One Another

Introduction

I deeply appreciate the opportunity to speak to you today. I preached here several times. And it’s a pleasure to be with you. I certainly enjoyed the Bible class that Brother Chapman taught. If that’s the kind of teaching you have all the time, you’re really blessed, you know. And so it’s a pleasure to be with him, but to be with all of you, enjoy being with our children, particularly this time of the year. And some of you are traveling, I know, from other places. We’re glad you’re here. You know, when you became a Christian, you in you entered into a very special relationship with God. But you also entered a very special relationship with the people of God, with other Christians. Some 30 times in the New Testament references are made to one another.

1. A New Commandment: Love One Another

And I want to talk to you about some of those. We couldn’t talk about all of them in the sermon of any reasonable length. But I want to talk to you about some of those, and let’s just get right to work on it. The first one is in John 13, verses 34 and 5. Jesus said, A new commandment I give unto you that you love one another. By this, he said, Shall all men know that you are my disciples if you have love one for another. Now, if we don’t have love for one another, the world won’t even suspect that we’re his disciples. But he said, by this the world will know. Now, why did Jesus say a new commandment I give unto you? Had levant love never been taught before Jesus came?

No, of course it had. The Old Testament dealt with the subject of love. You remember in Matthew 22, Jesus talked there beginning in verse 37, they came and said, What is the first and great commandment in the law? Well, he said, the first commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. And he said, The second is like it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. So love was taught in the Old Testament. Well, why did Jesus say it’s a new commandment? Well, it’s new in its quality or in its kind. He said, I want you to love one another as I have loved you.

What kind of love is that? Well, in Philippians, the second chapter, verse 5, beginning, Paul said, Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but made himself of no reputation and took upon himself the form of a servant. And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself even unto the death of the cross.

And that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

Such as that which was demonstrated or shown when Jesus left the portals of glory, took upon himself the form of a man, was born to a peasant woman, laid in a manger for his first cradle, and then grew up to the age of 30 and began to preach. And then in a little while, the people, first crowds gathered around him to hear him, but he preached some things that didn’t that were hard to say. They didn’t want to hear that. And many of his disciples turned back and walked no more with him. But on the cross, those who crucified him, who called for his death, he said, Father, forgive them, for they know not what to do. Could there be any greater demonstration of love than that?

2. Bear Ye One Another’s Burdens

That’s what’s new about it. Now let’s change the subject. In Galatians the sixth chapter and verse 2, Paul said, Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.

Sometimes it’s tough. Have you visited anybody in a nursing home lately? I visited a number of people in nursing homes through the years. Sometimes they’re sitting in chairs, wheelchairs out in the hall. They don’t know you, you don’t know them, and you’re passing by them trying to get to the room that you where you’re visiting someone, and they want to strike up a conversation with you. They want somebody to acknowledge their existence. There are some who have no company. I have a lady that works for me three days a week. She comes to help me out. And she works in an assisted living place, but she’s also worked in some nursing homes. And she said there are people who never have any company. Nobody ever comes to see them.

And they sit there and stare at the wall and wait to die. Bear ye one another’s burdens. Could you spare a little time to go see a brother or a sister that’s in a nursing home? And don’t keep looking at your watch like you’re big inconvenienced because you have to be there. Listen to them talk. Talk to them. Let them know that somebody cares about them. That’s bearing a burden. Sometimes people get older. I’ve had a little experience with that. And uh when that happens, things change in their lives. They can’t do what they used to do. Sometimes can’t drive at night anymore. And when there’s a gospel meeting or a service on Wednesday night, they don’t they’re not able to drive. Could do you have a car?

Can you still see at night? Could you go by and pick them up, give them a ride? You’d be bearing somebody’s burdens. Or could you go to the grocery store to the market for somebody that’s sick and laid up and can’t get out? Or could you go pick up a prescription for them? Or come by the house and just talk with them a little while. Or maybe somebody’s had an injury and they can’t, the grass is growing like crazy and they can’t get out and cut it. You have a lawnmower guys, you have a weed eater. Do you load that up and go over there and cut your grass for them? You’d be helping to bear burden. Death in a family comes. That’s a time when you don’t want to think about having to cook.

Could you prepare a dish and take to them at a time when they’re going to have company and they don’t feel like even fooly with preparing food. That’s a wonderful blessing.

3. Receive Ye One Another

I’ve been on the receiving end of that several times. I want to tell you that is such a comfort to know that there are people who care about you and want to help you. Bear ye one another’s burdens. And so fulfill the law of Christ. There are people whose hearts are broken when they’re involved in a divorce. Or their children have gotten into trouble and disappointed them terribly. And they need they need some understanding. They need somebody to listen. They need a shoulder to lean on. And not a critic, but a shoulder. There’s a difference. Let’s change the subject. In Romans the 15th chapter, and verse 7, Paul reaches the climax of the argument that he began in chapter 14. When he dealt with issues that were that were matters of choice and private scruple.

And there were two special areas of disturbance that we don’t, we’re not familiar with so much among ourselves. But he said, receive you one another. The two issues he raised in the 14th chapter, first of all, had to do with the eating of meat. It’s my conviction that in Romans 14, he’s looking at this from a Jewish angle primarily. In 1 Corinthians 8, 9, and 10, he looks at this problem from a Gentile perspective more. But here he talks about the eating of meat. There were certain kinds of meat that were limited to the Jew. He could, under the law of Moses, he couldn’t eat shellfish. He couldn’t eat shrimp. He couldn’t eat pork. That was off limits to him. It was unclean under the law.

Now, under the New Testament, those restrictions do not apply.

And there are some who are. I baptized one brother that, one fellow that became an elder in the church later. He’d been raised in Judaism. Let’s suppose a scene now where here is a brother in Christ that’s a mature Christian. He’s a strong Christian. And he knows that eating meat or not eating meat is inconsequential. It’s a matter of choice. And so he invites this converted Jewish brother to his house for dinner. And he goes over there, and guess what they have? Pork chops. And he looks at that and he thinks to himself, what am I going to do now? I have never tasted this. I don’t, I’ve never had it in my mouth. Well, his host recognizes that he’s uncomfortable. So he says to him, Now, now listen, you’re a Christian now, and the law of Moses has been nailed to the cross.

And it’s this meat is all right. It’s okay. It’s all right. You’ll enjoy it, it’s good. So reluctantly he takes him one on his plate and cuts him off a little piece of it, puts it in his mouth and chews it around. He’s not even sure he can swallow it. And the whole time he’s doing that, his conscience is killing him. Because he’s never done this before in his life, and has been reared with the idea that it was wrong for him to do that. What’s his problem? Well, he hadn’t had time to grow. See? He’s a Christian. But he has to grow. And the strong brother needs to help him to grow, and he does not need to put a stumbling block in his way and encourage him to do something that’s a violation of his conscience.

Receive ye one another. Let’s extend that scenario a little bit. Let’s suppose now that this Jewish brother, here’s another fellow that’s converted out of Judaism, and there’s a brother whose barn burns down. And he’s going to have a barn raising on a Saturday. Some of the brethren are going to go out there and help him build his barn. So he says to his new Jewish brother, how how about getting your hammer and saw and coming out and helping us on Saturday? Well, he’s honored to feel he wants to be a part. He wants to be included, of course. So he goes out there with his hammer and his saw. But he’s never worked on Saturday before in his life.

And every time he drives a nail, his conscience kills him. He’s violating his conscience. What he’s doing is not a faith. And so his host sees that he’s nervous and uncomfortable about it. So he explains to him. We’re not under the law now. This is Saturday. The Lord’s Day is important to it. But this is the this is the seventh day, this is the Sabbath, and we’re not bound under the Sabbath anymore. Back to Colossians 2, you remember Paul talked about the Sabbath days that God at Christ has nailed all of this to the cross. Now what should what should happen here? Well, the stronger brother ought to bear the infirmities of the weak. And that’s what verse 1 of chapter 15 in Romans says. Ye that are strong bear the infirmities of the weak.

You see, in the church, we have people that have come out of different backgrounds. All of us brought baggage of some kind, but it’s not all the same. My father, where I grew up in Virginia, my father never let us have a deck of playing cards in our house. We could play rook or old maids, but he said these cards are the tools of gamblers, and we’re not going to have them in this house. And we didn’t have them. But he didn’t try to bind that on everybody else as a law of the Lord. That was his conviction. It was a personal scruples that Christians have about military service and whether or not you can be a Christian can be a policeman. And these are issues that brethren have to decide in their own conscience.

4. Be Ye Kind One to Another

And the rest of us need to let them decide it in their own conscience. There are issues and questions that arise among us that are inconsequential with God, but we may not think they are. And so we have a scruple about that. So what are we supposed to do? Receive ye one another. Let’s change the subject again. Over in the fourth chapter of Ephesians, verses 32-3. Paul said, be ye kind one to another. You know, we’re living in a world of angry voices. I’ve lived right good while and I’ve seen political campaigns come and go, but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a time in my life when politics is as dirty and corrupt. Oh, I know we’ve had bad ones before. But when nobody trusts anybody anymore.

If you’re of a different persuasion from somebody else, you’re just you’re just bad news. And we don’t need, we we need to learn how to tolerate one another. So there are questions that we have to settle in our own consciences, and you need to let us do that. And I need to let you do that. Be kind one to another. This travel season, where the airports are busy, and there are times around hell holiday seasons when air traffic is so heavy, and flights get canceled. And here you are stuck in an airport and your flight is canceled, and you’ve got to get you got to get to Atlanta wherever you’re going and change. And uh and you’re gonna miss your flight if something if something doesn’t give here, and so you go up to the counter and take it out on whoever is unfortunate enough to be there.

No, don’t do that. You get in the wrong line at Walmart. And by the way, if you ever see me in a line, don’t get behind me. I have developed it to an art form, getting into the wrong line. Somebody’s got to have a price check right before I’m ready to check out to get somebody from the back of the store to come all the way up, and there you stand, and there’s somebody in front of you, they’re camped out. We need to be kind to one another. Have you ever heard of road rage? Are you polite enough to let somebody into the line of traffic when he’s trying to get in when the traffic is heavy? Do you appreciate it when somebody lets you in?

Road rage is a bad thing. I had a preacher’s wife told me, in fact, this preacher was a good friend of mine, but his wife said, My husband is such a gentleman that he’ll hold the door open for everybody in the grocery store, and then try to run over every one of them in the parking lot.

There’s something about a man getting behind the wheel of an automobile that changes his persona. I don’t know what it is, it’s a if if it’s a sense of power or control or what it is, we need, we need then. We need to learn how to be kind to one another. And I want to tell you something else. Sometimes in our dealings, interaction with each other’s brethren. There are churches sometimes that don’t have elders and they have business meetings to settle everything. And sometimes everything will go along beautifully for several months. Then all of a sudden, out of the blue, some fella drops a clod in the churn, as Tennessee Interford used to say. And we got angry voices being heard. Brethren can’t be tolerant with one another.

I was in one of those meetings one time. And after a little bit of a little while, I asked the brother who was conducting the meeting, I said, Can I say something? He said, Sure. Be please do. I said, let’s let’s just get out on our knees and pray, and I’ll lead the prayer because I’m not mad. And we had a prayer. And you could have heard a pin drop, and when it was over, we had a pretty nice business meeting. But I’m going to tell you something. There is not any sense in this world in brethren not being able to get along with each other and treat one another as Christians are supposed to. Don’t you think that’s what Jesus had in mind when he said, By this, shall all men know that you’re my disciples if you love one another?

Think that plays into that? Be kind one to another. Let’s go home with that. How about it’s your house? Do you have angry voices at your table? You have siblings, children in your family, siblings that don’t know how to be kind and respectful to one another. Our husbands and wives that quarrel and argue, and home becomes a battleground instead of a haven of refuge. We can do better than that, folks. There are families of people who profess to be Christians. They can’t get along with each other. Dysfunctional families, we call them.

5. Use Hospitality One to Another

But we can do better than that. Be ye kind one to another. Let’s change the subject again. In 1 Peter 4 and verse 9, Peter said, use hospitality one to another without grumbling or without grudging. Do it because it’s the right thing to do, and you don’t expect to be paid back. And don’t complain about it. Use hospitality. Whatever happened to hospitality, Brother Chapman, you suppose. I don’t know where it went. We don’t seem to have the degree of it that we used to have. I know you can’t go back to the good old days. They weren’t all they were cracked up to be.

Some of them are Christians, and some of them brought their buddies with them, and we converted some of them while they were there. My parents, as well as some others in the congregation, uh, resolved among themselves that they would never leave a serviceman, let a serviceman leave the premises without somebody inviting them home with them for dinner. And my father would take us home, there’s a carload of us, and he’d take us home, and my mother would start on dinner, and he’d go back to town and bring a carload of soldiers home to spend the afternoon with us. Meant a lot to those boys. Some of them were just out of high school. They’d been drafted. It was wartime. And some of them were homesick. Some of them were love sick.

They’d left sweethearts behind. And some of them were afraid, they were terrified because they did not know what awaited them when they went across the Atlantic or the Pacific. They didn’t know what was going to happen when they shipped out. Hospitality meant a lot to them. Some of them, when the war was over, came back through there just to visit to thank every people there for how kind they were to them. Hospitality is a wonderful thing.

We lived in the woods. And we’d cleared off some land where we could plant corn. And you could look out the window, see car lamps coming through the cornfield. And my mother’d say, We’ve got company coming. You kids pick up that meant straighten up the living room because company was coming. They were going to our house because there wasn’t anywhere else to go up that road. And they’d come and we didn’t have television. Can you imagine that? We didn’t have cell phones. Boy, we were backward.

But people would come and and I was always glad because that meant we were going to have entertainment that night. The old folks that sat around and talked, the kids would sit on the floor with big, big ears and big eyes and listen. They’d tell funny things and tell about strange things that happened, uh, where they came from and all of that. It was educational and fun. My dad would say, Hun, talking to my mother, he’d say, Can you go to the kitchen and mix us up a little fudge? It was kind of kind of a kind of a party when company came. Well, did they call that tell us they were coming? No, we didn’t have a phone. They couldn’t call us. They just came.

That’s what people did. They’d load up and go and spend bedtime with you. We don’t do much of that anymore. After the war was over, more people had automobiles. And in the 50s, guess what came along? Television. And if you visited somebody that had a television set and you didn’t have one, you had to learn the rules of the house because you did not talk during the program. You only talked during the commercials. That was just a rule of the house. It played a played havoc with hospitality. And there are a number of other things. We’ve gotten busy with this, this, and that. I’ve held meetings all over the country for a long time. And I have enjoyed the hospitality of many Christians. I’ve stayed in the homes of many that shared their shared their homes with me and their tables with me and their love and kindness, and I’ll ever be grateful for it.

And sometimes people, where the husband and wife both are busy and working, sometimes they’ll take you out to a restaurant people. That’s okay. That’s hospitality too, you know. It really is. But whatever the whatever the occasion, we need to be with one another more than we are right here in this house. We need to see each other more often than that. And we need we need to make occasions. And I I don’t know. I’m not here, and I don’t know what what your procedures are about it. But you need times when you can be together socially, enjoy one another’s company, get acquainted with each other. That helps you to know how to bear one another’s burdens, by the way, and to show kindness to one another.

Be, he said, use hospitality one to another. I would not be standing here today in front of you as a preacher. Had it not been for an occasion of hospitality in my house when I was 14 years old. We had a we were going to have a gospel meeting. Ten days. Can you imagine that? The preacher was coming down from Washington, D.C. His name was Bonds Stocks. I kid you not, that was his name. Brother Stocks had gone to Washington as a secretary for Senator J. C. Rankin from the state of Mississippi. And when he he was he was a faithful Christian, and he got to Washington and he got to preaching some. And he was so good at it, the brethren encouraged him to quit his government job and just devote his full time to preaching.

And he did that. And he was coming for a meeting with us. Well, he’d met a lot of important people. My mother was always a little bit timid. She didn’t think what we had was good enough. She got over that, by the way. But she had a little problem with that. Had a business meeting one night on Sunday night, and it was kind of long. My dad came out to the car, and my mother said, That was a long meeting. He said, Yeah, it was. Said, we’re trying to decide where Brother Stocks was going to stay when he comes for the meeting. She said, Where is he going to stay? He said, With us. My mother said, With us. She said, We don’t even have a bathroom in the house.

We didn’t. She said, I don’t have enough ditches that matched to set a good table. He said, Well, you’ve got two sisters and they got lots of dishes. He said, You can borrow some. See, men are problem solvers, girls, you know that. He didn’t see what the problem was. He said, We live this way all the time. She said, How’s a man going to take a bath? She said, We’re gonna put, he said, we’re gonna pour some water in the number two wash tub. And he said, I mean it just like we do. That’s the way we do it, that he can do that too. She didn’t he didn’t see what the problem was. Well, my mother, she she went along. It was fine. And he came.

He stayed with us. Wonderful ten days. He had more funny stories than I’d ever heard. He’d been to places that I never dreamed of ever getting to go. And had lots of experiences in his work. And we thoroughly enjoyed having him. We found out he’d been raised in Mississippi about as poor as we were in Virginia. One day he he said, I’ve got to go to town and have my car service. For some reason, he called me Cornelius. That is not my name. Don’t you call me that either? But he called me that. He said, Cornelius, I’m going to town getting my car service. And he said, How about riding over with me? So I did. And on the way over there, he asked me a question that turned my whole world upside down.

I didn’t realize it at the time. He said, Cornelius, what are you going to do when you grow up? Well, I said, My brother and I are going to go to Nashville, Tennessee, and play on the grand old opera. We had a band. We were playing played music. And we thought just if we got to town and they knew we were there, they’d put us right out on the stage. Naive. He said, Well, that sounds like fun, but did you ever think about being a gospel preacher? I said, No, sir. I don’t think I could do that. I wouldn’t know what to say. He said, Does it make you nervous to stand up and sing and play in front of an audience? And I said, No, I kind of like it.

He said, See there? You’ve got stage fright whipped already. You won’t have to worry about that. And on he didn’t say any more until we started back home. And he said, You know, Cornelius, he said, I’ve got some notes I’ve typed up about church history, where all the different churches got started. And he said, one of these days you might could use some of that. He said, While I’m here, said you could copy those if you’d like to. Well, we rushed back to the house and I got back to the house. I rushed in and got some paper and sat down at the kitchen table and started copying those notes. My mom said, What are you doing? I said, Brother Stocks has some notes here that about how the church has started.

6. Let Us Consider One Another

I’m copying. He planted a seed in my heart that I never have been able to get rid of. I haven’t gotten rid of it yet. And I don’t know how many times I’ve stayed in a home where there was a 12 or 14-year-old boy and said to him, I hope I get to hear you preach sometime. You never know where that may go. But it all started with an act of hospitality. Open-ended by my father with reservation by my mother at first, but hospitality nonetheless. Hospitality is a precious thing. Use it without grumbling. Now, let’s change the subject one more time and I’ll be done. You know, in Hebrews the 10th chapter, verse 24. The writer said, Consider, let us consider one another. To provoke unto love and to good works.

Now, what does that mean? To provoke. That didn’t mean, you know, we say, I really provoked with you. No, that’s not what he’s talking about. He’s talking about stirring each other up to be better. When we come together to worship with one another, that stirs me. I miss it. There have been a few times when I was sick that I just couldn’t go. The longest few hours that there are, especially on Sunday. Seems like that’s that day just never end when you can’t be with the brethren. In Colossians 3 and 16, he said, let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.

When we come together to sing and pray, remember our Lord, like we have his death. When we do all of that, we are discharging not only our responsibility to worship our God, but we also are in a position to greatly encourage one another. And when you’re absent, your seat is empty. That doesn’t encourage anybody. Just doesn’t. You know, sometimes preachers in meetings, we we get up and preach to a house full on Sunday morning. By Monday night, if it wasn’t for visitors from other places, it sure would be embarrassing. And you know something? I’ve never been able to convert a bench. Just an empty. You can’t convert a bench. But if you can sit somebody on that bench that’ll listen, you can teach them the truth if they have an honest heart.

And it helps a lot for Christians to consider each other. You may think that your absence doesn’t amount to anything. Oh, but it does. Now I’m not talking about circumstances that are beyond our control. God understands that, and we need to as well. But when you by deliberate choice decide that the church is going to meet, and I’m not going to be there. You made a bad choice. You know, in that context when he said, Let us consider one another to provoke the good works. You know what the next verse is? Verse 25 of Hebrews 10. Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is, but exhorting one another. There it is again, one another. Exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the day approaching.

Conclusion

You see, assembling together to worship should not just be a matter of routine with us. But it should be an occasion that we anticipate with great joy. And that we enjoy when we get there with full capacity. Consider one another. Now, would you get your hymn books? Or you don’t need books, you got this up here. We’re going to sing an invitation song. And I want to tell you why we’re going to do that. We’re not going to do that as a matter of routine. Just a ritual that we just have to go through. No. We do this as a sincere effort on our part to impress upon you the importance of being in a right relationship with God. That’s why we do that. If you’re not a Christian, if you’re not saved, you need to be saved.

You need to be a Christian. That’s why I’ve decided, I’ve made arrangements for my funeral, by the way. And I’ve decided I want them to sing all invitation songs at my funeral. I want, I want something to impress people at a time when they’re thinking about life and death. I want something to impress them with importance of just as they are, just as I am coming to the Lord. Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling. There’s so many good invitation songs. And they have a message in them. And we’re going to sing one of them now. And if you’re not a Christian, my friend, you need, you need to be one. You need to come before us with faith in your heart that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that He loved you and died for you, and that He wants you to come to Him.

You need to turn away from every sin in your life. Not just be sorry for it, but change your course of action. And stand before us and pledge allegiance to Him. Make the good confession that Jesus is Lord, that He’s a Christ. And upon that confession, we will baptize you today into Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. You know what you’ll be? You just be a Christian. That’s all. Well, what kind of a Christian? Just a Christian. Christian, that’s what you’ll be. It may be that some of you in the audience today have drifted away from the Lord. You haven’t been faithful to him. And you need to make some corrections publicly. If such is the case with you, my brother, my sister, make your way to one of these aisles.

In either situation, whether to become a Christian or to return to the house of the Lord and to the people of the Lord and take your place in it. We’re going to stand and sing this song. Make your way to one of these aisles and right down to the front right now. Brother Chapman, would you come