Sermon Transcript
Thank you for putting up with us as we adjust around changing schedules and substitute preacher. Somebody, somebody mentioned to me last night, they’re like, you know, when there’s a substitute teacher in a class, the students get a movie.
Is that what you’re doing? And I was like, huh, that would have been a great idea 48 hours ago, but I I already have something, so you don’t get a movie, sorry. Let’s pray. Father, thank you for this morning, thank you for Christmas. Lord, we pray that you would open your word to us, that we could hear what you would want to say.
We pray that you bring healing to Dave, you restore him quickly, Lord. We pray those things in Jesus’ name. Amen. Our scripture passage this morning, this is our last installment in 1 Thessalonians. Next week we’ll start Christmas stuff.
So 1 Thessalonians 5:12-15. It’s 1 Thessalonians 5:12-15. Now we ask you, brothers and sisters, to acknowledge those who work hard among you, who care for you in the Lord, who admonish you, Hold them in the highest regard and love because of their work. Live in peace with each other. And we urge you, brothers and sisters, warn those who are idle and disruptive.
Encourage the disheartened. Help the weak. Be patient with everyone. Make sure nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always strive to do what is good for each other and for everyone else. I’ll be honest, I feel a little robbed that Dave is out of commission this week and we don’t get to hear him.
Preach these verses as originally scheduled. I, I would have loved to hear Dave preach these verses because when I read, live in peace with each other, encourage the disheartened, help the weak, be patient with everyone, make sure nobody pays back wrong for wrong but always strive to do what is good for each other— when I read that, I think Dave Gudgel. I think That’s who he is. I just read this description of what we should do, and I think, that’s Dave. I’m not exaggerating.
I’m not trying to score points with my boss. I promise. He is the most encouraging person I’ve been around on a day-to-day basis by a mile. I don’t know who’s in second place in this race of the most encouraging person, but whoever’s in second place is way Way back there. It’s not even close to how encouraging Dave is.
I started to notice this when I was first interviewing with Bridges about a year ago, and so I looked up some of the emails Dave and I sent back and forth to each other when I was interviewing, and these are just indicative of what every communication with Dave is like. So he starts off writing, hi Dan, thanks again for today’s call. So we had, I don’t know, about 20 Skype conversations, ’cause I was in Georgia, we couldn’t do real face-to-face. We had about 20 Skype conversations between starting to interview and actually being hired, so this was just after one of those conversations. Thanks again for today’s call.
It’s a joy to talk to you. I don’t know if anybody has ever told me that in my life. Like with Beth, sometimes, of course, my wife, she’ll say something like, I just love talking to you, or, I’m just so glad that we got to talk so long today, but never in a non-wife type normal relationship has anybody ever said anything to me like that. He concludes the email with, you and Beth are in our prayers. Thank you, Dave.
With all the thank-yous, I always got the sense that somehow I was doing him a favor, by interviewing for the position that I really wanted? It’s amazing. Or another email, hi Dan, I loved our call last night. Thanks a bunch for making time.
You’re welcome, potential employer. Like I’m not gonna make time for the call, like that’s ever going to happen. Of course I’m gonna make time for the call. Isn’t that just expected? Isn’t it just expected that I, the candidate, would make time?
So yes, that is expected in case you’re interviewing for a position, or life lesson if you haven’t interviewed for something yet, be available, of course. But what that showed me about Dave is that he’s going to praise and thank for things that are just expected to be done. So I had the thought, I’m not going to need to go above and beyond with this guy if I work for him. To get a thank you. I’m just gonna get a thank you for breathing, apparently.
Now, that’s not my personality, to thank a lot. Talk about that in a minute. But I gotta tell you, it is really nice to be around someone like that. That’s good advice, by the way, for husbands and wives. Thank each other for things that are just expected, for doing the laundry, for putting away the dishes, for going to work.
Don’t I have to go to work? Yes, you have to go to work, but thank you for going to work. Or with your boss or coworkers or friends, to just thank for what’s expected. I try to think about it on the level of a teacher thanking students for showing up to class. Don’t we have to show up for class?
Yes, you have to show up for class, but thank you for showing up to class is what it feels like with Dave. He concludes that email with, I am very grateful for the person you are and the many ways God is working in your life and ministry. Thank you, Dave. Now, does your boss tell you that very often? Does anyone tell you that very often?
Spouse? Parents? Students, do your parents tell you that very often? Hey, son or daughter, I’m grateful for the person you are and what God is doing in your life. Thank you for existing.
It’d be nice to hear, wouldn’t it? So I wondered, is this just how Dave is during the interview stage? Is he just trying to sell me on the position by being super encouraging, and then when I get there, it’ll be a bait-and-switch, and it’ll be a completely different situation? But the more we chatted, the more I began to believe that’s just who he is. And after arriving, I’ve learned that really is just who he is.
Like now, for instance, he’ll start telling me before I preach a sermon, this is going to be great. It really is. I’m so glad you’re here and for what you’re going to say. This weekend. And I think, I haven’t even done anything yet, and he’s already thanking me.
Like, how can you be sure that it’s going to be great in advance of it happening? So it’s not just, and it’s nice, it’s not just that I get praise for doing things that I’m expected to do, it’s I get praise from Dave before I do anything at all. And I’ll take it. That’s a good place to be. I don’t know if you’ve ever been around someone like that.
I know you see and interact with Dave a little, but in a daily interaction type relationship, do you have someone like that? I don’t think that I ever have. But again, I gotta tell you, it’s pretty nice. Which, this is how I know that I’m not saying these things in order to score points with my boss. Because I don’t think I could get any more points.
Let’s say I had some more points, what exactly would that make better? Like, what would better look like given my current situation if I’m already being thanked in advance for things that I’m just expected to do anyway? I think I’m maxed out already. So I read these verses 12 and 13, now we ask you, brothers and sisters, to acknowledge those who work hard among you. Who care for you in the Lord.
He’s talking about pastors and spiritual leaders there who care for you in the Lord, who admonish you. Hold them in the highest regard and love because of their work. And I think Dave is certainly doing that for his staff and the various other leaders at this church. So, again, I don’t know how he could actually be doing it more. So let me just ask you, ’cause I check myself on this, are we doing that for him?
I ask myself that all the time. Am I doing that for Dave? Am I encouraging him like he’s encouraging me? Are we as a church doing that for him? I’m not saying we’re not.
I’m not calling out anything specific. This isn’t like we gotta change majorly. I’m just asking us that we check ourselves. Just check. If we are.
Now, like I said, Dave’s personality is not my personality, and that’s actually why I want to triple-check that I’m doing this for Dave, because typically you’re going to get a good job from me after you complete the task, and if it was actually a good job. I’m going to need to see that it was a good job, and then you will get a good job. And you aren’t going to get a, wow, that was great, unless you go way above and beyond. So I’ve been asking myself lately, even before I knew I was preaching this text, because I see Dave in the office and I’m like, you know, I’m not like that. Why am I not like that?
So why am I hesitant to praise someone? Where does that come from? Why do I not like your post on Facebook unless it is really phenomenal? Unless it has moved the needle for me big time, right? Why do you have to go above and beyond to earn my praise?
When somebody asks me my opinion of something, whether it’s a movie or the new model of a car or a sermon, whether it’s my sermon or somebody else’s sermon, why does my mind immediately grab what could make it better? Why do I go there first? Why do I go negative First. Now, life experiences have taught me that I should respond verbally with praise first. I should praise before I mention the things that I think should change.
I’ve learned that, okay? So I do that. But I don’t think of the praise first. That’s not what pops in my mind first. In fact, my instinct isn’t really to talk about what’s good at all.
If it’s good, I’m like, well, it should be good. And since it’s doing what it should be doing, then we don’t need to talk about it. Let’s talk about what’s not good so we can make it good. And then once it’s good, we won’t really need to talk about it anymore, and we can move on to the next thing that needs to be fixed. That’s me.
Or when someone else praises something, great sermon, great movie, why do I think, yeah, but here are some things that were wrong with it? Or, yeah, but I would have liked it better if, pops into my mind. How do you like the Christmas tree, Dan? Well, I’d like it better if. Why do I need to say that?
Why is that my reaction when I hear somebody else praise something? Just been asking myself. The truth is that I don’t want to admit because that was my dad. That’s where it came from for me. So true story, I would bring home the report card back in the day when I was in school, all A’s.
All the time, 95, 96 final average, and Dad would say, hmm, I think you can do better.
Didn’t say great, didn’t say well done, he said, hmm, I think you can do better. The crazy thing is, I therefore did better. There was one class where my final average, all 3 quarters, was a 100%.
Overall grade in the class, 100. 3 times. I showed that to Dad. Can’t do better than this. And he said, I quote, that’s pretty good.
As in, you met expectation. So now you will get a, that’s pretty good. Don’t boohoo for me too long. The end of that story is by the time Dad died, God had done a miraculous work in both my life and Dad’s life, and we had a great relationship. So that’s another story for another day.
But in the meantime, before God’s unbelievable work, I couldn’t stand Dad. I dreaded, honestly, I dreaded our interactions together as father and son. Did you have a parent like that? Who was, shall we say, less than encouraging?
If so, did you like that parent? Of course not, right? Those are not warm memories of childhood. So here’s the question: why would we replicate those traits, whether we picked it up from a parent or somewhere else in life, from some person that we didn’t like that person either? Why would we replicate Why are we doing the same things?
Maybe the things we do are a little bit modified, like I would never tell my kids what my dad told me, but basically at the root, it’s the same thing. I know my dad’s reasons. I know his response. He would say, it’s to get you to be your best. If I don’t push you and keep the bar high, you won’t achieve what you could achieve, and I want you to reach your full potential.
So I appreciate the good intentions, and I mean that sincerely. That was part of the healing process for me, was being able to see that, hey, Dad actually wanted the best for me. But, okay, in case you’re a parent who’s really pushing the accelerator, okay, but I think there’s a lot more people in psychologists’ offices from overbearing parents than from over-encouraging parents. I think there’s a lot more broken families, a lot more distant children, a lot more daddy issues from over-pushing than from over-praising. So I’m evaluating where I am and where I want to be with Beth, with 2 young kids, with our young professional group, with our college students.
With the rest of the staff, with friends and family? What kind of person do I want to be? And at one end of the spectrum, I see where Dad was. On the other end of the spectrum, I see where Dave is. And I’m not on either end right now.
You probably aren’t either. But where are we headed? What direction do we even want to point ourselves?
Now, I want to head in Dave’s direction. I want to be growing in encouragement. I don’t want to be growing in criticism, even if it’s well-intentioned criticism that I’m intending to make someone or something better. I’d— instead of that, I’d rather be growing in encouragement. Now, I can hear your rebuttal.
But we need to make things better. We need to tell people they are wrong when they are wrong. I know you argue with me in your head. That’s great, keep doing that. I do the same thing when I hear somebody preach, so don’t worry.
Our text this morning has accounted for your rebuttal already. Verse 14, we urge you, brothers and sisters, warn those who are idle and disruptive. So, yes, when something is wrong, we need to call it out. But let’s look at this. In this little block of text, Paul gives us 9 commands how to treat each other.
8 of them are to encourage, help, live in peace, don’t pay back wrong for wrong, but do what is good. And then one of them is warn people when they are off track. So we have 8 I wonder what our ratio is. If you want to know, ask your kids, or your spouse, or your coworkers, or your friends. What is my encourage-to-criticize ratio?
How many encouraging things do I say for each critical thing that I say? Or maybe you don’t want to ask that. Because you already know the answer and you don’t want to hear it. And then even when a situation arrives where we need to say something critical, let’s look at this word. It says warn.
Some versions may even say admonish. It doesn’t say scold those who are in error. It doesn’t say fight in a passively aggressive manner. It doesn’t say give someone dirty looks until they come around to your point of view. It doesn’t say try to triangulate with other people to get this person to change.
It doesn’t say exclude the person from something just because you’re mad.
Warn, admonish. That means, one, go directly to the person, but two, warn has a compassionate element to it. It implies love and concern for the person. Listen, if we go to someone in need of correction filled with genuine love and concern, most likely that person— now, not always, there’s some bad apples out there, obviously— but most likely that person is going to feel loved and encouraged because that actually is our genuine motive underneath what we’re doing. I first saw this with my preaching professor when I was in seminary.
My mentor, my Yoda, my Master Splinter, Dr. Smith, or Doc, as many of us called him. If Dave is the personification of encouragement, Doc Smith is the personification of love and care. So just one example of how this played out: sermons that we preached in preaching class were recorded, and then we needed to watch them with Doc later on, one-on-one. So, for the 20-minute sermon that we had in class, it would take 2 or 3 hours for Doc to go through them with us, which that in itself right there is an act of love. Sitting in his office, little TV, he would pause it, talk about what just happened, rewind, show something again, giving 30 or 40 times more encouragement than correction.
And I remember one instance he paused it and looked at me and said, And he said, now what should you have done there? And I just kind of hung my head and I was like, I should have had a slower transition. And he lit up and he said, yeah, good, very good. So why don’t you do that? And I thought, okay, I’ll just take a little note here in case I’m ever in a similar situation.
I’ll do that differently next time. Right now. Why don’t you try that right now? Just start from about 30 seconds before and go through that transition again. Here in your office?
Yeah. Just the two of us? Yeah, stand up actually and do that. Okay, Yoda, there’s a whole bunch of awkward that’s about to happen, it’s just the two of us standing there, but I’ll do it. So I did it, and he acted like I had just done the most magnificent thing that had ever happened in the history of the world.
2 to 3 hours of that— correcting, teaching, helping, loving— I would walk out of that office feeling so loved, so supported, so cared for, I’d get back to our apartment, and my roommates would ask, so, how’d it go? I’d say, he tore my sermon apart for, like, 3 hours. It was awesome. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt better about something that I’ve done, actually. And I kept wondering, how did Doc Smith pull that off?
How did he give as many corrections as he did? Because I’d get back, and I’d be looking at my notes, and I’d be kind of just processing what happened, and I’m like, he told me to change everything. That’s what happened. And I feel great. How did he make me and everyone else feel so loved?
Because it wasn’t just me, this was everyone. Everybody had this experience with Dr. Smith. And after sitting under him for 3 years, here’s my brilliant conclusion. Really insightful. This is the magic that made it work.
It’s because he actually loved us.
That’s it. That was the whole secret. He was full. He was overflowing with love and concern for his students. So when he said something corrective, it still came across as loving and encouraging because that was what was actually in his heart.
One of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned in the last few years is whatever’s on the inside actually will come out. If you’re feeling loving and compassionate when you’re correcting someone, that’s going to come out. The person will probably receive love and compassion. But if you feel judgmental, that’s going to come out. It does not matter how many loving things you say.
It does not matter how much window dressing you wrap around your spite. If you’re thinking, I hate you. Gosh, I just hate your face. Could you please get out of here? If I could never see you again, that’d be— could you quit or fall off a cliff or something?
Oh, hi. Hi. Good to see you. I’m just so glad. How are you?
How’s your kids? Okay, you can’t hide it.
It’s going to come through. Different people say different things about the percentage of communication that is nonverbal. Maybe it’s different for different individuals because some of us have a better poker face than others of us, but whatever your percentage of nonverbal communication is, it is still higher than your percentage of verbal communication. People will know if you are authentically encouraging them and praising them. They will know what’s in your heart, which means, of course, We need to work on our hearts.
It can’t just be words that we change. This isn’t some kind of compliment sandwich managerial strategy. You’re familiar with that? The compliment sandwich? Your boss wants you to change something, so you get 2 compliments, then a criticism, then 2 more compliments.
Compliment sandwich. And you can see straight through it. You don’t feel encouraged at all. In fact, you might be a little insulted your boss tried to manage you by giving you criticism wrapped up in fake compliments. Compare that to someone like Dave, or someone like Dr. Smith, whose hearts are so full of compassion and acceptance and love that their normal operating procedure is encouragement.
And then, when they need to speak some kind of correction or warning, it’s just an extension of the encouragement they’ve been pouring out day after day, year after year. So the correction— and this is what’s so impressive about people like this— their correction actually feels encouraging. Which brings us to the question, which is always the question: How can we change our hearts?
How can we change our hearts to actually be caring, compassionate, encouraging, so that our baseline motive when we address someone is out of love and is not out of judgment or criticism? Or can we? Can we even change our hearts? Are we just— maybe we’re just fated to the genetic lottery. I am my father’s son.
So I will be a critical perfectionist. Sorry, Beth. Or can we do something?
As Christians, we have an amazing resource to do something, but it’s gonna sting to start with. You know where our criticism comes from? You know what’s at the root of our criticism?
Pride. We think we are better than the person we are criticizing or complaining about. We think we’re better. Even if we’re just being critical of an athlete who made a bad play, what do we say? You idiot!
How could you have taken a 3-point shot when you only needed 2 points to win? What were you thinking? See what you just revealed about yourself when you said that? But by speaking down to the athlete, you have positioned yourself higher. It’s, I’m better than you.
In this case, I’m smarter than you, dumb athlete. Or ladies, maybe guys too, but ladies, how could she wear that?
If you say that, you think you’re better. Than the person wearing that? Well, I don’t think I’m better. I just think she’s inappropriate.
Okay. You think, of course, that you are appropriate.
So you think you’re better.
Pride. That’s what’s in our hearts. It’s impossible to judge someone, to be critical, to complain about someone without looking down your nose at that person. Without making yourself superior, at least in the category that you are criticizing. It means we’ve forgotten the gospel.
It means we’ve forgotten we’re wretched sinners saved by grace alone, that we’re a huge mess and we aren’t better than anyone. It means we’ve forgotten 1 Timothy 1:15, Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the Some of us remembered it. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the worst, or chief, or foremost. That’s not was the worst, that’s am the worst. That’s not once upon a time I was the worst, but now I’ve got my act together.
No, that’s currently am the worst. The worst. We’ve forgotten that.
It’s hidden in this last thing Paul ties in here, verse 15. Make sure nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always strive to do what is good for each other. Wrong for wrong. You know what that is? That’s Old Testament law.
That’s eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. Which Paul would have had memorized in his former occupation as a Pharisee. Of course, he knew that scripture. Of course, he had eye for an eye in mind when he wrote this. He’s saying things are different now.
We don’t do eye for an eye anymore. Because when Jesus appeared, people began to look at the Old Testament differently. They began to see things like eye for an eye were to force foreshadow what Jesus was going to do for us. That in Christ, God wouldn’t take the deserved eye for an eye, but that God would pay back to us good for the wrong that we had paid to him. Now, God could pay back wrong for wrong.
He has a right to do that. God could pay us back what we deserve, which of course would mean all of us are in big trouble. But instead, Jesus stands in our place and takes the wrong that we deserve. God paid to Jesus wrong for our wrong. He paid to Jesus what we deserve.
So after Jesus, New Testament writers all realized, how could I take tooth for a tooth from anyone?
When Jesus paid what I owe to God, When I have received so much undeserved favor from God, how could I then turn and give anyone anything other than that?
We realize, I can’t look down on anyone.
I’m not in a higher position than anyone. I’m not better than anyone.
And I am praised by God. I am esteemed by him. I am adored by him. I, I have no room to criticize others because God didn’t levy the criticism on me that he could have. I can’t complain about others because God doesn’t complain about me.
He pays me back good for my wrong.
Let that sink down into your heart the same way that it sank down into the New Testament writers. It will begin to cure our pride and transform us into more encouraging people.
Let’s pray together. Father, thank you that you don’t complain about us.
Thank you that you esteem us, that you adore us, Lord. Thank you for sending Christ who paid what we owe. Lord, we pray that we would turn to him. We pray that we could encourage others with the encouragement that we have received from you, from the shower of praises that we have received from you. We pray those things in Jesus’ name, amen.
