“It isn’t the mountains ahead that wear you out, it’s the pebble in your shoe.” At the end of his letter to the Thessalonians, Paul addresses many of the pebbles in in the shoe of the Church. These exhortations also apply to us at Seed Church as we set out on the exciting process of bringing on a new pastor and ministering with him.
Paul starts out taking about the leaders in the church, not just those who stand in front, but those who labor and those who care. This does not mean those who are put in place because they are wealthy, but because they work and teach.
We are to care for, love and esteem these people – and the best way to make life easy for church leaders is to live at peace with each other.
Leaders are like bus drivers, with a dozen things to be paying attention to at the same time and a bunch of unruly people in the back. It’s easy to be a backseat driver, easy to second guess decisions, easy to squabble amongst ourselves. But don’t – instead, love, defend, appreciate and support.
Then Paul goes on to our corporate responsibility to not just our leaders, but the idle, faint-hearted, the weak. Paul walked through much of these issues earlier in the epistle. Some had stopped working to just wait fit Christ’s return. Others were hurt and mourning, others were simply weak, whether spiritually or physically.
There are different ways to address each of these, but we are always called to be patient with them (and we are all of them, at some point). Patient here means long-suffering, with a long fuse. We should be able to endure much, partly because others ensure much from us.
Then comes a difficult passage – “do not repay evil with evil.” Much evil was being done to the church, and even within the church at times. But we are called to do good, not just ourselves but to all. Many of the issues in society today, racism in particular, have been exacerbated because the church did not do good to all.
The church is called to be a family, a circle of love. We can’t exclude the leaders from our circle of love. We can’t exclude the weak and struggling from our circle of love. We can’t even exclude those who do evil to us from that circle!
Love is the proper response when we have a pebble in our shoe as we walk the Way following Christ. We’re at a new stage of our journey at Seed, so let’s be sure we are supporting our leaders, old and new, loving the weak and even our enemies as we move forward.
-Sermon Notes, Mahlon Friesen, Seed Church, Lynnwood WA, June 28, 2020