Meeting Together

Someone Needs You There

“And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together… but encouraging one another.”
Hebrews 10:24–25

We all know business can be a lonely place.  We make decisions, carry responsibility, manage people, deal with uncertainty and carry worries that we cannot easily share with those around us. And when life gets particularly busy, one of the first things we are tempted to sacrifice is time with other people.

Hebrews tells us to do the opposite.

“Let us consider how we may spur one another on… not giving up meeting together… but encouraging one another.”

Notice how often the language is “one another.”

Christian fellowship isn’t simply about what I get from attending. It is about what God might give to somebody else through me.

There will be months when I arrive needing encouragement. Perhaps business is difficult, a decision is weighing heavily on me, relationships are strained, or I simply need somebody to pray with me.

But there will also be months when everything is going well.  And perhaps those are the months when it is most tempting to think, “I’m really busy. I don’t particularly need the meeting this month.”

But somebody else might need you.

Paul describes something similar in Romans 1:12 when he talks about being “mutually encouraged by each other’s faith.” Even Paul doesn’t imagine himself simply arriving as the expert with something to give. Christian community involves giving and receiving.  There is something similar in Paul’s instructions to Titus. In Titus 2, those who have travelled further along the road are expected to encourage and teach those coming behind them. What we have received isn’t intended to stop with us.

·      Perhaps someone encouraged you when your business was struggling.

·      Perhaps someone prayed with you when you couldn’t see the way forward.

·      Perhaps someone shared an experience that helped you avoid a mistake.

·      Perhaps somebody simply listened when you needed to talk.

There comes a point when we realise:  I am now that person for somebody else.

Paul puts it very simply in Galatians 6:2:

“Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfil the law of Christ.”

Sometimes I carry yours. Sometimes you carry mine. That requires us to be present.

In his 1961 inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy famously challenged Americans:

“Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”

Perhaps there is an echo of that challenge in how we think about Christian fellowship.

Instead of asking, “Do I need the meeting this month?”, perhaps we should ask, “Does someone at the meeting need me this month?”

That changes the question completely.

We stop thinking of fellowship primarily as something we attend when we need something and begin to see our presence as something we offer to others.

Of course, the great objection for businesspeople is time.  There is always another email, another meeting, another customer, another problem. John Mark Comer writes about what he calls The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, drawing on Dallas Willard’s warning that hurry is one of the great enemies of the spiritual life. Bill Hybels captured the same paradox in the title of his book Too Busy Not to Pray.

Perhaps we could extend that thought:  We may sometimes be too busy not to meet.

If our lives are so busy that we no longer have time to pray with others, listen to others, encourage others or allow others to encourage us, perhaps the problem isn’t the meeting. Perhaps something has become disordered in our understanding of what really matters.

So once a month, we make space.

Not for another networking event.  Not primarily to find customers, make contacts or generate business.   We come together at our Hubs as people who happen to carry the particular privileges, pressures and responsibilities of business.

·      We talk.

·      We listen.

·      We pray.

·      We encourage.

·      We carry one another’s burdens.

And sometimes we discover that the experience God has taken us through is precisely the experience somebody else needs to hear about.

So come when you need encouragement.

But perhaps even more importantly, come when you don’t.

Because that may be the month when somebody else needs yours.

Prayer

Lord, thank you for the people you place around us.

Forgive us when busyness convinces us that we can manage alone. Help us to recognise that Christian fellowship is not simply something we receive, but something to which we contribute.

Give us the humility to ask for help when we need it, the generosity to offer help when others need it, and the wisdom to make space in busy lives to listen, encourage and pray.

Show us whose burden we might help carry today.

Amen.

- Ken Sharp.