Looking at the words the Bible uses for encourage — paramuthia and parakaleo – we saw that they really have no exact English translations. They both mean encourage and comfort and exhort, all the time. In English those are three different concepts – but in the original Greek they are one concept.
From that we developed a working definition of the biblical concept of encouragement – of what God is asking of us when His Word says, “encourage one another”: To help someone move forward on the path God has for them.
Even just the word “help” is not a bad translation of this concept either. You have to be with the person, helping, to be an encouragement. This is not, “Get back up on that horse.” This is, “Let me tell you how to stay on the horse, and help you back up.”
And maybe one of those Greek words, parakaleo, sounded familiar to you. There’s a passage in the Bible where the noun form of that word is often translated as helper, and that’s what we want to talk about next.
“And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever” (John 14:16)
Yes, in John 14-16, the Holy Spirit is referred to as the paraklete. That’s the noun form of parakaleo. So the Holy Spirit is the Helper, the Encourager, Comforter, the Counselor.
Let’s look briefly at what this passage says about the Holy Spirit and see what that can tell us about how we are to encourage one another. Obviously, He helps us move forward in the direction God intends for us. Specifically:
“But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.”
The Holy Spirit teaches us – and reminds us what we’ve been taught. While we don’t all have the gift of teaching, we are all responsible to teach. Perhaps a better way to say that is, we are all responsible to give others insight and direction from God’s Word. And I think we’re also responsible to remind people what they already know.
You might call that exhortation instead of teaching, and I think that’s a good way to describe the work of the Holy Spirit that is being described here. And it’s part of what is meant by the biblical term for encouragement.
Of course, the words the Bible uses for “encourage” are also very “with-y”, and you can’t get more “with-y” than the Holy Spirit, who is always with each believer. So we’ll look at that next time.
In the meantime, how are you doing with exhorting others? The Bible tells us to do it – twice.
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