Admonish the Undisciplined
1 Thessalonians 5v14a
25th February 2022
After teaching us not to speculate about the date of the second coming of Jesus Christ, Paul turned to teaching us how to live during the church age, in the time before Jesus returns. We've seen that Paul's top priorities for Christian living, as expressed to the Thessalonian church, are respecting our leaders and living in peace with each other.
But living in peace with each other is not enough. We could be at peace simply by never speaking to each other. Somebody once said you can have peace in a graveyard. Our love for each other has to be active. Doing no harm is not enough; we need to help each other, both in words and in actions.
James tells us that faith without action is dead (James 2:17). How can we see a brother or sister in Christ who needs help and just ignore it? And our words are important, too. I'll happily endorse the worldly saying, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all". But if you can't say something nice, then there's something wrong with you, isn't there? The next verse says:
1 Thessalonians 5:14
And we urge you, brothers, warn [admonish] those who are idle, encourage the timid,
help the weak, be patient with everyone.
Paul focusses on the need to help three kinds of Christian: the idle, the timid and the weak. These different kinds of Christian need different kinds of help. Not everybody has your strengths. Not everybody has your weaknesses. But we all have strengths, and we all have weaknesses. This week, we'll look at the first of these categories.
The Greek word translated "idle" here is "ataktos" which means disorderly, undisciplined, irresponsible. It refers to people who do what they feel like doing, rather than what should be done. It includes the idle (the NIV translation) but it's much wider than that. For example, people who stay home when they should be at work, doing what I believe is now called "pulling a sicky", or people who could get a job but choose not to, or people who, say, get an office job and spend half the day playing minesweeper or spider patience on the computer, or chatting by the coffee machine.
In church, we could perhaps say that ataktos people are the ones who say they'll do something and then don't do it. People who could come to the meeting but can't be bothered, people who chatter during worship, people who could visit the sick but would rather watch the cricket. We all need leisure time, but there is a balance to be struck, and those who choose leisure over service too much of the time are ataktos – idle, lazy, selfish. Some Christians are like that.
We're called to warn, or admonish, them. This is the same word, noutheteō, that we looked at two weeks ago. As we also saw last week, our leaders are required to admonish us, so perhaps as a pastor it's time I stepped up. Here goes. All of this is totally obvious, I hope, but I'm just giving a few examples.
If you could get a job but prefer to remain unemployed, you will probably always be poor, unfulfilled and lonely. If you're lazy at work, you're unlikely to get a promotion. If you don't work at school, you'll probably get bad exam results, and that will probably result in you getting a low paid job. All this, I hope, is obvious to us all.
Moving on to our church life, the life and ministry of the church depends on every one of us. If you don't come regularly to meetings, you won't encourage and support the other members. The life and ministry of the church will suffer. You will probably always be spiritually poor, unfulfilled and lonely. Again, I hope that's all obvious.
If you continually promise to do things and then fail to do them, you will inevitably get a reputation for being unreliable. People won't include you in their plans, because they'll expect you to let them down.
If you're always complaining, people won't want to talk to you. Well, not unless they're troublemakers. If you constantly tell people how poor you are and hint that they should give you money, they'll start to avoid you. If you try to boss people around, they'll begin to wish you weren't coming. If you gossip about people, they won't want to tell you how they're doing.
All this is so general, and so obvious, that I don't expect I'm bringing you much revelation. I'm just trying to say that admonishment is warning, not criticising. It's not saying, "You've got a bad attitude". It's saying, "If you persist in this behaviour, negative consequences will result".
When we talk one-on-one, there may be something worth saying, something that applies to an individual, something less obvious than the examples I've given, that's in the nature of admonishment. And when brothers and sisters, and particularly our leaders, admonish us, we would do well to listen carefully.
Each one of us is called by God to pull our weight. Some of us are sick, or elderly, or have intense careers, or several children, or some other aspect of their lives prevents them doing as much as others. Also, all of us are useless at some things. I can't do carpentry, or paint, or sing opera, or lots of other things. But I hope I can write, and preach, and pray, to some level of competence.
We all have some time, and some energy, and all of us are good at some things. We're all called to do what we can to further the kingdom of God, to build the church, to reach the lost, to help others. The ataktos people are too wrapped up in themselves to pull their weight, and they need to be lovingly admonished.
When you admonish them, do it nicely, gently, lovingly. Try to win your brother, not alienate him.