Devotional 140: The Duty of Saints: Mutual Love and Edification

The Confession Read

2. Saints by profession are bound to maintain an holy fellowship and communion in the worship of God, and in performing such other spiritual services as tend to their mutual edification; as also in relieving each other in outward things, according to their several abilities and necessities. Which communion, as God offereth opportunity, is to be extended unto all those who, in every place, call upon the name of the Lord Jesus.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 26, Section 2

Introduction

When the barley ripened in the fields of Israel, the law of God laid a peculiar restraint upon the reaper's hand. He might cut the standing grain and bind it into sheaves and carry it to the threshing floor, but he might not reap to the very border of his field, nor gather the gleanings of his harvest, nor turn back for a sheaf forgotten in the field. The corners were to be left standing; the scattered ears were to lie where they fell; the forgotten sheaf was not to be fetched. And why? Because all of it belonged to the poor, to the stranger, to the fatherless, and to the widow. The field was never the reaper's alone. A hidden share of every harvest was already claimed for the needy, and the man who swept his field clean to the last ear had robbed the poor of what God had reserved for them. Hold that picture in the mind, for it is the controlling image of the sentence before us, and it reaches further than a field of barley. We come now to the second movement of this chapter, and the divines have something almost startling to tell us. In the first section they opened to us the root of the communion of saints, the union of every believer with Jesus Christ by his Spirit and by faith, and out of that union the binding of all believers to one another in love. But a root that is never seen above the ground is soon mistaken for nothing at all, and so the divines now turn from the invisible to the visible, from the reality to the obligation, from what the saints are to what the saints owe. The word that governs this section is that small, solemn verb, "bound." The saints "are bound to maintain" a holy fellowship. Communion, we are being taught, is not a pleasant sentiment to be enjoyed when it suits us; it is a duty to be discharged, a debt that every believer owes to every other, reaching down into the most ordinary things of life, into bread and clothing and a roof against the cold. Notice first the change of phrase. The last section spoke of all saints united to Christ; this one speaks of "saints by profession." The invisible communion embraces every one of the elect, known to God alone; but the visible duties that follow are laid upon every man and woman who has named the name of Christ before the world. What the divines mean is this: if your mouth confesses Jesus as Lord, the whole weight of this section falls upon you. You are not permitted to stand apart and enjoy a private portion while the rest of the field goes untended, for you are a member of a body, and a member has duties that cannot be shed while the body lives. And what are those duties? The divines name three, and they name them in an order that is full of wisdom. First, the saints are bound to maintain holy fellowship in the worship of God, gathered together before his face. Second, they are bound to perform such spiritual services as tend to their mutual edification, building one another up in faith and holiness. Third, they are bound to relieve one another in outward things, according to their several abilities and necessities. Here is the gleaning field again. The communion of saints is not an affair of the spirit only, of warm thoughts and kind feelings; it is an affair of the purse and the pantry, of the coat given to the shivering brother and the bread set before the hungry sister. And then, lest any man narrow the field to his own little circle, the divines add that this communion, as God offers opportunity, is to be extended to all those who in every place call upon the name of the Lord Jesus. The corners of the field reach to the ends of the earth.

Scripture Foundation

The first duty is mutual edification, and no text states it with more force than the apostle's exhortation in the epistle to the Hebrews. "Let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works: not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching" (Hebrews 10:24-25). The word rendered "provoke" is one of the most surprising in the New Testament. It is paroxusmos, the root from which our English word "paroxysm" descends, and in ordinary Greek it means a sharpening, a whetting, a violent stirring up. It is the word for a sudden fit of fever, for the flash of anger, for the spur of a goad. Yet the apostle takes this fierce word and sanctifies it. He sets it in the service of love. He would have the saints so sharpen one another, so spur and stir and provoke one another, that love and good works break out among them as sparks fly from a flint. The picture is not of a polite circle of acquaintances exchanging pleasantries; it is of iron sharpening iron, of one blade whetted against another until both grow keen. Consider one another, he says; keep your eye upon your brother's soul; study him, watch him, know him, that you may speak the word and do the deed that will set him blazing in love and labouring in good works. Nor is this provocation to be left to chance and warm moods; it has a home in the assembly. The apostle binds the exhortation to the gathering of the saints, for it is there, face to face, under the Word and in the mutual presence of the body, that the sharpening happens. The assembling of ourselves together is not a convenience but a command, and the believer who habitually forsakes it has cut himself off from the very place where the paroxusmos of love is kindled. Mark the reason the apostle gives: "so much the more, as ye see the day approaching." The darker the world grows and the nearer the return of Christ, the more urgent the mutual ministry of the saints. The blade that is never whetted against its fellow grows dull, and the believer who shuns the assembly forfeits the very whetstone of his love. The second duty is the relief of outward things, and here Paul gives the church its standing rule. Writing to the saints at Rome, he sets down the plain command: "Distributing to the necessity of saints; given to hospitality" (Romans 12:13). Two duties lie folded together in that short verse, and both belong to the section before us. To distribute to the necessity of saints is to search out the need of the brethren and to meet it, to hold the goods of this world with an open hand, ready to part with them when a saint is in want. And hospitality, the love of strangers, is the same spirit turned toward the unknown and the travelling believer, the brother who arrives at the door with no claim upon us but the name he bears. The apostle sets these duties among the ordinary graces of the Christian life, alongside the love that is without dissimulation and the rejoicing in hope, as though to teach us that the relief of the saints is not an occasional kindness but the very texture of a godly life. How that relief is to be measured, the church of Antioch has taught us by her example, and her example is recorded for our instruction. When a prophet foretold a great dearth through the whole world, "then the disciples, every man according to his ability, determined to send relief unto the brethren which dwelt in Judaea" (Acts 11:29). Here is the divines' phrase, "according to their several abilities," already at work in the first generation of the church. Not all gave the same amount, for not all had the same abundance; but all gave according to what they had, and the whole church was stirred to a common act of mercy. The rich gave much because they had much; the poor gave little because they had little; and both gave with the same willing heart, so that the famine-stricken brethren in Judaea received a relief that was the offering of the whole body. This is the communion of saints in outward things: not a leveling of all men to an equal state, but a bearing of every man's burden according to every man's strength. But the deepest word of all on this matter is found in Paul's letter to the Corinthians, and it is a word that shows us how closely the relief of the saints is bound to the very essence of communion. Speaking of the contribution for the poor saints at Jerusalem, Paul writes that the Macedonians "praying us with much intreaty that we would receive the gift, and take upon us the fellowship of the ministering to the saints" (2 Corinthians 8:4). The word "fellowship" here is the same word the last section taught us to know, koinōnia, and its presence in this verse is a revelation. The relief of the saints in outward things is not a mere act of charity added on to the communion of the saints as an afterthought; it is itself that communion, expressed in silver and bread. When the believer shares his goods with a needy brother, he is not doing something in addition to fellowship; he is doing fellowship. The purse is one of the members of the body, and the money that passes from the hand of the wealthy saint to the hand of the poor saint is the blood of the body moving, as surely as a word of comfort or a prayer. To be a saint is to be a minister, and the ministering to the saints is fellowship in its most concrete form. Beneath all these duties lies the one great aim toward which every gift and grace is directed, and Paul names it in a passage that carries the whole doctrine to its summit. Speaking of Christ the Head, he writes that "from whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love" (Ephesians 4:16). The word for edifying is oikodomē, and it is a builder's word. It means the raising of a house, the setting of stone upon stone, the slow and patient construction of an edifice that rises a little higher with every course laid. This is what the communion of saints is for: the building of the body. Every joint supplies something; every member, from the least to the greatest, carries a stone and sets it in the wall; and the whole body grows, not by the labour of a few, but by the contribution of all, until the edifice of Christ is complete. And mark the mortar that binds every stone: love. The body edifies itself in love, or it does not edify itself at all. There is no true building where there is no love, for gifts without love are the clanging of a cymbal, and a body that is not knit together in love is not a body but a heap of stones.

What the Divines Meant

The divines were writing against a Christianity that had learned to say the Creed and then to live as though it meant nothing. Men would rise in the assembly and confess the communion of saints, and then return to a life in which no saint received a crumb of their bread or an hour of their time. Against this contradiction the divines set their sentence, and the very first word is a word of obligation: the saints "are bound." Communion is not left to inclination, nor an invitation to be declined as the mood moves; it is a bond laid upon every professor of the faith by the very fact of his profession. To say "I believe in the communion of saints" and then to live in isolation and self-interest is not a lapse of charity merely; it is a lie, a false confession, the taking of a vow that is broken as soon as it is spoken. The phrase "saints by profession" is the divines' careful instrument, and it repays the closest attention. They knew well the distinction between the invisible church and the visible, between the whole company of the elect whom God knows and the whole company of professors whom men may see. The duties of this section cannot be discharged toward the elect as such, for no man can read the secret things of the heart; they are discharged toward those who profess the faith, toward the visible communion of the church. And the divines' point is that profession itself creates obligation. The man who names the name of Christ has thereby joined himself to the visible body of Christ, and he is bound to every other member of that body by duties that he cannot renounce while he retains the name. Turn then to the three duties themselves, and observe how comprehensive they are. The first is the maintenance of "holy fellowship and communion in the worship of God." Here the divines place the gathered worship first, and they do so because worship is the fountain of all the rest. It is before the face of God, in the assembly where his Word is preached and his ordinances administered and his name called upon, that the saints meet as saints and know one another as members of one body. The worship of God is the great centring act of communion, the act in which the many are gathered into one and the scattered members are drawn to their Head. He who would have communion with the saints but despises the worship of the saints has cut the nerve of the very thing he professes to love. The second duty is "such other spiritual services as tend to their mutual edification." The divines deliberately say "such other," for they would not have the worship of God stand alone as though it exhausted communion. Beyond the assembly there is a whole range of spiritual ministry by which the saints build one another up: the word of counsel, the exhortation to faithfulness, the rebuke of sin, the comfort of the afflicted, the prayer of one for another, the holy conference in which the things of God are spoken of heart to heart. All these are spiritual services, services of the soul to the soul, and they all serve the one end that the apostle names: edification, oikodomē, the building of the body in love. The divines would have us see that the church is not built by sermons alone. It is built by ten thousand unseen acts, by the word spoken at the right moment, by the letter written, by the visit made, by the sin faithfully rebuked and the sorrow gently comforted, each one a stone set in the wall. The third duty is "relieving each other in outward things, according to their several abilities and necessities." Here the divines descend from the spiritual to the material, and they do so without apology. The communion of saints touches the body as well as the soul, the hunger as well as the unbelief, the winter coat as well as the cold heart. And the phrase "according to their several abilities and necessities" is the divines' guard against two errors at once. Against the error of the idle rich, who have ability but will not feel necessity, it stands as a command: your abundance is God's provision for your brother's want. Against the error of the presumptuous, who would make all things common and level every man to the same estate, it stands as a check: the duty is proportioned, ability answering necessity, not an abolition of property or a confusion of estates. The wealthy saint and the poor saint remain what they are; but the one is bound to relieve the other, each according to what he has and what his brother lacks. Then comes the phrase that lifts the eye from the local congregation to the ends of the earth: "as God offereth opportunity, is to be extended unto all those who, in every place, call upon the name of the Lord Jesus." Two things are taught in this closing clause. The first is the providential hinge, "as God offereth opportunity." The communion of saints is not a demand that a man relieve every need in the world at once, an impossibility that would crush the most willing spirit; it is a duty that God himself orders by his providence, opening this door and closing that, setting this needy brother in our path and withholding the other from our sight. We are stewards, and the opportunities are God's appointments. The second thing is the catholic extent of the duty. The communion is not confined to one congregation, one nation, or one denomination; it is to be extended to all who in every place call upon the name of the Lord Jesus. The same confession of the same Lord is the token by which one saint recognises another in a strange land, and the duty of relief and edification crosses every boundary of tribe and tongue. The field is the whole world, and the corners are left standing in every land.

Theological Depth

The teachers of the Reformed church did not pass over this section lightly, for they saw in it the practical heart of the gospel, and each pressed its truth in a direction of his own. Calvin made the gathered worship of the saints the very form in which communion exists, and he did so with a vividness that has shaped the church ever since. The church, he taught, is the school of God: it is there, in the assembly gathered under the Word, that the children of God are taught, trained, and brought to maturity, and no man can grow in grace who sets himself outside the schoolroom. God has willed, Calvin insisted, to have his children gathered, to nourish them by a common ministry, and to form them together, so that a believer who imagines he may learn of Christ while refusing the company and the teaching of Christ's church is like a pupil who imagines he may be educated while standing in the street. And because the school is one, the gifts of the Spirit are given to be shared within it. Calvin would not hear of a Christianity that is fed and warmed in solitude; the very means of grace, the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments, are ordinances of a gathered people, and the man who will not be gathered has, in Calvin's account, no part in them. The worship of God is the centre around which the communion of the saints is ordered, and to leave the assembly is to leave the communion. Watson, who never left a doctrine until he had found its warmest application, takes up the duty of mutual edification and reduces it to a list of graces that any believer may practise. He would have the saints perform their spiritual services to one another in specific and deliberate ways: by prayer for one another, by sympathy with one another, by holy conference one with another, by admonition of the erring, and by comfort of the afflicted. It is a homely list, and it is meant to be, for Watson knew that edification does not live in abstractions but in particulars. Prayer, he would say, is the first and greatest of these services, for he who prays for his brother does him good at the very throne of grace. Sympathy is the second, the entering into another's sorrow so that the burden is halved by being shared. Conference is the third, the speaking of the things of God between believers in such a manner that both are warmed. Admonition is the fourth, the faithful and loving warning to a brother whose steps are sliding, for he who will not admonish a sinning brother hates him in his heart. And comfort is the fifth, the speaking of the promises of God to a heavy soul. These five, Watson teaches, are the ordinary instruments by which the body builds itself up in love, and the believer who is slack in all five has not yet begun to keep the communion he confesses. Owen, whose eye was always upon the inner life of the body, saw that the whole communion of saints is carried upon love, and he stated the matter in words that leave no room for doubt. The communion of saints, he taught, begins in love and ends in love; it is love that joins the members, love that moves them to their mutual duties, and love that makes every service of the body a service acceptable to God. "This mutual love," he wrote, "is that wherein the communion of saints doth consist." It is a startling sentence, and it cuts to the root of the matter: where this mutual love is wanting, the communion of saints is wanting, whatever professions may be made, for the communion is not a structure that love decorates but the very substance of love itself. And Owen pointed to a text as the crown of the whole doctrine: the apostle's description of the body in Ephesians, "maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love." This, Owen judged, is the most eminent description of the communion of saints in all the Scripture, for it gathers into one sentence the Head who supplies, the members who minister, and the love by which the whole is knit together and built up. If we would know what the communion of saints is, Owen would say, we need look no further: it is the body edifying itself in love. Hodge brings to the section his gift for clear division, and he lays the three duties before us as three lines of one obligation. The saints, he observes, are bound to communion in worship, in the mutual edification of the spiritual life, and in the relief of outward necessities; and these three are not three separate duties but three forms of one duty, the duty of love to the body of Christ. He then presses the closing clause as the divines themselves would have pressed it. The communion, Hodge insists, is not to be shut up within the walls of a single congregation; it is to be extended to every saint of every nation and every evangelical communion, to all who in every place call upon the name of the Lord Jesus. The name of Christ, confessed and honoured, is the bond that unites believers across every distance, and the duties of edification and relief follow that name wherever it is sincerely called upon. Hodge would have us lift our eyes from our own little fellowship to the whole church of God scattered throughout the world, and to feel ourselves debtors to saints we have never seen, in lands whose language we do not speak, simply because they and we call upon the same Lord. Shaw supplies the section's sharpest and most serviceable observation, and it is worth pausing upon because it welds the two halves of the duty together. The relief of the saints in outward things, he notes, is expressly called "fellowship" in the Scripture, for the apostle speaks of "the fellowship of the ministering to the saints." The point is not a matter of words only. It is the divines' own teaching made visible: the sharing of goods is not an appendix to the communion of saints but a part of its very essence, so that the man who is ready with a prayer but slow with a purse has only half understood what communion is. And Shaw lays his finger with equal care upon the providential hinge, "as God offereth opportunity." The duty of relief is real and binding, but it is a duty that God himself administers, setting before each believer the particular needs that his providence has appointed for him to meet. We are not called to relieve every need, which is God's own work and not ours; we are called to relieve the needs that God brings to our door. Shaw's exposition here both binds the conscience and calms it, laying a duty the believer may discharge with joy rather than the despair of one who has mistaken stewardship for the government of the world.

Puritan Application

First, let this section search your conscience about the assembly. The divines place the worship of God first among the duties of communion, and they do so because there is no communion without it. Ask yourself, then, whether you are a constant and willing worshipper, or whether the assembly has become for you an occasional thing, attended when convenient and forsaken when not. The believer who can lightly forgo the gathering of the saints is cutting the thread that binds him to the body, and the thread, once cut, is not easily tied again. The school of God has its hours, and the scholar who is seldom in his place will soon forget what he once learned. Let the assembling of the saints be the fixed and joyful centre of your week, and count it not a burden but a privilege, for it is there that your Head feeds you and your brethren sharpen you and the body of Christ is edified in love. Second, take up the duty of edification, and do not leave it to the minister alone. It is the peculiar temptation of a comfortable age to suppose that edification is the work of the pulpit, and that the ordinary believer has nothing to do but to receive. The apostle knew nothing of such a division, and neither did the divines. Every member is a minister, and every saint is bound to perform spiritual services for the edification of the rest. Pray for your brethren by name; speak a word of comfort to the sorrowing; hold holy conference with the zealous; and do not shrink from the harder service of admonition, for the friend who will tell you of your fault is a truer friend than he who flatters you. The body grows by the contribution of every member, and the member that supplies nothing is a member that has forgotten why it was joined to the body at all. Third, open your hand to the relief of the saints, and remember that this too is communion. There is a false spirituality that would make religion a thing of the soul alone and despise the ministry of bread and clothing, but the divines will have none of it. The communion of saints reaches down into the very necessities of the body, and the believer who is ready with a prayer and slow with a purse has not yet learned what fellowship is. Search out the needy among the brethren, and meet their necessity according to your ability, and do it cheerfully, for God loveth a cheerful giver. And do not think that this duty is for the rich alone; the church of Antioch gave according to every man's ability, and the widow's two mites were more than all the abundance of the wealthy. Where there is a willing heart, there is a gift, and where there is love, no gift is too small to be accepted of God. Fourth, let the communion of saints be catholic, and love the brethren you have never seen. It is easy to love the saints of our own congregation, those who worship beside us and think as we think; but the divines extend the communion to all who in every place call upon the name of the Lord Jesus, and the apostle would have us do good to all men, especially to them that are of the household of faith. The name of Christ is the countersign by which one saint recognises another across every boundary of nation and tongue and denomination, and where that name is sincerely confessed, there is a brother and a debt. Pray for the persecuted church in lands you will never visit, and give to the relief of saints whose faces you will never see, and let your love be as wide as the field of God, which leaves its corners standing in every land. A sectarian love is a shrunken thing, unworthy of the catholic faith we confess. Fifth, receive all this as a word of comfort as well as a word of command, for the duty that binds you is the proof that you are not alone. The reason you are bound to worship, to edify, and to relieve is that you are a member of a body, and a body is the very opposite of solitude. The same sentence that lays these duties upon you assures you that there are saints laid under the same duties toward you, that your necessity is their appointment, and that your sorrow is their burden. The communion of saints is not a one-way street but a common life, and the hand that ministers to you is as much a part of it as the hand by which you minister. Rejoice, then, in the fellowship of the redeemed, and let the doctrine of this section be not a yoke but a joy, the glad discovery that you are joined, in worship and in edification and in the relief of outward things, to a body that spans the world and reaches to heaven, and that the Lord Jesus Christ is its Head.

Prayer

O Lord Jesus Christ, Thou who art the Head of Thy body the church, and who hast bound us to Thyself by Thy Spirit and by faith, we bless Thee for the communion of the saints, and we beseech Thee now to make us faithful in the duties that communion lays upon us. Forgive us the many ways in which we have professed a fellowship we have not kept: the assemblies we have lightly forsaken, the words of edification we have withheld, the hands we have shut when a brother was in need. Have mercy upon us, and write upon our hearts the law of love. Teach us, we pray Thee, to maintain holy fellowship in Thy worship, and to delight in the gathering of Thy people, counting it our chief joy to meet with Thee and with Thy saints in the place where Thy name is called upon. Make us diligent in every spiritual service that builds up the body, ready to pray, to sympathise, to confer, to admonish, and to comfort, as the need of each brother requires. And open our hands, O Lord, to the relief of the saints, that we may minister to the necessities of the needy according to the ability Thou hast given us, and may learn that the fellowship of ministering to the saints is fellowship with Thee. Enlarge our hearts, we beseech Thee, beyond the walls of our own assembly, that we may love and serve the saints in every place who call upon the name of the Lord Jesus, and may feel ourselves debtors to Thy whole church scattered throughout the world. And do Thou, who orderest all things by Thy providence, set before us such opportunities as Thou seest good, that we may not pass by the need Thou hast appointed for us to meet. And when our hands grow slack and our love grows cold, revive us with the remembrance of that day when faith shall be turned to sight, and the whole body, complete and without a missing member, shall be gathered before Thy throne, and the communion of the saints shall be perfected in the communion of glory, where love shall never fail and fellowship shall never be broken. Until that day, keep us faithful, we pray Thee, in the body here below. We ask all this in the name of Jesus Christ our Head, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, world without end. Amen.