Chapter Ten - Helping
Chapter Ten
Helping
When I was a young boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’
- Fred Rodgers[i]
When God wanted humanity to appreciate who He was, He made a woman.
Eve was her name, given to the man as a helper (Genesis 2:20). A helper is someone who gives us what we cannot give ourselves. In the gift of woman to man, God gave him love, caring, intimacy, communication, and joy on a human plane. These are things the man could not have given himself. He needed a helper.
The same word that signifies the beauty of the woman as the man’s helper (helper is the Hebrew word Ezer) is most frequently used to refer to God. Ezer refers to a source of strength outside of ourselves. Of the twenty-one uses of Ezer in the Old Testament, sixteen are used of God. God gives to us that which we cannot give ourselves. What are the gifts resulting from God as Helper? Fear is banished, flourishing abounds, security pervades, and enemies are vanquished. “So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand” (Isaiah 41:10, emphasis mine).
As we saw in chapter eight, Jesus was primarily a servant sent by the Father to serve those of us who could not save themselves. If taking on the role of a slave was good enough for the Son of Man, it should be good enough for us. Helping is a noble venture, and as we help, we do it humbly.
It would be an easy thing to do – to help others in their need if it weren’t for us. To be honest, we often get in the way of being God’s agents of blessing. Opportunity abounds. Time is not of the essence. Rather, it is we who are the blockage.
When we considered earlier what it would look like for pride to be our guide in section one, what was apparent was that self-love, with eros at the center, was the seedbed of pride. For if we have a high estimation of ourselves, we will have a lower estimation of God and of the people around us made in His image.
The new paradigm of self, where agape is at the center, will seamlessly lead to service. The diagram below gives us a good image of what our new core of life looks like as we are connected to Christ, who is Himself agape.
Fig. 13 Self - Agape
We feel tension when the needs of others embrace the means of meeting those needs that we possess. We are conflicted. The conflict is between eros and agape. This is another way of saying the conflict lies between the self being the end or the means to the end.
Lewis Smedes has a helpful response to our tension. “There is a simple answer, I believe, though it is not easy to practice. The answer is this: our self can be either a means or an end. If we make ourselves the end, the ultimate goal, and the final aim of our striving, we are in conflict with agape love. Love does not seek itself as the living end. Instead, love is the power that drives us to seek ourselves as a means of being agents of love. This will take some thinking through, and it is very important to get it straight. If we do not have it clear, we will never relieve our conflict between self-seeking and self-denial.”[ii]
Before we get to how to practice helping others, we need to consider some basic tenets of serving.
We need to prepare for discomfort. “No sweat, no service” might be our motto. Jesus called it suffering. He described the fruitful life as the dying life – like a seed that is set down into the earth to die (John 12:23-24). John Stott writes, “It is not just that suffering belongs to service, but that suffering is indispensable to fruitful, effective service.”[iii] Discomfort is normative for all who want to advance in servanthood.
We need to deny our love of self. Following Jesus is more than putting our faith in Him and waiting to ascend to heaven. True following means death. “No death to self, no life for others” might be our motto. “Then he said to them all: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it.” (Lk 9:23-24).
With these two seminal tenets in mind; discomfort and self-denial, we now move to the practical question of “Now what?” How do we do it? Follow Jesus daily by helping others daily.
[i] Maxwell King, The Good Neighbor: The Life and the Work of Fred Rodgers, New York: Abrams Press, 2018, 6.
[ii] Smedes, p. 54.
[iii] John Stott, The Cross of Christ. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1986, 320.