The Work of Building Up

Therefore exhort one another, and build each other up, even as you also do. (1 Thessalonians 5:11, WEB)

Paul ends a section of hard teaching with a soft, practical charge. Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing. The phrase build one another up suggests slow, deliberate work, the kind a man does with his hands over time, stone laid on stone, nothing finished in a single afternoon. It is not a single dramatic rescue that everyone remembers but a steady adding to another man, a word here and a word there that leaves him a little stronger than you found him, week after week, until the sum of it becomes something solid.

Men in this fight tend to be well practiced at tearing themselves down. The inner voice after a fall is fluent in accusation and never seems to run out of material, and a man can spend hours being demolished by his own thoughts without any help from anyone. What is often missing is the other voice, the brother who builds, who reminds you what is true about you when you cannot remember it yourself, who speaks against the accusation with something steadier. That kind of encouragement is not flattery, which would be useless, and it is not pretending the sin did not happen, which would be a lie. It is the patient labor of helping a man believe he is not beyond hope, that God is not finished with him, that the fall is not the whole story of who he is.

Notice Paul's last clause, just as you are doing, an assumption that this is already the ordinary business of brothers and not some heroic extra. It is meant to be normal, the everyday work of the men around you. Look for one man to build up today with a true and specific word, not a vague nicety but something real you have actually seen in him. Ask God to make your presence something that leaves other men stronger than they were before you spoke.