But Encourage One Another RECAP

CONSECRATE Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.  Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you.  Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.  HEAR Hebrews 3:12–13 See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. CONSIDER As a kind of encore today, enjoy this series of quotes from across the series over this summer of encouragement.  “To encourage in the biblical sense of the term is to stand in the stead and agency of Jesus, participating in the work of the Holy Spirit, to minister grace to human beings at the level of their inner person, communicating, conveying, and imparting life, love, courage, comfort, consolation, joy, peace, hope, faith, and other dispensations and manifestations of the kingdom of heaven as the moment invites or requires.” “Courage is not the absence of fear, discouragement, or despair. Courage is the presence of Jesus. Jesus is all the courage of God in a human person. The main thing, my friends, is the right here, right now presence of the person of Jesus. It is not so much about practicing the presence. It is about presencing the person of Jesus.”  “To encourage someone in the midst of a trial is to greet them with the embrace of Jesus, welcome them into the house of love, and sit with them until they are ready to walk again. And then wander in the wilderness with them until Jesus leads them into the room of joy, where he himself, in his timing, assigns purpose and meaning to the painful trial. It can take years. This is what he does. He doesn’t need explainers. He needs people who will sonder and then wander and then wonder, but mostly love, love, love. That is the shape and sequence of encouragement.” “The joy of the Lord is not a silver lining in an otherwise dark cloud. The joy of the Lord is the revolutionary presence of Jesus Christ himself—in us—transcending our mortal bodies with his eternal life, presence, encouragement, perseverance, love, power, and all the possibilities this means. The joy of the Lord is not a “but look on the bright side” approach to life. This is no “glass half full” mentality. With Jesus, there is no glass, only fullness.” "Over the course of our lives, all of us have been through difficult trials. Unjust treatment, unforeseen losses, tragic deaths, life-stealing diseases, betrayals, relationship failures, and all manner of pain and suffering. These things create wilderness seasons that can go on for long periods of time. These are the places where we slowly and often imperceptibly lose faith in God. We would rarely identify it as such, but we begin to shrink back from real trust. We believe in principle but not in an everyday kind of trusting reality. We take on a wilderness wound, and our hearts slowly begin to harden. We don’t so much choose hardness as we fail to pursue healing. We allow a wall of protection to be constructed around our heart, and while it does protect us in some ways, it also slowly and imperceptibly isolates us from God and others. This is how sin deceives us. We mistakenly focus on sin at the level of our behaviors, but our behaviors are merely the symptoms of the sickness. Sin, in its deepest essence, is the condition of an unbelieving heart, and an unbelieving or untrusting heart inevitably becomes a hardened heart. And a hardened heart is the most dangerous place on earth.” “Encouragement, in the biblical sense of the term, is about personally and particularly hearing the voice of God from another person. As we encourage one another, we learn to speak to one another in the voice of God in the humble authority of Jesus in the loving power of the Holy Spirit.” PRAY Jesus, thank you for encouraging us, even me, by your Word and Spirit. You are my courage. Thank you for making me one of your encouragers of others; indeed, for encouraging others through me—daily—as long as it is called Today. It is all for your glory, for others' gain, and for my good. In your name, amen.