Paul’s Letter to the Gauls (Galatians) – Chapter 6

Had a sister in the church who lived in rage. She threw things. She had fits. She screamed. She dissolved three houses made up of nothing but single sisters. And they could not live with her. We readjust and put somebody somewhere else. On one or two occasions, I got really, really brave and I talked to her, just a little bit, and here suddenly was sweetness and light. Her voice cooed like a dog’s. Her face got angelic. I’m telling you, this is the way it happened. She would retell that story, make it sound so simple and uncomplicated, and say that everything was fine now and it would never happen again. And that’s the unreal world that she probably lives in today. One day, I finally got another brother to confront her, but I was sitting there. We sat at a table. This was after four years of this going on daily. When finally confronted, that’s something I hate to do. I rarely do it. I’d rather be horsewhipped. On that day, she packed her bags and left us. That was how deep her commitment to the Lord was.

Now, I really am sorry that I’m not a Christian counselor, and I cannot list for you more of the things that take place, but let me talk to you about some more general things. And that is just some sister who’s got a baby, and she’s just at home all day, and she’s just sad and heartbroken, and her self-image is going through the floor. A brother who’s gone into four dry meetings in a row, and he wants to leave here; he can’t handle this anymore. A couple who are out of a job can’t find a better one, and they’re looking everywhere, and day by day, they get more and more discouraged. Those are real things that happen to every one of us, and you don’t know what to do. You do not know how to conduct yourself. You do not know how to relate to that person when you walk up to the door. You don’t know what to say to them. Last week, you encouraged them. This week, they still don’t have a job. This week, you encourage them. Next week, they still don’t have a job. About the fifth or sixth week, you don’t know anything to say, but they are in the church, and they are your brothers and sisters, and you love them, and you are hurting with them, and what do you do? What does the church of Jesus Christ do? These are real things, and we live with them.

Now, can you help me with some more chronic liars and people who exaggerate all the time? What’s that, Babs? The eternal complainer. Critical people. Gossips keep coming. Then, one day, suddenly, a divorce. You never knew the gun was loaded, just like that. Help me some more. Come on. You deal with problems every week. You can’t figure out how to classify them, and most of them are unclassifiable. The death of a spouse or child. Okay. A death can be terribly devastating to everybody, and then there’s at least a year of ministry to that soul or to the…Boy, oh boy. Somebody really gets sick, and it stays and stays and stays. That’s right. And every once in a while, somebody goes bonkers. Just plain old goes off the deep end. Well, Gene, Jiminy Crickets, is that what church life is like? Well, no, my dear friend, that is not what church life is like. That’s what life is like. That’s right, and it is, and you ask any secular counselor or any Christian counselor who has people streaming through their offices constantly, and they’ll tell you that life is not what it looks like on the streets of Memphis, Tennessee. It’s not like that.

Now, you will not be in the church. Therefore, all you will have are three other families who are your friends, and you will not see the world. You do not see a microcosm of it. You only have three or four friends. All you know is that they are the most plagued people in the world, cursed with bad luck, and you think you have three friends with more bad luck than anybody else on earth. But when you get into the church, you have a microcosm of the entire planet. We’re not having one out of three divorces because people are easy to get along with one another. We are complex creatures, and church life should be able to address all our needs. Maybe not resolve them all, but we ought to be able to address them.

And if you’re thinking about coming to Atlanta, I can tell you one thing for sure above all else: don’t come if you’re unwilling to be counseled by a professional Christian counselor. But Gene, we don’t believe in that. We are 50 in Portland, and I think, without counting, we have four people with master’s degrees in counseling. We are 50 people, and we keep all four of them hopping. I don’t mean I do. I play no role in this whatsoever. We got three or four people, two others excellently trained, equivalent in their abilities to men who are well-trained counselors. They’re not out there with their shingle out. These are Christians who need to go to someone for help, and they’re not there as Christian counselors. They are brothers and sisters who have a little more wisdom than the rest of us do, and it is upon that basis that they are approached. But they stay busy. They are the most tired people in the church. They come home, and almost every evening they do something and reach out to a needy person.

Now, I don’t know what your impression is, but I’m telling you that this isn’t a sign of something terrible. That is a sign of something wonderful. We are seeking to reach out. I am a little slow and a little thick when I give this as a personal confession. My own feeling has always been that…I’ll take Jamie. He’s the first person I saw. Here’s Jamie. Jamie’s got a problem. Jamie comes to me. We talk, or I go to him. We sat down. We talk. We work through Jaime’s problem, and praise God, the Lord has a victory in Jaime. Wonderful. That’s great. Now I have to…I’m going to have time for Drew if Drew ever has a problem. Then I wake up to the fact that this isn’t really true with Jamie; we didn’t just finish something. We may have just started it, but the truth is, Jamie will need care in the church of God for the rest of his life. Oh, he’s sort of weak. Yeah, that’s true. He’s sort of needy.

Yeah, that’s true. But so is everybody else in the church, and it’s taken me a long time to realize that a caring atmosphere and a caring ministry are not seasonal, and they’re not for one person some of the time. It’s for all of us, all of the time. It’s taken me 20 years, and I’ve always been…I’ve leaned toward this way in my ministry all this time. I’ve been far more interested in meeting the needs of God’s people, in every way possible, than most people are, but I am slowly, slowly coming to understand that this must be 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I have come to realize that there are some people, not all of us, but there are some of God’s people in the house of God, who need almost every week to sit down with two or three friends and tell their friends where they are. I’ve always thought that was kind of dumb and that that person needed to get over that.

This is a true confession for me. I have come to realize that that ought to be part of the house of God, and that there are, especially sisters. I don’t want to do this with my sisters because brothers are this way, too. Still, sisters have to stay home more than brothers do, generally speaking. Sometimes sisters really need to meet with a small group of people every week who hold them up and hold one another up, and there are brothers…I want you to know I’ve never been sympathetic to that. I’ve always looked at that as some sort of illness. There are brothers and their wives who need to talk through, almost by the week, about where they are and have the care of a few other people. I apologize to you. I apologize for not having experienced that need, so I haven’t been able to identify with it. That doesn’t make it go away. And I want to say to you brothers who don’t have that need, don’t look down on brothers and sisters who do; they may be smarter than we are. They may be a lot smarter than we are.

That’s my introduction to this message. It may not be the most edifying thing you ever heard, but brother, it’s as real as grass and dirt and air and sunshine. It’s real, and it is in the church in Galatia. Now, how do you address that? With a great deal of wisdom. I’m going to stop for a second. …not people I personally know or have had the experience of living in common together, which I’m never going to do again. How many of the rest of you have lived in common? Will you raise your hand? In fact, would you do me a favor? Stand up, would you? You’ve had a long experience living in common with many people. Okay? Do you witness to what I am saying about the enormous needs of God’s people? Yes or no? Do you? Without a doubt. Was it bigger than you ever dreamed? Was it, Babs? Definitely bigger than you ever dreamed. Thank you, and it’s not because you’re a Christian, nor is it because you’re living in common. It’s because you begin to see it. What did Paul do? What did Paul say? What’s in chapter six? And this is the first piece of Christian literature ever written. Was it there? May I go on? I’ll do it very briefly, but we got a word here.

Audience: Something that happened to me. When my wife had our first baby, Justin was born prematurely, and I don’t know what effect it had on my wife because I’m not a physician, but my wife had more problems than you can imagine. She just had her whole system broken down, and it caused thousands of dollars’ worth of tests to run on her, and no doctor ever figured out what was wrong with her. But she had every bone in her body ache. She was bleeding up until the 13th week after she had the baby. I can’t tell you, it was just unbelievable, the things that would go on. She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t hold food down. Everything was terrible. The baby wasn’t taking the breast correctly, and he had to be fed at all hours of the night; he was restless, as if he didn’t want to sleep. And of course, because my wife was in such pain, she couldn’t take care of the baby, so I had to stay up every single night and take care of that little guy. After about five weeks of that, one night I got up, it was like 3:30 in the morning, and the baby was crying. All I wanted to do was stop that baby crying so I could get back to sleep, so I could get up at 5:30 and go to work.

I looked at that child, and I turned to the Lord, and something had to happen. I was ready to strangle that kid, and something in me broke when I gave that to the Lord. The Lord, I tell you what He made me understand, that the Lord’s nature is to love not from someone’s strength but to love their very weaknesses. There’s something about the frailty of my firstborn lying there crying and helpless and defenseless and hungry. He couldn’t sleep, which made me love him for the fact that he was crying. I don’t know how to put it any simpler than that. When that happened, it broke me, and I picked him up, put him in my arms. We just walked around the living room until he fell asleep, one hour later or so, and every night from that moment, I loved that boy because of his weaknesses. I loved my wife because of her weaknesses, not because of her strengths. That turned my life around for my family.

Praise the Lord. Alright, I will start there. That is verse one of chapter 6. Brethren, even if a man is called in any trespass, you who are spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness, looking to yourselves, lest you too be tempted. And this is the matter of the weaker and the stronger. Now, he said that to a church. He starts with the word “brethren,” which covers brothers and sisters; it was everyone there. He has just been talking about grace as opposed to rules and regulations. He has confined the flesh to a totally different place. Now he says you’re totally free. But in case there is one who goes into the flesh, you who are spiritual, restore. I’m simply going to say that the church should be in the ministry or in the business of being able to restore. Now, it is so difficult to do that. I can tell you what we will do instead. We will watch that brother go do that thing, then sit around and talk about it. Did you know what happened? No, I didn’t. I don’t mean gossip, talk about it. I mean, talk about it like what on earth do we do? And often we do nothing.