Encouragement Is Not Sympathy

According to 1 Thessalonians 5:11, God calls us to “encourage one another and build each other up.” Παρακαλέω, the Greek word for encouraging, also means comforting or urging.  Encouragement is not simply about making someone feel better.  Encouragement invites people into a way of life and a way of thinking that enables us to experience the fullness of God’s blessings.

Encouragement is not sympathy.  Encouragement strengthens and invigorates.  It offers power and confidence.  Sympathy, however, seeks to lessen the harshness of our struggles.  It tells us, “What you are experiencing is too much for you to handle.  Your life is too difficult.”  Much like pity, it weakens us with the message that we are incapable of dealing with the life God has given us. 

Sympathy cuts us off from the Lord.  It limits our grasp of his capabilities, until he becomes nothing more than the One who cares and holds our hands.  But encouragement draws us closer to God.  It urges us to One who fills us with His power to handle anything that we face. It tells us that with God, all things are possible and no situations are God-forsaken.  Sympathy says “What a shame!”  Encouragement says “Get ready for something amazing!”

Years ago I met a man with chronic physical ailments.  His wife sympathized for him.  She tended to his every need.  As he lay groaning on the hospital bed in their living room, she did whatever she could do to ease his struggles.  Each day he got weaker and weaker, and eventually went to a residential therapy center.

The therapists did not sympathize with this man; they encouraged him.  With caring and with firmness, they pushed him to do what he never thought he would ever be able to do again.  When he complained, they urged him to do the best that he could.  Over time he became stronger and stronger, until he was able to walk again and care for himself.

The man returned home, where his sympathetic wife once again cared for his every need.  When he faced a struggle, she took care of it for him.  The more she did, the less he did and became weaker and weaker.  Before long, he found himself back in the hospital bed again.  As well-meaning as his wife was, her sympathy took away his strength.

When God tells us to encourage one another, he wants us to act like the therapists, not the wife.

God in the Crowd

We seek God in various ways and places.  I, like many people, get in touch with God in the natural world.  I often sense his presence in the night sky, and I feel close to him when I’m out in the woods or on the creek.

But there is a better way to meet God.  Not in the beauty of nature, but through other people.

The Bible begins with a tale of a man enjoying fellowship with God in a beautiful garden called Eden.  But the story of Scripture moves us out of the garden and takes us on a journey to our ultimate destination.  At the very end of the book, Revelation does not offer the promise of a return to Eden, but the vision of a city (Revelation 21-22).  The new paradise that Christ is preparing for us is not about sunsets and waterfalls.  It is about streets and gates and walls and people…lots of people.  For all eternity, we will see the glory of God in the midst of a crowd.

We do not find God primarily in a rainbow or a hawk’s flight, because they were not made in his image.  That honor belongs to humanity alone (Genesis 1:26).  We discover God as we encounter his image in one another.  We may, with the psalmist, proclaim that “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1).  But nothing compares with the glory of God that we see in another person.  None of us, to be sure, are a perfect and complete image of God, but we each possess a unique reflection of his glory.  Every person we encounter provides us with a new aspect of the God whom we seek.  If you want to find God, look for him in people, not towering oaks or ocean waves.

Not only are we made in God’s image, but he is present in the world through us.  As the apostle Paul wrote, “You are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it” (1 Corinthians 12:27).  The message once again is clear: we find God in people.  He touches us and speaks to us in the ordinary messiness of human relationships, more so than in the stars and the wind.

We may resist the truth of finding God in others in part because human relationships can be difficult.  People will disagree with us, anger and hurt us, and fail us.  They intrude into our lives with demands and expectations that can frustrate us.  And it is exactly in these inconveniences that we meet God.  Left to our own devices, we would create self-centered paradises, constructed from our convictions and fueled by our egocentrism.  But God, through his presence in others, interrupts our solipsism with his call upon us, his challenge for us, his shocking new word for us.

Times of personal and quiet reflection, whether in the beauty of nature or the stillness of our living rooms, are essential for our spiritual quest.  But they are not its meat and potatoes.  For that, we must encounter and interact with others.  And that is why we have a church.