Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church
## Pastor Dennis Tuuri

We turn to 1 Thessalonians chapter 5 for our sermon scripture. God has graciously called us into holy worship this day. We have come forward confessing our sins. He has assured us of our forgiveness of our sins in Christ our mediator. He has trained us to respond to his word aptly, thinking his thoughts after him and singing praises to him for that word. We now turn to the instruction that he gives us this day from his holy mountain.

1 Thessalonians chapter 5, we’ll read verses 12 through 15. Please stand for the reading of God’s command word. “And we beseech you, brethren, to know them which labor among you, and are over you in the Lord, and admonish you, and to esteem them very highly in love for their work’s sake, and be at peace among yourselves. Now we exhort you, brethren, warn them that are unruly. Comfort the feeble-minded, support the weak. Be patient toward all men. See that none render evil for evil unto any man, but ever follow that which is good, both among yourselves and to all men.” Please be seated. This time the younger children may be dismissed to go down to their Sabbath schools.

This is our somewhere around our 40th sermon in the book of 1 Thessalonians. And we’re nearing the end, of course, of the book. And here at the end, we have a series of commands, very specific short commands.

I wanted to spend just a minute giving the context of the particular command we’re going to talk about today: help the weak. My title, although perhaps maybe not quite to the mark, is “Stiffen those without strength.” You see why I use the term stiffen as we go through this.

We are commanded here to do something relative to different types of people in verse 14. And this is the third group. We dealt with the unruly, the disorderly last week—or actually it was the week before last. And then this week it’s those without strength. And the context for this: remember that chapter 5, the concluding portion of this epistle, began with a series of instructions in the first 11 verses relative to the day of the Lord and those in light. And it followed a section on the day of the Lord and those in darkness. And so that’s what formed the transitional statement beginning in verse 12: “We beseech you brethren,” with a whole series of instructions in terms of church life.

Those in the light are instructed in the last, including portions of this epistle, in what that light implies. And so we talked about honoring church authorities. Paul gives instructions to those who are functionally our superiors in verses 12 and 13 relative to honoring those in authority, those who labor among us and admonish us, to esteem them very highly in love for the work’s sake. He then says in verse 13 rather—at the end of it—to be at peace among yourselves, and then he gives some specific instructions.

Having given instructions vertically—relating to our responsibilities toward the authorities in the church—and then telling us to live at peace with one another, he brackets the back half of it. And that’s what we’re in the middle of now: a series of really three injunctions, and then a kind of a concluding injunction will follow what we talk about today.

Next week we’ll talk about the need to be patient and not render evil for evil in the context of doing these first three things: admonishing the disorderly, comforting those with little hearts, and stiffening or strengthening those without strength. So that’s the context. From that part, the epistle will then move into a series of short injunctions relative to the will of God in terms of rejoicing and praying and giving thanks in verses 16-18.

And then we’ll look at some comments in verses 19-21 relative to the spirit: “Quench not the spirit, despise not prophesyings, prove all things, hold fast that which is good.” And then we’ll deal with the appearance of evil, which we’re to avoid, concluding with a benediction and some concluding remarks by Paul. And that’ll be the end of the epistle.

So we’re nearing the end—near the end of most of Paul’s epistles. There’s a series of very dynamic short statements that are full of meaning, full of responsibilities, and full also, if you understand them correctly, of encouragement to us for our Christian life. And that’s the context in the epistle for this particular injunction to stiffen those without strength.

Now then, the immediate context is these series of three injunctions. And remember we said this several times now—and it’s good to repeat it again here—that what Paul tells us here: it’s not simply the job of the authorities in church, the elders or the deacons or the pastors or whatever a church might have in terms of its church government. It’s not simply the authority of those who are called to special office in the church to admonish, to comfort, and to strengthen. These—all these injunctions are given to the laity, to the brethren. They’re given to you and these are responsibilities that you must fulfill in relationship one to the other in the context of this church.

That doesn’t let church officers off the hook. They do these things perhaps in a heightened sense as we can see in the Apostle Paul’s ministry. But it does mean that the congregation has a tremendous charge by God here to exercise pastoral concerns for others within the congregation with particular difficulties. One commentary says that these passages give the whole community a sense of pastoral responsibility.

Now, that’s what you’re called to do. The question is, how are you going to do it? We come to the faith in America. I mentioned the movie The Field last week. I’ll mention it again. At one point, a sentence that’s kind of haunted me over the last few weeks since I watched it. The pastor said in the context of the difficulties in the little village there in Ireland, he said, “You know, we just put a thin Christian veneer over these people.” And in many ways, Christianity has attempted to put a thin Christian veneer over what has become increasingly a pagan population.

I do not wonder, nor do I look askance at people that say “Is the faith surviving today?” I understand what they mean by that. Where are the Christians who are dedicated with the Christian worldview and committed to doing all things to the honor of Jesus Christ? We are pale shadows, I think—and I include myself in that remark—of eventually what God will have planted on this soil once again in terms of the Christian faith.

God calls us to exercise pastoral responsibilities by renewing our mind as we approach people with his word, so that we don’t approach difficulties in the church with worldly answers, albeit maybe compassionate answers. The tender mercies of the wicked are not helpful. They are hurtful to people. And so when we’re going to—if we’re going to fulfill these short pastoral commands, we’ve got to understand them in terms of the totality of scripture.

How do we help those without strength? And we’ll be talking about that today. Now, we brought George Gillespie up a couple months ago, and he gave a good—although it’s certainly not the last answer—a series of seven eyes to help you remember ways to pastorally approach friends of yours who are weak or disorderly or littlehearted or whatever the problem might be. And you remember that, I’ll just run through them briefly. We’ll talk about them again throughout the context of the sermon.

Those seven eyes were: First, involvement with the person. Investigation—which means a humbling of yourself to say “I don’t necessarily know what the problem is of this person’s life. I got to talk. I got to think. I got to work it through. I got to ask a lot of questions.” So: involvement, investigation, interpretation. We have to interpret the data according to the scriptures, not in the light of non-biblical secular answers or psychology or anything else. We interpret the difficulties people are having biblically.

We then give them instruction—obviously, again, instruction from the word of God. Then we call for intention on their part. We stress covenant in this church. And when you’re counseling people, you must get them to commit. When you’re coming alongside of a brother to try to give them instruction from the faith relative to a problem they’re having, you want to move them to a point of covenantal commitment that they’ll obey the covenant word of God that you’re reminding them of.

Implementation. Then you begin to work through that problem in their lives once they’ve committed to doing it. And you seek to help them. And then finally, integration. The whole purpose why God brings difficulties into the lives of believers is to call their whole cause—their whole life to flourish, perish, and benefit as a result of being corrected by God. And so whatever the problem is gets worked out in the rest of their lives as well.

Now, this first element—the very first element—is involvement. And when we’re talking about the weak, as we’re going to talk about today—strengthening the weak—here is one with very explicit set of scripture references of the involvement of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul to those who are weak.

Hebrews 4:15 and 5:2 tells us that one of the great things we have in having the great high priest of Jesus Christ is that he has a feeling of our infirmities. In verse 15 of chapter 4, “he was in all points tested like as we are, yet without sin.” 5:2: “Who can have compassion on the ignorant and on them that are out of the way, for that he himself also is compassed with infirmity.” That word infirmity is weakness, but basically the same word we have here. Our savior has compassion for the weak.

And Paul, then, as modeling the savior—as we’re to model Jesus Christ in our lives—also had compassion for those in the context of the Christian churches who were weak. 2 Corinthians 11:28 Paul says, “Besides those things that are without, that which cometh upon me daily, the care of all the churches. Who is weak and I am not weak? Who is offended and I burn not?” Paul said that if the churches that he was ministering to are weak, he identified with that weakness. He was involved. He was compassionate and empathized with the weakness of the people that he was ministering to.

And he recognized that we are indeed, according to the word of God, one body. When any member of the body is weak, the whole body is weakened. And so if you’re going to help people, if we’re going to obey this command to stiffen those without strength, we begin here. We begin with having the correct heart attitude toward members of the church who are weak, members of our family who are weak, friends of ours who are believers who are weak.

The correct heart attitude is not disdain for the weakness. The correct heart attitude is having compassion for the people that wants to move them on from strength to strength, from glory to glory. And so we see ourselves needful of having that basic initial involvement in terms of how we help people who are weak by having a heart for them and loving them and being committed to helping them in spite of the difficulties that might come upon us.

So it’s very important in terms of the context. These are pastoral admonitions. We approach pastoral counseling with the people that we all deal with on a one-on-one basis. And by counseling, I just mean coming alongside of biblically and helping to do what these things would do: admonishing the disorderly, comforting the littlehearted people within the context of the church, and strengthening the weak. We do that first by becoming involved in their lives and committed to helping them.

Let’s look at this command simply stated. Then, having gotten hopefully an understanding of the necessity of a correct heart attitude toward the weak: This command, simply basically, is comprised of two words. The first word is support. This root word means “to hold oneself opposite to.” By my implication, became to be used in the sense of “to adhere to,” and by extension then “to care for somebody.”

I suppose real simply and literally you could say that, in a way, and it almost literally means that to simply come alongside somebody and put your arm around them and hold them up. And that’s why I say “stiffen those without strength.” You’ve probably seen people who are so without strength, particular points in time, where they literally need your hand around them, underneath their shoulder, to lift them up or to keep them walking.

Well, that’s the context here. That’s what this word means: to support, to come alongside of in that way. This is one of four occurrences in the New Testament where this word is used. It’s used twice in the gospels to speak of the relationship of a servant to his master. “You can’t have two masters. Jesus said, you’ll either hold to the one or despise the other, or you can’t serve both masters.”

So the idea of holding to a master—that same word is what’s being used here. So it means to hold on to somebody to the intent of supporting them. And by the—that tells us a lot about the servant-master relationship. Servants aren’t simply to submit. They’re supposed to actually hold on to and list to support masters. That’s true of all functional superior and subordinate relationships: husbands, wives, etc. Wives are supposed to hold on to their husbands in the same way to support them and to help them be what they’re supposed to be.

The other occurrence of this, beside the two gospel occurrences for servant-master and then the occurrence in our verse here in 1 Thessalonians, is in Titus 1:9 where we read that we are to hold fast the faithful word he hath been taught, that he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince the gains—speaking of the qualification of elders. And elders should be somebody who holds fast to the faithful word. So that’s what the basically the word here in this context means: simply to hold on to somebody, to stiffen them, to support them as it were in their weakness, to strengthen the will of those who would tend to wander in the broad way.

Put your arm around them is the way one put it in his commentary. They need to be assured that they are not forsaken or despised because of their helplessness or weakness. And so this basic concept of involvement in the lives of people at church in helping them in particular difficulties is very much stressed in the very word that’s used here in terms of supporting those who are without strength.

And the word “without strength,” weak in the text—”help the weak.” The word weak simply is comprised of two words: the word strength and then the opposite of having no strength. In other words, those without strength. And this is used many times in the scriptures—some 50 or 60 times. We’ll get to that in a little bit. It can be translated feeble—support those who are feeble—or impotent, the sick, those without physical strength, the weak, or weak thing. These are the ways it can be translated.

So basically this command, simply put, tells us to have compassion, to be involved in the lives of people in the context of the church, and those who we sense either characteristic in their lives or at a particular point in their lives are without strength, to stick fast to them, to not leave them alone, not to disdain them, but rather to help them and to come alongside them, trying to prop them up and strengthen them.

Let’s take a closer look now though at this term strengthen. We said that the term hold on to is only used four times. We can’t get a lot from biblical teaching about that other than what we’ve already said. But I think that the need to move on to understand the people we’re dealing with means we want to understand the scriptures as it uses these particular phrases to describe areas that people fall into.

In other words, if we’re going to understand who it is that was without strength, we got to look at the rest of the scriptural teaching on that term to understand who it is that we’re supposed to be supporting. I mentioned last week that you know, it really is a would be a real big problem if we were to support the unruly or if we were somehow to comfort those without strength. It’s not enough. They need to be not just comforted and empathized with—they need to be strengthened.

And so these three different categories, as many other categories in the scriptures, command us to understand them well enough to be able to interpret when we’re dealing with somebody, what particular point they’re at in their Christian life. And when we identify them as being without strength in this sense of the term, that our responsibility is not to admonish them or rebuke them—that’s the disorderly. Our responsibility in that time is to strengthen them. Okay?

So we can look at a fuller definition of this by looking at various scriptures and in various ways that the word weak is used in the scriptures. And I guess that if you want to continue to think of these seven eyes, once you become involved, you want to do some investigation with people, ask them questions, try to discern where they’re at, and then you want to interpret their condition according to the scriptures.

And so if you’re going to interpret those who are weak according to the scriptures, you got to know what the scriptures teach in terms of weakness. Okay?

One of the primary ways the word weak is used throughout the scriptures—primarily, however, in the gospels—is in the sense of physical illness. And so people can be weak physically. And so if people are weak physically, what do they need? They need to be healed. They need to be somehow helped. But people can be physically weak.

Secondly, Paul, in Acts 20 and in other places of the scriptures, including in 1 Thessalonians, talks about how he didn’t want to be a burden economically on people. And in Acts 20:34, he says, “You yourselves know that these hands have ministered unto my necessities and to them that were with me. I have showed you all things how that so laboring you ought to support the weak.”

He gave himself as an example—this is to the Ephesian elders, to various churches. They were weak economically, and he would then support them. And so people can be weak or without resources economically, and that may be another way in which people are weak.

Additionally, in Acts 20, I think the implication we can draw there, as well as other scriptures, is that they were weak in terms of trust. He wanted to make sure that they didn’t think he was coming in just to make money off them. And so they were weak in trust in terms of having Paul approach them with the preaching of the gospel. So people can be weak physically, they can be weak in terms of economics, they can be weak in terms of trust.

Third, they can be weak intellectually as well. They can simply not understand things. And if you’re dealing with people, you should be able to discern that. But remember that is a potential source of weakness in somebody’s life, either through a lack of actual intelligence and ability or through a lack of training. And certainly in the context of the local church, people can be weak intellectually and simply not knowing the word of God. And frequently that’s what we’ll run into in our day and age and in our culture when the word is not taught systematically in very many institutions at all.

And certainly the homes that we were raised in, we were not necessarily taught very systematically in the scriptures. So we can be weak intellectually in our knowledge of the scriptures.

Another weakness that the scriptures talk about is positional weakness. In 1 Peter 3:7, wives are referred to as those who are the weaker vessels. And now, I’ve seen wives who are actually literally stronger than their husbands. Now, I’m sure that wives usually are physically weaker, and there may be some other weaknesses involved here, but I think that one of the things being spoken of here is their positional weakness.

And gentlemen, husbands, if you do not understand that, consider it. Consider your relationship to your employer and the positional weakness you have relative to your employer. I have seen time and time again, one of the great sins that husbands do is to fail to consider the weakness of their wives positionally.

Now, it’s a weakness that God’s put them in. He’s given them that position, but remember, it can be extremely intimidating to a wife to be positionally or functionally inferior or submissive to the husband. It’s a scary thing to trust most aspects of your lives to somebody else, as much as you may have loved them at one point in time emotionally.

If that love fails to become covenantal and biblical in content, it’s a very difficult thing for wives to trust their husbands in that way. So we must have concern for them.

There’s functional weakness. 1 Corinthians 12:22 Paul says that there are members of the body that are more feeble than other members. So here again, in the context of the church, there are some members that are weaker and there are some members of our physical body that are weaker. And that’s not a bad thing. They have a weakness that is positional in its base. And that weakness that we are to strengthen may indeed be that kind of positional weakness.

Fifth, spiritual weakness. And this spiritual weakness could be through immaturity. And of course, here it’s linked to that intellectual problem we mentioned earlier. In Romans 14:1, it speaks of those who are weak in the faith, and it says in verse two that those that are weak in the faith eat only herbs—they’re vegetarians. In other words, in the context of that of Romans 14. And so those are those who are weak in the context of their spiritual immaturity.

And Romans 14 and again in 1 Corinthians 8, he describes groups of people whose knowledge of the word of God had not become well enough developed or understood, where they realized they didn’t have to worry about what they ate. That it wasn’t what goes into a man that defiles him. It’s what comes out of the man that comes out from his heart.

1 Corinthians 8 verse 7 it says that some, their conscience being weak, are defiled when they eat meat sacrificed to idols. You there’s no—that there’s no sin to eat against eating meat sacrificed to idols. Paul made that clear. But for those who ate with a weak conscience, they were defiled. And so some people that we deal with in the context of the church are weak spiritually simply through immaturity.

And again here, this is going to be normally the case, frequently when we run across people who are having difficulties because the churches today are full of weak Christians. They’re full of weak preaching. They’re full of no systematic studies going on in the homes. No encouragement for men to study the word of God out on their own. And so we can expect spiritual immaturity to be the mark of the day. And indeed it is. And so we’re going to see a lot of weakness this way as well.

And finally, they can be weak through sin. Now notice this weakness through sin is simply one of many listed in the scriptures. And so I don’t think we can read weakness through sin into the comment in Thessalonians exclusively. But on the other hand, we don’t want to leave it out either.

Romans 6:19, Paul says, “I speak after the manner of men because of the infirmity, the weakness of your flesh. For as you yielded your members servants to uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity.” Paul correlates their infirmity of flesh to their sinfulness in terms of yielding their members unto sin. And so there is a weakness that occurs to the Christian not simply through immaturity but through sin in the life, and that can weaken a man.

And in that weakened state we can find him. And so we must interpret the data along these biblical lines and try to discern what we’re dealing with.

Now if we have a better understanding then of what it means to be weak—biblically, intellectually, economically, spiritually, through immaturity or through sin, positionally, etc. If we have a better understanding of that, then it helps us to understand what Paul means when he says to stiffen or strengthen those without strength.

In the context of those who are sick, that it means we should try to help them get better physically. And indeed, you know, our savior over and over and over again in the gospels is healing people from their sickness. That’s the model. That’s the motif. That’s the big picture—that big symbol, if you want to look at it that way—that God puts in front of us for what Jesus does in the lives of men. He heals them from sickness, physical illness, and he brings them to soundness of health. He raises them up out of the dead—in the case of Lazarus, that we talked about several weeks ago—that is the model for everything that our savior does to us. He ministers to us. He makes us whole. The model for that is physical health.

And it would be the height of Neoplatonic thought in the church—in other words, a false distinction between spirit and body—if we simply said that, well, yeah, that was just a picture, so we don’t got to worry about people’s physical infirmities. We don’t want to pass this one up too quick is what I’m saying.

In the context of the church, those with physical disabilities should be helped by the members of the church. They should be supported in their physical difficulties and infirmities. Okay? And so that’s one way to implement this command: as you know people in the context of the church who are your friends and in your group, so to speak, who are physically ill or outside of your group even in the terms of the church, you think through ways to help them in those physical illnesses.

Secondly, we talked about those who may be weak economically. And again, to apply this command to that type of situation, we would want to enrich people that are infeebled or strengthless in terms of economics.

Again, Paul said in terms of Acts 20 that he wanted to support the weak. He said, “Remember the words of the Lord Jesus: it’s more blessed to give than to receive.” He was giving them money in essence by working and providing for his own needs. He was giving them the fruit of his labors. And so he was helping them to be enriched by his actual labor itself.

And so the Apostle Paul understood that one of the ways you help the weak, to strengthen the weak and to make them stiffer, is to give to them economically. Now, simply throwing money at a problem frequently is not the problem—or not the direct solution—but it can be sometimes. And again, we don’t want to pass that over too quickly as we think of other ways to help people who are weak.

One of the things we’re called to do in the context of the church is to minister to people financially. God over and over in the scriptures makes it quite clear that he gives rich people to the church, among other things, to be able to share that wealth with those who are financially disabled through no sinful fault of their own.

And so demonstrate again a picture of what God does to us. We’re in poverty before God. We have no righteousness before God, but he gives us all things in Jesus Christ our savior. He gives us the entire world, doesn’t he? You know, we get to inherit the world and not because we have any right to it, but because God graciously gives it to his son, who gives it to his church to administer.

And so that’s a picture of what we’re to do with one another as well. So you help those who are poor.

And in terms of those who are intellectually poor, intellectually weak: Of course, the answer to that is to teach them. Isaiah 35:3 says, “Strengthen ye the weak hands. Confirm the feeble knees. Say to them that are of a fearful heart, Be strong. Fear not. Behold, your God will come with vengeance. Even God with recompense. He will come to save you.”

Isaiah 35 speaks to people that needed knowledge from the word of God. Now, sure, they needed courage. They needed to be strengthened. Their hands needed to be strengthened because as they saw the world around them, their hearts grew faint and they were without strength because of their lack of intellectual insight into the word of God.

And we live in times today that can be extraordinarily frightening and disheartening to each and every one of us. It is a tough thing to get together on Thanksgiving with extended family and not have problems of the world surface to the top of a day that’s supposed to be Thanksgiving. I know I just went through such a day. I’m saying that this world is in bad shape and anybody who ignores the great devastations that are happening in this world and in this state locally as well is walking around with blinders on.

One of the things that came up at our Thanksgiving dinner was one of the families there, part of my wife’s relatives—their child goes to a school, a rural part rather of the state, and they’re handing out condoms there at the school now to the junior highs and high school kids. I mean this is not a nice world. And you can look at this world and start to get extremely discouraged and be lose strength to do the task that God has called you to do. And that’s a result of being intellectually weak in terms of your apprehension of the faith.

The word of God says to such people: instruct them in the word of God. That God’s blessings and cursings are flowing out in history into all the world. And that if we see people passing out condoms and encouraging promiscuous sex in the high schools, it’s only we’re seeing them being prepared for judgment by God. And we should be able to see beyond all that to the great blessings that God has given us in our culture.

And hopefully your Thanksgiving caused you to ponder the great blessings God has given to us even in the midst of this wicked and godless culture. Yet God has poured out great blessings to us, his people. History moves in terms of the establishment of the people of God, as we said so often from this pulpit. You must know that. You must hold on to that. Otherwise, you can have a root of bitterness in terms of all of history itself and what’s going on in our nation today spring up in your heart that chokes off thanksgiving and makes you infeeble for the task that God has called you to do.

We must be taught from the word of God and intellectually strengthened. And that’s what we’re to do for one another. And if we see one another being disheartened because of the way the world’s going, strengthen them with the knowledge of the word. The knowledge that the word says that victory is coming forth into all the land through the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ. As people are being established and things aren’t as bad as they appear in your papers, nor as bad as they appear on the TV.

They’re worse in some cases, but overall and beyond that all the judgment coming forth is for the establishment of his people. And so we can create take great part in that and take great strength in that as well.

Hebrews 12 talks about the need not to simply take people that are intellectually weak and leave them where they’re at. It says, “Lift up the hands which hang down and the feeble knees. Make straight paths for your feet, lest that which is lame be turned out of the way, but let it rather be healed.”

I mentioned that Titus 1 says to hold fast to the faith word. And part of our holding fast to those who are intellectually weak in terms of the knowledge of the word of God is to get them to hold fast, to cleave to the faithful word, to instruct them in that word, and to bring them along.

Now, I said that we’re going to have a lot of this in our day and age—biblical illiteracy, basically. But certainly that’s also true of new converts. And we have new converts in the context of this church. And we all have a responsibility to help ground them in the word of God and to help support and strengthen them in that word, and we should be taking those responsibilities seriously.

And you should be thinking whether or not you’ve fulfilled your responsibilities to such people in the context of this church. Maybe you’re called in the providence of God to come alongside of a new convert or somebody new to Reformed theology in this church and to help them understand the basics of the faith. Maybe there are people in the context of this church that have never received that kind of in-depth teaching.

And I’m telling you that teaching does not simply belong to the leadership of the church. It can’t be done. The body must be ministering one to the other in the context of the local manifestation of the body of Jesus Christ, to strengthen each other out. This is your responsibility as well as mine. And my responsibility is to admonish you and to admonish myself to fulfill these responsibilities to build each other up, particularly those in the context who are weak intellectually in a knowledge of the word of God.

For those who are weak functionally or positionally are to be honored. That’s the point of Paul or in Peter’s epistle in chapter 3:7 speaking of the wife, the weaker vessel. What’s the solution to that? Well, he tells husbands to give honor unto the wife.

If they’re weak because of their positional inferiority, it doesn’t mean you want to get rid of the positional subordination that God puts in place. That would be terrible for them. That’s the job God has called them to do. But at the same time, your answer to this is to properly esteem them in their position. Instead of lording it over your wife or lording it over your employees at work, you honor them instead.

We give out of our way to honor people who because of their functional subordination can become weak and without strength in terms of fulfillment of their tasks. I mentioned the parts of the body that Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 12:22. He says that yes, some body parts are weaker, functionally inferior, but they’re necessary. He says the weaker members are necessary for the health of the whole body, and the weaker vessel of the wife is necessary for the functioning of the household.

You got to get a hold of that in your head. And then if you’re working with people that are weaker members of the body or weaker members of the family, you want to honor them. You want to get them to understand that they are necessary for the proper functioning of the family or the church or whatever it is. You want to honor them. And if you do that, then you’ve strengthened those people who are in a position of weakness through functional subordination.

And then fifth, those who are weak through immaturity or through sin: you want to edify them. You want to build them up. Romans 15 He says, “We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak and not to please ourselves.”

Now, that doesn’t mean just to bear it up and say, “Oh, well, they’re weak. That’s the way it is.” Christ, when he bore our sins, did something about it. And Paul, I think, here in the Epistle to the Romans the same thing. We’re supposed to do something about it.

And we don’t have to just guess, because of the word bear, he goes on in verse two of 15 to say, “Let every one of us please his neighbor for his good to edification. You got a person who’s weak in conscience because of their spiritual immaturity. You don’t want to stomp on them. You don’t want to force them to do things that’s going to be sin for them, to eat meat sacrificed to idols or to drink some kind of alcoholic beverage or to smoke a cigar.

You don’t want to force things on them. But on the other hand, you do also not want to leave them in a position of weakness. So often, you know, the church tends to take people that are spiritually immature and weak because of that immaturity—those that we find in 1 Corinthians 8 and Romans, we talked about earlier—and leave them in that position of weakness and somehow think that’s a benefit to us.

“Aren’t we good people? Nobody in the church drinks wine. We don’t have wine in our communion service ‘cuz we don’t want to offend anybody ‘cuz we’re trying to obey the admonition about the weaker brother.” Baloney. Baloney. This admonition says the weaker brother you must be very careful with. You don’t want to cause them to sin against their conscience. But that bearing of their infirmities must lead to their good, to their edification.

You don’t want to leave them thinking that somehow meat sacrificed to idols can’t be eaten. You want to move them along the path gently, slowly, based upon the word of God, not damaging their conscience, but if possible, you want to move them to edification in terms of that particular thing. And he goes on to say again in Romans 15, the next verse: even Christ not please himself. Be pleasing to us, to think we’re great people and get rid of wine at communion. But our job is to help people to be moved along to strengthen the weak hands.

Certainly to have consideration and regard for them, but to stiffen the strengthless—not simply to leave them strengthless. Okay?

So this command means that we want to think biblically about people and their problems that we come across in the context of here at the local body, this local manifestation of Jesus Christ. We want to look at people who are strengthless and recognize they could be so physically, through economic problems, intellectually, positionally in the providence of God, spiritually, through immaturity or through sin.

And we don’t want to just understand that. We want to then implement a plan with such people to move them to strength. We want to be biblically involved. We want to investigate to see what’s going on in their life. Why is it that they manifest a weakness or a lack of strength? We want to interpret those things according to these verses, then, and then we want to instruct them based upon the word of God to the end that they might be strengthened if at all possible in that particular area.

And we want to then begin to work with them in the context of that. And so those who are physically ill, we want to try to heal through technology, through prayer, through the anointing of oil, whatever it is, we want to try to move them to physical health. Those who are weak economically, we want to enrich them. We want to strengthen them and stiffen them, as it were, by bringing them actual material possessions that can help them in terms of their financial impoverishment.

We want to teach those who are strengthless through a lack of understanding of the word of God and even being taught it at all. We want to honor those who are positionally strengthless. And we want to edify those who are strengthless through spiritual immaturity or through sin. In the case of sin, of course, it means removing that sin from their lives, admonishing them if they become disorderly or unruly and a failure to leave their sin.

We’re going to tell them “Well, I’d like to help your weakness, but I can’t help the weakness until you stop that sinning.” And we don’t want to leave them in the sin. We want to move them on to strength according to the word of God.

So we want to do all these things. And you know, there’s a beautiful lesson behind all this. Our Lord Jesus Christ came that he might strengthen us. We are to stiffen the strengthless. But ultimately, all this is happening under the dominion of Jesus Christ, the Lord Jesus Christ.

In Romans 5:6, we read that “when we were yet without strength, that’s the same term used here—when we were weak—in due time, Christ died for the ungodly.” We’re the ones, as I said, that are the model or the picture rather of the model of the people that were lame, dead, etc. We’re the ones who are impoverished. We’re the ones who had no knowledge, who had uncircumcised ears, and couldn’t hear the instruction of God’s word. And we’re the ones who didn’t understand history according to the word of God at all. And we were weak—weaker than weak. We were lying in there dead, essentially, in our weakness.

And Jesus Christ reaches out to us and he brings us to a position of strength. And he doesn’t just leave us then with salvation. That salvation is perfected and matured. 1 Peter 5:10, it says that after you’ve suffered a while, you have already been converted—mind you, God will make you perfect, establish, strengthen each of you. Strengthen—the same word is used here. Jesus Christ stiffens, strengthens his people who are at various times in their life completely without strength, and then through trials become without strength as well.

But God establishes us and God strengthens us. He does it through the Holy Spirit. Romans 8:26 says the Spirit also helps our infirmities, our weakness. The Spirit comes to bring us, as it were, the life of Jesus Christ, to bring us his teaching and instruction, to bring us the secondary means that God has used—his word—planted in our hearts that we might be moved from weakness to strength. The Holy Spirit is dwelling in the context of each of us individually and in the context of the church to strengthen and establish us.

What a neat deal. In Romans 8:26, it says specifically the way he helps our infirmities: and we don’t know how to pray about somebody, he prays for us. He helps us in that way. So the Spirit comes to minister Jesus Christ—who is a strengthening Spirit, then, to us—and he calls us. That’s our job: one to the other in the context of the local church. That is an essential ministry of the church to carry out that healing, that enrichment, that strengthening ministry that Jesus Christ does for us in salvation, to carry that out in the context of the local body of Jesus Christ.

And we are then the secondary means Christ uses to stiffen and strengthen each other in the context of the church. Now, that’s absolutely unnatural and unworldly. The world takes the weak things and despises them. The Romans took those who were weak—children—and left them to die and left them for their bodies to be ripped apart by dogs. And today the weak ones are the ones who are being murdered in millions upon millions across this world on a regular basis.

The world despises the weak. And in spite of all their fine rhetoric to the contrary, they have no regard for the weak. But we’re not called to be like that. We’re called not to despise weak brothers and sisters in the context of the church. And more than that, we’re called actually to go out of our way to help them and strengthen them and stiffen them.

Now, this tells us something about the importance of the local church. These admonitions, these instructions, are given to us. They’re given to us that we might fulfill in the lives of each other. To be cut off from a local body of Jesus Christ is to be outside of the normal secondary means that God uses to help us become strong, vibrant Christians. To be cut off from the local church is to be cut off from one of the central means that God gives us for our sanctification, for our growth and grace, and for our strengthening.

And one of the things we should be thankful for is a local church that sees these responsibilities and moves on upon them in obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ. This is a matter of obedience to us. We must obey these commandments from God. But beyond that, it is a high privilege to carry forth the ministry of Jesus Christ in someone’s life. It is a high privilege to take a person who is new to the faith and instruct them in the royal word of life in the scriptures.

And it’s a high privilege to come alongside of somebody without financial resources and to assist them with the wealth that, you know, came from God. That’s a high privilege that we have. It’s a high calling we have. It brings with it tremendous responsibilities, but it also brings tremendous joy. That’s what we’ve been created to do. Jesus Christ is the one ultimately who is strengthening people through the work of the Holy Spirit.

And all this redounds to the glory of God. We talked about Lazarus, and Jesus said—remember, from John 11, we spoke of a couple weeks ago—he said that “Lazarus’s sickness is not unto death but for the glory of God.” And presumably in the context of the church, the weakness of the members that we see is not weakness unto death, it’s weakness under the glory of God, that they might be moved from strength to strength, from glory to glory, through the means of the people, the brothers and sisters, by the means of you all ministering to them the things of Jesus Christ and the things of the Spirit.

1 Corinthians 15, again talking about the body, but applicable to what we’re saying here, says the body is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness and is raised in power. Beyond the strengthening that we see—that God calls us to participate in and rejoice in the context of the church—is a great strengthening to come when Christ returns and everything moves from glory to glory. But we see a little bit of that heaven, that beautiful realization of what’s going to happen, as we see each other go from glory to glory, from weakness to strength, as our body goes from weakness to strength, as we move in terms of spiritual maturity in obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ.

First Peter 5:10 said that the God of grace, who have called us under his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that you have suffered a while, make you perfect, establish, strengthen, settle you. He said that God does that. It goes on to say “to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.” All these things redound—not ultimately for our well-being, although we greatly rejoice in it, we are benefited by it—but ultimately, the reason that all this occurs and why God has called us to this kind of ministry, one to the other, of strengthening those without strength, is that he might be glorified in and through us.

We do the work not of ourselves. We do the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so he receives all the glory and honor. This is the one of whom the scriptures said in Matthew 12: “Behold my servant, whom I have chosen, my beloved in whom my soul is well pleased. I’ll put my spirit upon him, and he shall show judgment to the Gentiles. He shall not strive nor cry, neither shall any man hear his voice in the streets. A bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking flax shall he not quench.”

He wouldn’t quench those who are weak in faith or weak through other means, but rather he brings them to strength and maturity. It says, “A bruised reed shall he not break, and a smoking flax shall he not quench, till he send forth judgment unto victory. He takes those that are weak and makes them strong in him.”

Ezekiel 34: “I will seek out that which was lost and bring again that which was driven away and will bind up that which was broken and will strengthen that which was sick. But I’ll destroy the fat and the strong. I will feed them with judgment.”

Our Lord Jesus Christ looks at the weak among us. Has great compassion for them and uses—they the secondary means of the Spirit—to bring his word and his being to them and strengthen them and move them from glory to glory, from weak to strength. He has that kind of love and concern for the weak in the context of the church. He treats them that way. Shall we treat them any differently? Shall we despise them? Shall we not have enough time for them? No.

Lensky says that the weak are not to be let go of or to be abandoned as persons who amount to little, but rather are to be held to and to be supported. Ward in his commentary is that we’re to help physically, morally, mentally, and spiritually. The church has traditionally, Ward said, has passed passengers as well as robust crew members. And that’s true. We shouldn’t despise them for that.

Weak souls are the normal stuff the Christian church is composed of. Many of us have a lack of knowledge of the will of God that makes us weak. A lack of courage to trust God in trying circumstances. A timorous scrupulousness, hesitant to use our liberty in Jesus Christ in terms of foods or other things. A lack of stability or purpose. And so we result in being easily carried away. Some lack courage to face or will to endure persecutions or trials. Some