my last post about encouragement, <\/a>we saw that it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\nAs I said last time, I don\u2019t think that means encouragement is more important than prayer. But I do think it\u2019s clear that encouragement is a lot more important than you and I usually think it is.<\/p>\n
And here\u2019s where it gets worse: We don\u2019t even know what encouragement really is.<\/p>\n
For one thing, the world has diluted our understanding of encouragement. Let me choose another abstract word as an example: love.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s love mean to our culture today? It\u2019s a feeling, something you fall into and out of. It just happens.<\/p>\n
Is that the love the Bible talks about? Nope.<\/p>\n
See, if we modeled Christian love on worldly love, we\u2019d be in deep doo-doo.<\/p>\n
And because we don\u2019t understand what encouragement really is, speaking biblically, we have no other model but the world\u2019s model for encouragement.<\/p>\n
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\u2019re really a big A-number-one super-duper encourager, you write encouraging notes to people once a \u2026 well, maybe, once a month.<\/p>\n
Well, we\u2019re in trouble even if we just look at what our English word means.<\/p>\n
The \u201ccour\u201d part comes from the Latin, and probably got into our language from the French, and relates to the heart. With that \u201cen\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
So do our examples measure up, even to the world\u2019s definition of encouraging?<\/p>\n
Sort of, right?<\/p>\n
But there seems to be a whole lot missing, doesn\u2019t there?<\/p>\n
When we look at what the Bible says about encouragement, the problem gets worse still \u2013 but the solutions also start to come into focus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Not only do we miss the importance of encouragement, we don\u2019t really know what it means to encourage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1422],"class_list":{"0":"post-4026","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-ministry","7":"tag-encouragement","8":"entry"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/ian-fallis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/ian-fallis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/ian-fallis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/ian-fallis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/ian-fallis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4026"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/ian-fallis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4026\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/ian-fallis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/ian-fallis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/ian-fallis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}