Summary
Encourage One Another and Build Each Other Up
Paul's charge in 1 Thessalonians 5:11—"encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing"—comes with two imperatives the Christian dare not separate: encourage (or comfort), and build up. Both presuppose that something is already under construction. The Christian life is a house God is building, and we have been called to assist on one another's job sites.
Think of the spiritual home God constructs in each believer. The site itself is a tangled lot of sin—weeds, muck, and a heart of stone that no human tool can break. God prepares that ground through His Word and lays the foundation in baptism, and the foundation is the one Paul names in 1 Corinthians 3:11: Jesus Christ, and no other. The proof of that foundation's strength is the gospel itself—"God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" Romans 5:8—and the promise that whoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life John 3:16.
From there the framing rises through the preaching of the Word, the gathering of the church, and prayer. The wiring and plumbing are run as parents, sponsors, and the wider congregation hand on the stories of Scripture—creation, the patriarchs, the prophets, Mary, Christ, the apostles. Insulation comes through doctrine: learning why these stories matter and what the foundation actually means. Unlike a contractor's checklist, none of this happens just once. God keeps framing, wiring, and insulating throughout the whole of a Christian's life, and He always works from the inside out, because "the LORD looks on the heart" 1 Samuel 16:7.
But God does not call us to build only our own house. A volunteer who only ever built his own home would not be much of a volunteer. We are members of the body of Christ, the one holy catholic and apostolic Church, and the Spirit empowers us to bless our neighbors by helping them build on the foundation already laid for them. That is what encouragement means in 1 Thessalonians 5: joining the Spirit's work in someone else's spiritual home.
Here a real temptation appears. We easily confuse "encourage" with "make happy," and so we end up encouraging one another in sin—approving rotted lumber because it would feel unkind to point it out. But you would never tell a friend that cracked, decaying boards are fine for his new house. You would help him haul them to the dump and pick out something solid. So too in the faith: genuine encouragement sometimes means speaking the law plainly, naming sin as sin, and helping a brother or sister tear out what cannot bear weight. Every one of us has rotted wood that needs replacing with the sure timber of God's Word, as taught in "Encourage" (2-28-21).
This is why Paul anchors his exhortation in the gospel itself: "God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep we might live with him" 1 Thessalonians 5:9-10. Our homes are not framed with the rotten wood of sin but with the pure wood of the cross; not held by the rusted hardware of despair but by the very nails that pierced Christ's hands and feet; not flooded by judgment but washed daily by the waters of Holy Baptism. Encouraging one another, then, is simply pointing each other back to that foundation again and again—until the final walkthrough, when we cross the threshold of heaven and know that we are home.
Video citations
- "Encourage" (2-28-21) — Good morning. If you would please open your Bibles to first Thessalonians, the fifth chapter, that's first Thessalonians, the fifth chapter. These past few weeks and in this sermon series, we have…