100 - Encouraging One Another

Proverbs 16:24 NASB

Pleasant words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.

Proverbs 12:25 NASB

Anxiety in a man’s heart weighs it down, but a good word makes it glad.

1 Thessalonians 5:11 NASB

Encourage one another and build up one another, just as you also are doing.

Hebrews 3:13 NASB

Encourage one another day after day, as long as it is still called “Today"

God guides us with His comforting hand, granting us wisdom and understanding to see beyond circumstance. Lifting us up for us to in turn lift up one another with the same comfort shown to us. Since we see ourselves in Christ no longer from a worldly point of view God gives us the wisdom and insight to look past the external and what is often judged to be true by mere appearance and to see instead what is within the unseen. To judge rightly, seeing God's work in our lives. To help us see the best that is in each of us. To shed light on who, in His sight, we truly are.

God sees us in a different light because we are in a different light, a light of spiritual holiness and righteousness. Even if we find it hard to see clearly what He has done, it does not nullify the fact that what He says is truth and that this is His view of us. Yes, it is difficult having lived viewing ourselves in the mindset of the flesh caught in the age-old struggle with sin and guilt to see what He has done. Even as believers this view still lingers. If He sees us set free and new, then we are encouraged as those who believe Him to see ourselves in the same light.

God knows all things, we do not. Our perspective is not His perspective. He knows the ways He is changing us and where He is leading us even though we may lack faith and understanding. He sees us as those spiritually recreated whose walk in the flesh is being transformed. He prunes and disciplines us because He loves us, to bring about what He desires, what is ultimately our own desire. To see as He sees, not swayed by this world and the view it holds. A view of self-reliance carried within hearts and minds holding them captive. He has set us free to be truly free. To release ourselves, allowing our minds to renew according to what He has done not according to what He is in the process of changing. Our focus is on what is, not on what no longer is or what we feel is not. For God gives life to the dead and calls things into existence that are not as though they were.

God created all things, the splendor of all He has made to reveal Himself to us and to show how much He loves us. How much more magnificent are the ones He created all things for, you and I. We were created as walking miracles. Our fantastic bodies producing in us processes numbering in the quadrillions per second all in His control and sustaining power without a single input on our part. How can we look at ourselves and feel in any way less than what we are, what He has made us and lovingly sustains?

God so loved us that He gave His one and only Son. Who emptied Himself of all, came to live with us, and to die for us so that we would have all, what we now possess in Him. The length He went to recreate us as new, reborn spiritually, for us to acknowledge and believe what He has done. For us to help one another realize who we are. To build one another up in Him. To fill each other with what is true and right. To set our minds on things above. Sometimes we don't feel loved, but He has made it abundantly clear that He does. Sometimes all it takes is for us to tell each other the truth for it to become real.

In a world self-consumed we hold the power to lift one another. Some in this world are caught in addictions in the hopes to cope, to find rest and relief. Some in desperation end their lives as a last resort to set themselves free from a life they can no longer face. If they had only known that from birth they were created in the image of God, and that there was a Savior willing to save, a grandness if perceived and grasped. We are set free and enlightened by God, possessing within to share with one another what is true. In love to lift both believers and unbelievers with wisdom and understanding. To be lights, because we are lights. A reflection of who Christ Jesus is shining through us.