When my second son was a junior in high school, his soccer team experienced something that pretty much everyone at the game found disturbing. His team was very good that year, gaining the best record in their section, section one. As the section one winner, they were the top seed in the league playoffs, meaning that for their first-round play-off game, they went up against the second place team from section three, lowest seeded team.
That lowest seeded team had a great season in their section, winning most of their games. But there is usually a difference in quality between the larger section one schools and the smaller section three schools. No matter. When you make it into the playoffs, you are excited, hoping and expecting to do well. Even if you are a smaller school, you believe you can be David to their Goliath.
It was not to be. My son’s section one team dominated the section three team. In the second half of the game, when the score was something like 5-0, my son’s coach mercifully and wisely not only played his varsity substitutes, but he also played junior varsity players whom he pulled up to the varsity team for an expanded playoff roster. Still my son’s team dominated the section three team.
As the second half wore on, the section three team’s players started to melt down. They were yelling at each other. Committing fouls. Making really stupid mistakes. It was ugly, and very uncomfortable to watch. You know that feeling of coming upon a car accident? You think, “I really should look away,” but you just stare in morbid fascination. The soccer game was like that. The game wasn’t over, but it was as though the section three team were so thoroughly discouraged, they gave up.
Yet you and I have most likely experienced similar feelings as that deeply discouraged soccer team. Maybe you’re working hard to pay off debt, even working extra jobs, working overtime, and all it feels like you’re doing is working, but life is expensive, stuff keeps breaking, and you get discouraged thinking you’ll never get debt-free.
These past few months, my family’s water heater died, we needed new tires on one vehicle, our dryer was making a screeching sound and needed a repair, our well water pressure valve died, our freezer’s ice cube tub shattered inside the freezer, we needed new deck doors, and both cars inspected. Money issues can be discouraging.
For some of you it’s not finances that are discouraging, but perhaps its relationships. Maybe after the recent holidays, with a lot of family gatherings, those relationships, or lack of relationships, are discouraging.
Maybe it is health. Perhaps you’ve gone through a bout of sickness, cancer, or something that has you saying, “Growing old is not fun.” I feel the aches and pains myself, as this year is one of those big milestone birthdays or me.
You might feel discouraged in some of those areas, or maybe in other areas. Are you discouraged today? My guess is that you probably have a twinge of discouragement somehow or another. Maybe you’re thinking, “It’s not a twinge…I’m really struggling.”
As I mentioned in the preview post, I’m starting a blog series about relationships in the church. The question we’re trying to answer in this series is “How should the people of the church relate to one another?” Because discouragement is a widespread reality in our world, the people of the church should encourage one another.
In the New Testament, there are a variety of words for encouragement:
I want to focus on two that have the same root paraklesis, parakaleo:
The literal meaning of this root word is “to call together.” The word is used this way in Scripture, for example, when a person is calling together a group of people. “You might be wondering why I called you together today.”
But there is also a figurative way to use the word. When we use the word figuratively, there is an urgency, an emotion about it. It is defined this way: “to cause someone to be encouraged or consoled, either by verbal or non-verbal means—‘to encourage, to console, encouragement.’”[1]
This same word is actually a title for the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, and is defined by Louw & Nida as “one who helps, by consoling, encouraging, or mediating on behalf of—‘Helper, Encourager, Mediator.’” Scholars tell us that this role of the Spirit is a very active encouragement. In fact, they write that it could be translated “‘the one who mothers us’ or, as in one language in Central Africa, ‘the one who falls down beside us,’ that is to say, an individual who upon finding a person collapsed along the road, kneels down beside the victim, cares for his needs, and carries him to safety.”[2]
The word is often translated as “advocate,” for the Holy Spirit in John 14-16. The word is also used this way for the ministry of Jesus: “We have a helper (advocate) with the Father, even Jesus Christ the righteous one,” as John writes in 1 John 2:1.
Therefore, when we are encouragers, we are choosing to live like Jesus did. We are choosing to behave like Holy Spirit. Which is precisely how we should live. In Galatians 5:24, Paul says that we should walk in step with the Spirit, and one way to do that is to be an encourager.
So what does an encourager look like in practice? We’ll meet a famous encourager in the next post.
Photo by Tobias Flyckt on Unsplash
[1] Johannes P. Louw and Eugene Albert Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains (New York: United Bible Societies, 1996), 305.
[2] Ibid, 141.
Engaging Scripture 