One of the most needed ministries in the church today is the ministry of encouragement. To encourage is to give courage, to give hope, to give confidence, to give comfort. People who encourage are known as energy-giving people.
You know, everyone needs to be encouraged. Even such a great servant of the Lord as the apostle Paul needed encouragement. It's amazing as you read through the book of Acts and the letters of Paul in the New Testament how many references he makes to the value of having other people around him to help him in the ministry, whose friendship he treasured, whose companionship he needed. Paul felt it keenly when he was in prison or in a difficult ministry situation . . . how much he relied on the encouragement of others of God's servants around him.
Everyone needs to be encouraged, but also, everyone needs to be an encourager. It's easier for us to focus on how we need to be encouraged. But it's more important to remember that all of us need to be encouragers.
Being an encourager is not an option. Thirty-two different times in the New Testament we read that there are things that as believers we are to do for "one another." Be kind to one another. Love one another.
When God brings His encouragement into your life and you let it overflow into another's life, you're really sending encouragement from God. When we let God encourage our heart in our stressful or discouraging circumstances, then we can become a means of giving God's encouragement out. We minister His grace to others.
It's easy to wait for others to come and encourage us. Especially when we're in a discouraging circumstance. Our tendency is to think "I need someone to encourage me,".
If we wait for others to come and encourage us, we're probably going to stay pretty much discouraged, because any time my focus is on self, that's a dead-end street. . But rather than looking for someone to encourage us, if we want to look out and ask the Lord, ‘Who could You encourage through me, even as I'm walking through these circumstances?’"
What goes 'round comes 'round. We reap what we sow. I really believe that we will be encouraged as we set out to encourage others. The time I most feel the need to be encouraged is the time I most need to focus on how I can be an encourager to others.
. It's really interesting that people who you would think need the most encouragement, whose lives have the most discouraging circumstances, often those people turn out to be the best encouragers.
Encouragement really is a matter of the heart. It's a matter of that inner person that's failing, that's fainting, that's weak or weary. Someone comes alongside and they minister the grace and the Spirit of God and our hearts are encouraged and strengthened because someone has come alongside of us.
When we encourage others, the goal is that we would point one another to the ultimate source of life for our internal batteries—that we would bring each other to the place where we could strengthen ourselves in the Lord.
So as we think about the people in our life right now, who needs us to come alongside of them and say, "Let me give you a jump start”? Then ask God to show you how. Say, "Lord, I'm available. I make myself available to be an encourager in the life of this person who is weak and needs a fresh start."
From Revive Our Hearts.
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