Teaching and Exhortation

Two posts back, I claimed the serving gifts are the ones church leaders tend to value least. Teaching and exhortation have the opposite problem, because we value them plenty, and we’re pretty much settled on what each one looks like. These two gifts you’ll see aplenty in many churches: teaching usually means preaching a sermon, and exhortation often means encouraging. I think both of those are too imprecise, and I think the second one is actually just wrong.

Teaching is one of the three gifts I believe God has given me, so half of what follows lands on me before it lands on anybody else. And to be fully candid, while I exercise the gift of teaching occasionally, it’s far less than I’d prefer since leadership and administration are often so needed.

Paul Keeps Setting Them Side by Side

But why would I put teaching and exhortation together? We don’t often associate these two, but Paul puts them side by side more than once.

They sit shoulder to shoulder in the Romans list, “the one who teaches, in his teaching; the one who exhorts, in his exhortation” (Romans 12:7-8). They show up together when he tells Timothy what to give himself to:

“Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching.”
(1 Timothy 4:13)

And they arrive together one last time at the end of Paul’s life, in the charge he writes just before saying he is already being poured out as a drink offering: “reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching” (2 Timothy 4:2). Three times, the same pair. That’s a hint about what each gift is for, and I don’t think it’s an accident that Paul repeated himself throughout his life.

The word behind teaching means to instruct, to explain, to expound, to instill doctrine. Our word “didactic” comes out of that family. It isn’t the transfer of information, or at least it isn’t only that. A person with this gift takes a text of God’s word, distills the universal truth from it, and makes its meaning land in a way a person can actually understand and apply. And notice where the gift sits in the lists. 1 Corinthians 12:28 puts teachers third, right behind apostles and prophets, and Ephesians 4:11 binds “shepherds and teachers” together so tightly that the ESV footnotes an alternative reading of the phrase: “the shepherd-teachers.” I don’t want to hang too much on this textual debate, but it’s worth pausing on for a second. Even when teaching is named as a role, the text won’t quite let it float free of caring for people, whether it’s combined with or adjacent to it.

Exhortation comes from a different picture. The word carries the sense of calling someone to your side, and its range runs far: comfort at one end, urging in the middle, correction at the other. It’s the same picture behind the name Jesus gives the Spirit in John 14:16, “another Helper.” The exhorter isn’t a motivational speaker or a cheerleader. They’re the person who comes and stands next to you and says the thing that keeps you going. This person probably feels like a coach, mentor, and counselor at various times.

Scripture gives us a face for that one. When the apostles ran into a Levite from Cyprus named Joseph, they didn’t describe him…they renamed him! Joseph becomes Barnabas, which the text tells us means “son of encouragement” (Acts 4:36). And when the Jerusalem church later sent him up to Antioch to see what God was doing, Luke says “he exhorted them all to remain faithful to the Lord with steadfast purpose, for he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith” (Acts 11:23-24).

Teaching puts the truth in front of you, exhortation comes and stands beside you with it, and neither one has finished its work until you’re actually somewhere different.

Teaching Is Bigger Than the Pulpit

The first way I think we shrink this pair of gifts is by turning teaching into a location. It’s an old enough habit that most of us don’t experience it as a choice, and it’s a dominant form in most churches so much that it has a colloquial name — the master teacher model.

If the gift only counts when it happens on a platform or in front of a room, then a church with one preacher has exactly one teacher, and everybody else has been quietly informed that they don’t have it. They lack the intellect, the formal training, or the rhetorical skill that this individual possesses; therefore, they can’t “teach.” But that’s not what Paul assumes. Writing to an entire church, not to a modern church staff, he says this:

“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.”
(Colossians 3:16)

Both instincts are in that sentence, the instruction and the nudge, and they’re handed to everybody and pointed in every direction. One another. So the woman who spends an hour explaining Galatians to a friend over coffee is teaching. So is the guy with ten-year-olds on Sunday morning (thanks Justin!). So is whoever in your church somehow makes the hard chapters feel less frightening (thanks Halim!).

And here’s what often happens to those people with the gift that gets expressed in community or relational settings. They get told they’re good with kids or that they ought to consider leading a group sometime. What they almost never hear is that the Spirit of God handed them something and that the church needs that gift to grow.

As one who had a platform to teach from occasionally, but expressed the gift far more often in group and one-on-one settings, it was so easy to believe the lie that I wasn’t actually “teaching” but rather just discipling and developing. And even though I have a formal seminary degree, I am increasingly convinced that faithful teaching requires more time spent applying 8th-grade English class lessons to a text than advanced degrees do. It’s not about the pedigree; it’s about the disciplined, devotional study of God’s word and its application to our own lives and the lives of others.

That said, there’s a reason churches guard this one. James is blunt about it: “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness” (James 3:1). That weight is real, and a church that hands a microphone to whoever wants it will hurt people. I do believe the church needs some evaluation of doctrine, or perhaps even credentialing. But look at where James puts the weight. It’s on the ones who teach, and it’s in the context of taming the tongue. James reminds the church of the power of speech, and Jesus reminds us that the mouth is an overflow of the heart. Teaching is a speech act, and no matter where you fall on who can teach in your church, the act and gift of teaching amplify what is in the human heart and impact those who hear.

This means the woman with the six-year-olds is carrying enormous weight and responsibility, whether or not anybody’s ever told her. The answer to too few teachers isn’t a free-for-all. It’s naming the gift where it actually shows up, and then taking responsibility for forming the person we just named into the image of Christ. The gift and the act require sober assessment of your own life and doctrine, and are to be stewarded well by the church, no matter the environment.

Exhortation Is Not Niceness

The second way we shrink this pair is a bit more pointed, and I’ve come to think it costs us more than we realize.

We hear “encouragement” and think of affirmation. But look at the company the word keeps in Scripture elsewhere. Paul’s charge to Timothy runs “reprove, rebuke, and exhort,” all three in one breath. His instruction to Titus is “exhort and rebuke with all authority” (Titus 2:15). The word has range, and in most of the rooms I’ve served in, we license the comforting third of it and quietly forbid the rest. This is especially prevalent in our North American pulpits today, given the therapeutic culture we live in and the experiences in many churches over the last five or six years.

This means the correction we hand the exhortation isn’t usually about volume. It’s about content: be kinder about it, soften that, maybe lead with something positive. The expression of the gift is “toned down” because the surrounding culture can’t handle it. The last post was about the zealous leader who gets told not to get so worked up, and this is a similar problem with a different cost. We’re not asking the exhorter to turn down. We’re often asking them to keep the comfort and drop the correction. And people with this gift usually comply because they care more about the person in front of them. And in our culture, they’d rather go quiet than wound somebody, which is fair. But the fear of hurting someone comes at the cost of sincere, biblical correction.

When this occurs, the church loses what it needs most in the long run. For example, nobody says anything before the marriage gets past saving. Nobody says anything while the drift is still two months old, not two years. Nobody says anything to the leader whose small “mistakes” are patterned and observable. We favor overlooking an offense and extending grace, which is good and biblical. But without exhortation expressed as correction, we all stand around a wreck afterward asking how it is that nobody saw it coming. The truth is, somebody probably did… and had been trained out of saying so directly, clearly, and correctively.

Again, I don’t want to go too far here, because our church culture is reacting to something real. Exhortation without patience is just criticism with a verse attached to it. That does real damage to people who are already limping, and I have done that to people in my youth. But Paul saw this coming. He didn’t write “reprove, rebuke, and exhort” and stop there; he wrote, “with complete patience and teaching.” The correction an immature exhorter needs isn’t less range; it’s more patience, and enough teaching underneath the exhortation that what gets pressed on someone is God’s word rather than the exhorter’s preference.

And this isn’t a specialist activity either. “But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (Hebrews 3:13). Every day, one another, with a reason attached. The ESV runs its cross-reference from there straight to Hebrews 10:24-25, stirring one another up to love and good works.

Son of Encouragement

One more thing about Barnabas.

The first thing Luke shows us the son of encouragement doing, after the apostles hand him that name, is walk into a room where everybody’s afraid. Saul had come to Jerusalem and tried to join the disciples, “and they were all afraid of him, for they did not believe that he was a disciple. But Barnabas took him and brought him to the apostles” (Acts 9:26-27). Barnabas’ first act is one of courage: bringing a gifted, saved, repentant Paul to the church’s leadership.

Years later, Barnabas is the one who goes to Tarsus to find him again, brings him back to Antioch, and Luke tells us “for a whole year they met with the church and taught a great many people” (Acts 11:26). So the man named for exhortation spent a year teaching, alongside the man he’d vouched for when nobody else would. And more than that, stuck with him over the years.

And this is so very different than many of our churches today. Yes, relationships continue, but for someone who had the courage to correct you and teach you, when was the last time you reached out? For the pastor who left your church years ago, have you thought about them at all? Maybe this is symptomatic of the gift of exhortation being absent.

A church that only teaches ends up right and unmoved. A church that only exhorts ends up warm and unfounded in the word. Antioch got a year of both, from two men the Spirit had gifted and the church had actually turned loose…and at the end of that year, the disciples were called Christians for the first time. And Antioch became a multiethnic missionary launching pad and landing spot…maybe we need more of this duo today!