The Gift of Exhortation

Question 4112

The gift of exhortation is the Spirit-given ability to come alongside other believers and stir them up to faith, obedience and perseverance through words that encourage, comfort and urge them on. Paul places it in the same list of grace-gifts in Romans 12, where he says that the one who exhorts should give himself to exhortation (Romans 12:8). The Greek behind the word is parakaleo and its noun paraklesis, a rich term that can mean to call to one side, to comfort, to encourage, to plead with and to urge. The same root lies behind the title the Lord Jesus gives the Holy Spirit, the Parakletos, the one called alongside to help. To exercise this gift, then, is to do in a small and human way what the Spirit himself does in the believer.

Because the word carries such a wide range, the gift of exhortation can show itself in tones that look quite different from one another. Sometimes it is the warm arm round the shoulder of a discouraged saint, and sometimes it is the firm and earnest pleading that will not let a brother drift into sin. The thread that holds these together is that the exhorter is always moving the hearer towards God, never simply making him feel better for its own sake.

What the gift of exhortation actually is

Exhortation in the New Testament is not vague positivity. When Paul tells Timothy to devote himself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation and to teaching (1 Timothy 4:13), he sets exhortation between two activities that are anchored in the word of God. The reading supplies the text, the teaching opens its meaning, and the exhortation presses it home upon the will. This is why the gift can never float free of the truth. A person may have great natural warmth and a knack for making people feel good, but that is not yet the gift of exhortation in the biblical sense. The genuine grace takes the truth that has been taught and applies it like a poultice to the wound, urging the hearer to act on what he now knows.

The letter to the Hebrews is one long exercise of this gift. Its author actually calls his own work a word of exhortation (Hebrews 13:22), and throughout the letter he reasons from Scripture and then turns to plead. Let us hold fast. Let us draw near. Let us run with endurance. Let us not neglect to meet together. Each appeal grows out of a doctrine carefully laid down, and each one is aimed at a congregation in danger of slipping back. That is the shape of biblical exhortation, a truth established and then driven home with affection and urgency.

Encouragement that has backbone

The man who supremely modelled this gift was Joseph the Levite, whom the apostles renamed Barnabas, which Luke tells us means son of encouragement (Acts 4:36). It was Barnabas who vouched for the newly converted Saul when the church was still afraid of him, Barnabas who was sent to Antioch and exhorted the new believers to remain faithful to the Lord with steadfast purpose (Acts 11:23), and Barnabas who gave the young deserter John Mark a second chance when Paul had written him off. Here we see that true exhortation has backbone. It is not flattery, and it is not the avoidance of hard words. It is the courage to believe the best of a person, to call out the potential the Spirit has placed in them, and to keep urging them towards it when others have given up.

This is worth saying plainly, because in some circles encouragement has been reduced to never saying anything that might cause discomfort. The believer with a real gift will sometimes cause discomfort, because love that means to see a brother grow cannot always leave him where he is. Yet even the firm word is delivered with such evident care for the hearer that it lands as help rather than attack. You can see how this differs from the more public and revelatory grace of prophecy in our study of the gift of prophecy, and how it serves the wider company in discovering and using your gift.

How the gift of exhortation serves the church

Paul lays down a principle in 1 Corinthians 14 that governs the whole life of the gathered church, that all things should be done for building up. He singles out the believer who speaks to others for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation (1 Corinthians 14:3), and that ministry is exactly the territory of the exhorter. In a healthy fellowship there are members whose particular grace is to notice the one who is flagging and to speak the timely word that keeps him in the race. Without them a congregation can be doctrinally sound yet cold, full of light but short of warmth. The gift of exhortation is part of how the Spirit keeps the body tender as well as true.

Luke gives us a living example at Antioch, where Judas and Silas, who were themselves prophets, encouraged and strengthened the brothers with many words (Acts 15:32). The two men had been sent to carry the decision of the Jerusalem council, and they could simply have delivered the letter and left, but the gift in them would not be content with that. They stayed, they spoke, and a young and shaken church was settled and strengthened. This is the gift of exhortation in motion, taking the bare facts of a decision and warming them into a word that holds people steady. The same grace is needed wherever the truth has been stated correctly but the hearers are wavering and need someone to come alongside and say, now take heart, and hold fast.

The writer to the Hebrews makes this a shared responsibility before he ever isolates it as a gift. 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 Christian is to be doing this for every other Christian, daily, as a guard against the hardening that creeps in unnoticed. The person with the gift simply does it with a frequency, an insight and an effect that mark him out, and his presence in a church raises the whole temperature of mutual care. He often works closely with those who carry the gift of leadership, supplying the warmth that keeps direction from becoming cold command.

Keeping exhortation healthy

A gift that deals so directly with the feelings and the will of others can be misused, and the godly exhorter watches for the dangers. There is the temptation to manipulate. Because he knows how to move people, he could move them towards his own preferences rather than towards God, and a strong personality with this gift can bend a fellowship to his will if he is not walking humbly. The remedy is to keep the exhortation tethered to Scripture, so that the hearer is being urged towards what God has said rather than towards what the speaker happens to want.

There is also the danger of shallowness, the encouragement that comforts without ever calling to repentance, that tells people they are fine when the loving thing would be to warn them. The exhorter who flatters has abandoned his post. Real paraklesis is willing to wound in order to heal, like the Lord who said to the church at Laodicea that those whom he loves he reproves and disciplines. The fruit of a healthy exercise of this gift is not dependence on the exhorter but growth in the hearer, and you can read about the character that such growth produces in our study of the fruit of the Spirit.

So, now what?

If the Lord has given you this grace, then you carry a quiet responsibility for the morale of your fellowship. Look for the discouraged, the wavering, the ones who have stopped coming, and go to them with a word that is rooted in the truth and warm with affection. Do not wait to be asked. The whole point of the gift is that it goes out to find the one who would never put up a hand for help.

If this is not your particular gift, the calling to encourage one another still rests on you every single day. None of us is excused from it, and a church where every member takes the command of Hebrews 3:13 to heart is a church well defended against the slow hardening of sin. You might begin this week by speaking one specific, truthful, God-ward word of encouragement to a brother or sister who needs it, and then doing the same the following week, until it becomes the habit of a life.

The Spirit who is called alongside us delights to use ordinary believers as his instruments of comfort. Make yourself available to him, keep your encouragement anchored in his word, and you will find that the timely word you speak is often the very thing that keeps someone walking with the Lord.

“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