We All Need Encouragement (by Assoc. Pastor Linda Pugsley)

•  I can’t do this anymore
• This is too much to bear
• Why doesn’t anyone help me
• This is so unfair
• I just can’t go on

I’m sure we’ve all felt like that a few times in our lives. It’s a dark place to be but how wonderful when God sends along an “encourager”. Are YOU an encourager?

Or are you:

• A discourager
• A judge
• Selfish
• Lazy
• Indifferent
• Angry
• Full of revenge

If you depend on people, that’s what you’ll probably get. But if you depend on God, Ephesians 3:20 will fill your empty soul… "God is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine.” Now that’s encouragement.

Listen to the definition of “encourage”…

• To stimulate

• Strengthen
• Spur on
• Assure
• Reassure
• Boost
• Excite
• Galvanize
• Provoke
• Energize
• Fortify
• Invigorate
• Rally
• Stir

Makes you want to run right out there and encourage someone, doesn’t it! But encouraging someone is not problem solving…that’s God’s territory.

If someone is focusing on their problem, then God sometimes seems to fade into the background. The problem starts to loom larger than God.

Encouraging can sometimes bring that focus back on God, or bring some joy into our hearts during times of failure.

God is the encourager in chief, but we are His servants and should do the same to others.

1 Thessalonians 5:11
Therefore encourage one another and build up one another, just as you also are doing.

Deuteronomy 3:28
But charge Joshua and encourage him and strengthen him, for he shall go across at the head of this people, and he will give them as an inheritance the land which you will see.

Judges 20:22
But the people, the men of Israel, encouraged themselves and arrayed for battle again in the place where they had arrayed themselves the first day.

BEST ENCOURAGEMENT OF ALL…

Colossians 2:2
that their hearts may be encouraged, having been knit together in love, and attaining to all the wealth that comes from the full assurance of understanding, resulting in a true knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ Himself,

You can do this, we can do this, together in Christ we can overcome any danger, any challenge, any fear…as we encourage one another in Him.

NOW GO LIVE IT!