Side by Side: Walking with Others in Wisdom and Love

by Edward T. Welch

The basic idea is that those who help best are the ones who both need help and give help.

Speaking personally, on most days I am happy to give help and reluctant to ask for it. For me, being needy is a sign of weakness, and, given a choice, I prefer to appear strong or at least competent.

Anything that reminds us that we are dependent on God and other people is a good thing. Otherwise, we trick ourselves into thinking that we are self-sufficient, and arrogance is sure to follow. We need help, and God has given us his Spirit and each other to provide it.

We were meant to walk side by side, an interdependent body of weak people. God is pleased to grow and change us through the help of people who have been re-created in Christ and empowered by the Spirit. That is how life in the church works.

Friends are the best helpers. They come prepackaged with compassion and love. All they need is wisdom, and that is available to everyone.

Your neediness qualifies you to help others. Your neediness, offered well to someone else, can even be one of the great gifts you give to your church. You will inspire others to ask for help.

These spiritual beings have power to afflict us physically, as we see with Job. But their primary weapons are lies, half-truths, and temptations, tactics that are much more powerful than any physical affliction.

Life includes so many influences and hardships, and God is up to something in all of them.

It is tough to picture something you cannot see, and you cannot see the actual heart, but Scripture does provide images and analogies such as a fountainhead, a well, a tree, and a treasure chest.1

emotions point out those things that are most important to us. When happy, we possess something we love; when anxious, something we love is at risk; when despondent, something we love has been lost; when angry, something we love is being stolen or kept from us.

When we feel shame, we feel as though someone has taken off our human covering and left us naked. It separates us from relationships, and relationships are dear to us. When guilty, we feel like our relationship with God is potentially in jeopardy, and this relationship gets to matters of life and death.

We could sum up our emotions this way: they usually proceed from our hearts, are given shape by our bodies, reflect the quality of our relationships, bear the etchings of both the goodness and the meaninglessness of work, provide a peek into how we fare in spiritual battle, and identify what we really believe about God.

Who we love above all else is who we worship, and who we worship controls us.

Our task is to hear God’s voice, believe his words, and follow Jesus even when life is hard.

Jesus does spiritual battle by always bringing the conversation back to his Father’s reliable and proven words and deeds.

Suffering exposes the sin in our hearts in a way that few things can. When our lives are trouble free, we can confuse personal satisfaction for faith. We can think that God is good, and we are pleased with him, though we might be pleased less with him than we are with the ease of our lives. Then, when life is hard—especially when life remains hard—the allegiances of our hearts become more apparent. Suffering will reveal sin that still “clings so closely” to us (Heb. 12:1), and sin weighs a lot.

Here is a community goal: to be able to identify one pattern of sin in our lives, and to be able to do it with only a moment’s notice any time we are asked.

Though we don’t always realize it, all sin is personal—it is against God. It is against God and his character. Our sin says, “I want my independence”; “I don’t want to be associated with you”; “I want more than you can offer me”; “I know what is best for me”; or—and this is scary—“I hate you” (James 4:4). We don’t always know we are saying these things, but that is the nature of the heart. There is usually more going on than what we see.

Forgiveness of sins is essential to human satisfaction. The Hebrew word for that satisfaction is shalom, which means that all is right before God, and when all is right before God, we experience an abiding peace that is unruffled by the disappointments of life. Only confession and forgiveness bring shalom

Even though spiritual neediness is one of the most attractive acts of a human being, we have our own views of strength, honor, and what is most becoming, and pleas for help are not on that list.

Whether we have never asked anyone to pray for us or we do it every day, the goal is to grow both in how often we ask for prayer and how we ask for it. How often? We want to ask more than we do now. How to ask? We want to ask for prayer about both circumstances and matters of the heart that sit below the surface, for things seen and things unseen. We take the skills we have learned in personal prayer and ask others to pray with us. First, we put our burdens into words. Second, we attach words of Scripture that capture both our real needs and God’s purposes and promises. That is, we pray for what we know our Father wants to give us.

The Psalms highly value words that are spoken. We can know good things about the Lord, but the psalmists challenge us to turn knowledge into speech, both to the Lord and to others. The kingdom of heaven is by no means quiet. When we have good news, it should be announced.

but a good rule of thumb is that when you are stuck in hardships or sins, you keep enlarging the circle of those who know until you are no longer stuck.

Greetings are not a form of politeness from a bygone era. They are skills that imitate the Lord, they show respect and kindness to others, and we are meant to grow in them.

A reasonable application of Scripture is to greet one person we don’t know or don’t know well every time we gather with others in the body of Christ.

We don’t aim to draw out problems so that we can be helpers. We are simply interested in knowing another person, which is a basic feature of everyday love.

Suffering is the trouble that comes at us. Sin is the trouble that comes out of us.

If we are affected by someone’s suffering, we will remember it, which is one of the great gifts that we give to each other.

The time we give to creative strategizing is the power behind such acts. It is unmistakable love that mimics the strategic planning of the triune God’s rescue mission. He planned and acted even before we knew our real needs.

All our hardships are now ways that we participate in the sufferings of Christ. He suffered with the world; we suffer with it. Our endurance in hardships shows our solidarity with him.

When we get God’s story right, our suffering confirms that we belong to him; it does not mean that he is distant and unresponsive.

Now we bring that practice into the troubled life of a friend. Our best question will be this: “How can I pray for you?” Or simply, “Let’s pray now.” With this simple suggestion, it is as if the universe opens before us. A two-dimensional conversation—between you and another person—goes three-dimensional.

Sickness is always a spiritual matter in that it raises questions about God’s care and goodness, and it is an opportunity to grow in trust and obedience.

Prayer for comfort eventually merges with prayer for faith. That is, comfort leads us back to the promises and presence of God, which we know by faith.

Though these are ordinary things to ask for, such prayers will push you toward matters we talk about too rarely. Many of us have never gone beyond the casual “How’s school?” “How’s work?” The movement toward things that are explicitly spiritual can seem like quite a jolt. It might feel risky or even impolite. But we need this in our own hardship, and others need it in theirs. We know our deepest needs, and to reach for anything short of these is unloving. When we pray for faith, we are praying for what is most important.

We can become alert to Satan’s influence (and how to respond to it) by walking through four gardens depicted in Scripture: Eden, the destitute garden of the wilderness, Gethsemane, and the resurrection garden. These four places were venues for battle, and they alert us to Satan’s tactics.

There is one more feature of Satan’s strategies that comes after these initial temptations. Once we follow his lead, he condemns us: “You are so bad; God will never love and forgive you.” There he is in all his anti-glory, Satan, the accuser. He gets us coming and going. He promises freedom; he delivers slavery.

The Gospel of John identifies one more garden, and the episode is heavy with allusions to Eden and its true gardener.

The true man—the image of God—stood firm in temptations, worked in this garden, and invited others to witness the final weapon against Satan’s devices. The centerpiece of the garden is a tomb that is empty.

Our church culture inadvertently communicates that preachers can talk publicly about sin, and a men’s group convened to deal with pornography can talk about it, but as a general rule, it is impolite to talk about sin one to one.

Humility is surprisingly sturdy in the face of anger. It includes a willingness to look at our own sins yet isn’t diverted from our concern for another.

Patience does not think, “If I were she, I would be working harder on this.” Patience is interested in what direction people face. Do they face toward Jesus? Patience is more interested in direction and less interested in how fast people are changing.

When anger is present, humility and patience are absent.

Sin is best raised in the context of faithful friendships where hardships have been shared and friends have prayed with each other.

The hardest sins to talk about are those we see someone commit, but we receive no invitation to speak. Here, we must decide if the sin is to be called out or covered.

Our fear of people’s angry reactions, the myth that help is needed only when asked for, and our sense that we have no right to say anything because we ourselves are quite a mess—these contribute to safe relationships rather than loving ones.

Though our goal might be to make someone feel less alone or embarrassed by their confession, commiserating doesn’t help. It shifts the conversation away from what is most important. Instead, we keep the focus on the issue at hand. We want to partner in an all-out battle against sin. The Spirit has started something, and we want to keep in step with what he is doing.

Scripture poses different questions of the heart. They all concern our divine allegiances. Who do you love? (Deut. 6:5; 1 John 2:15); who do you trust? (Jer. 17:5–8); who (or what) do you worship? (2 Kings 17:36); who will you serve? (Matt. 6:24); who do you obey? (1 John 3:10); for whose glory do you live? (Rom. 1:21–23); where is your treasure—is it in the world or in Christ? (Matt. 6:21); to whom do you belong? (John 8:44). To these we can add other questions. What do you crave? What do you feel that you need? Where do you find refuge, comfort, pleasure, or security? Who are your heroes and role models? What defines success or failure for you? When do you say, “If only . . . ?” (e.g., “If only my husband would . . .”) What do you see as your rights? Where in your life have you struggled with bitterness? What or whom do you avoid? Do you feel guilty at times?