I warned you that it gets worse.
In my last post about encouragement, we saw that it’s important enough that the Bible tells us twice to encourage one another, and that, depending on your translation, the Bible speaks more about encouragement than it does about prayer.
As I said last time, I don’t think that means encouragement is more important than prayer. But I do think it’s clear that encouragement is a lot more important than you and I usually think it is.
And here’s where it gets worse: We don’t even know what encouragement really is.
For one thing, the world has diluted our understanding of encouragement. Let me choose another abstract word as an example: love.
What’s love mean to our culture today? It’s a feeling, something you fall into and out of. It just happens.
Is that the love the Bible talks about? Nope.
See, if we modeled Christian love on worldly love, we’d be in deep doo-doo.
And because we don’t understand what encouragement really is, speaking biblically, we have no other model but the world’s model for encouragement.
So most of us think that encouragement is telling the pastor as you leave on Sunday morning that he preached a good sermon. Calling someone to cheer them up is encouragement. And if you’re really a big A-number-one super-duper encourager, you write encouraging notes to people once a … well, maybe, once a month.
Well, we’re in trouble even if we just look at what our English word means.
The “cour” part comes from the Latin, and probably got into our language from the French, and relates to the heart. With that “en” part on there, it means to give heart. Not literally to donate an organ, but to give courage. To give someone the mental or moral strength to carry on, to do right.
So do our examples measure up, even to the world’s definition of encouraging?
Sort of, right?
But there seems to be a whole lot missing, doesn’t there?
When we look at what the Bible says about encouragement, the problem gets worse still – but the solutions also start to come into focus.
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