Failure to Encourage

Excerpt from What's Best Next post:  Coughing is Heckling

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This is one reason, I think, that the Bible is replete with passages to encourage one another and build one another up. We are to “consider how to stir up one another to love and good works” and “encourage one another” (Hebrews 10:24-25) and “speak only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear” (Ephesians 4:29) and “encourage one another and build one another up” (1 Thessalonians 5:12).

If you aren’t actively building people up, there is a sense in which you may be inadvertently tearing them down. I don’t want to say that that is always the case, of course. But we should definitely be alert to the possibility that, sometimes at least, failure to encourage is to discourage. Our general bent toward one another should be to take every opportunity that we can (and makes sense) to build people up.

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