged today?  Who could I seek out to encourage?

I honestly believe these are the characteristics of a sober ‘child of the light’, which means the antithesis would be only doing things I know I can control, living in defeat or despair, isolating myself from others and shutting down…and, worst of all, being a person who discourages others around me.