Encouragement is like dominoes lined up in a track. When the first domino is touched, it hits another--then that one hits another one--then that one hits one--then another, another, and another. Over the course of about 15 seconds, you could knock over about 100 dominoes. Since the beginning of Creation, God has encouraged us with His faithful and unfailing love. Even when we had a choice of whether to choose God or to choose sin, we chose sin. If it had been a temptation-less environment, of course we would’ve chosen God! Who wouldn’t have? But that old serpent was plumb determined to convince us that there was more to do by giving into other things and not take God seriously, so we chose sin. For that, God said we should die; that didn’t mean that He wouldn’t provide a way for us to get back with Him, though. About 4,000 years after the Greatest Bad Choice Made in History, God showed us just how serious He was about letting us get back. Most of the time, we call that "attention-getter", from God, Jesus. The Father, then, had encouraged us to overcome the fruits we produce from our temptations and actually choose Him, over sin. He wasn’t going to let Old Scratch (Satan) get a hold of us and tell us we’re no-good, sinful, useless people. He encouraged us and boosted our self-esteem by sending Himself down in human form to tell us that if we believed in Him, that we’d have the kind of life God always wanted us to have with Him. And while He was in human form, He didn’t show us that we were serving a God who wanted to punish us and condemn us, but a God who came down to love us so much more that He’d sacrifice His own flesh for us. Jesus, the Son of God, came down to serve, and not to be served. The original twelve disciples all thought that Jesus was the second coming of King David or his son, Solomon. That wasn’t it. Jesus was a descendant of David and Solomon, but He didn’t inherit their earthly kingdom, for His inherited kingdom was not of this world, but of the Heaven He, Himself, made. Since His power was established in a place that it needed to be established in, He could serve us and love us, because He can. Heaven doesn’t need to be defended and it doesn’t need Jesus’s supervision for construction, because it’s a perfect place and will be constructed perfectly, if Jesus did or didn’t serve and love us. It’s through that love that God made it so easy for not every human to want to pursue that sin. That love was so determined to win our love, that it sacrificed itself to get our attention to realize that we shouldn’t be afraid of how our bodies will die, but how we should be afraid of how our bodies and our souls could be destroyed in Hell. Jesus’s death wasn’t eternal. He was dead three days and that’s it. After those three days were up, He rose and told us that that’s God’s power. God can give life to the body when we’re born, and can give life to the spirit when we die. Since Jesus didn’t sin at all, and had no reason to die, He let sin kill Jesus, by resting all our sins upon Jesus to die for. But that sin decayed and meant no punishment for sinners who believed that we no longer had a death-debt to pay for sinning. Once that sin wore off, God sent an angel to bust Jesus out of there and Jesus was alive, again! Jesus had paid the price for every kind of sin from beginning to end of the human race, and now was ready to hand it over to us. Jesus showed the disciples that God not only was just fulfilling prophecy, but He was showing that sin could only keep the Son of God down for three days, but that wasn’t enough to keep Him down forever. Just like the song, "Lord I Lift Your Name on High" goes: "He came from Heaven to earth to show the way. From the earth to the cross, my debt to pay. From the cross to the grave, from the grave to the sky." That’s where God says, "You know what, guys? I’ve been saying for years that I’d let you spend eternity with me, ’some glad day when this life is o’er’. I sent my Spirit down into a human body that would tell y’all that you’d be saved because I love ya so much and I want you up here with me, in Heaven. And just to prove that this guy that’s name is Jesus is actually the One I sent, I’ll raise Him from the dead, after three days, since He hasn’t sinned and He’s pure, just like me! Now that He’s been raised, you can encourage the rest of the world, for generations yet to come, of these miracles of Jesus that I did through Him and how put Him through death and rose Him, just to pay for you all messing up all the time and forgetting me. I love you guys so much that I don’t want some weasel like Satan throwing you off from living the kind of good life I meant for you to have, at first. If you just hold to what Jesus told ya when He was living and all the other things I’ve told you all through the years, you’ll be all right. You know why? Because pretty soon, I’m going to just get rid of Satan so you all don’t have to worry about being imperfect and dying for it and making me sad. You guys can be as happy as I am! And boyyy...you guys still have NO CLUE all the good surprises I’ve got waiting for you when you get here! I just can’t wait! I hope you guys will really try your best to make it, because it’ll be worth it! Take my word for it!"
Jesus meant encouragement from God, you all! His purpose isn’t to punish us, but to pamper us for all eternity. Out of His pampering us, we can only give a little bit back to serve Him with (compared to what He gives us). Once we get to Heaven, we can, finally, give as much to Him as we’ve always wanted to, but never knew we could, until then. And that’s when giving is just as fun and happy as receiving, because we’re doing both at the same time! There’s no guilt to go along with it, either. He serves us; we serve Him. It’s just so happy that we can’t imagine how much it’ll actually be joyous. By earthly standards, it doesn’t seem all that exciting. But I think that just is caused because some of us know that, on earth, we can’t sing or play music all that good, so what are we going to do for God by singing worship to Him in Heaven? I believe that we can and will be able to sing and play infinitely better than we ever could here. We’d make Elvis look like he was singing karaoke for the first time, at times when people thought he was the greatest singer of all time. As a matter of fact, we’d probably make Elvis look like Barney Fife on Andy Griffith that one time that he was in the choir at their church. That’s probably just in our first second of singing in Heaven, too! We’d probably get ten times better each millisecond! Think about THAT! I just want you to take a break from reading this and think about how much God will improve our singing and our playing, in Heaven! If you’ve thought about it like I have, right about now, you know it’ll happen, but you don’t know how in the world it ever would happen. But hey...that’s happening in this world, not Heaven.
Back to the domino effect. What I just told you about how God encourages us is just scratching the surface of how much He actually encourages us. Come on! Jesus’s life can’t be compressed into a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter, a book, or even the Bible! It’s like John the Apostle said when he closed out his gospel: "Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written." I can agree to that, whole-heartedly. Jesus did so much by letting me get into Heaven by believing in Him, that John would still be alive, today, writing every little thing that Jesus has done in the world. That’s not counting Heaven. John would be PRETTY tired if he even got the chance to start on the first second of us being in Heaven. That’s probably why God got him to stop at just where earth stopped and Heaven started. God said to John, "Whoa, son. You better stop before your hand falls off your arm!" Now, if John was a lefty, like me, then he’d have a good five-foot blanket of smudging on the side of his hand, if he wrote about the first bit of time it’d take to wink an eye, in Heaven, that it’d be so neat and great and good and all that. See...God encourages us so much and does so much for us, that I can’t just contain it to a sentence or two--I have to write a whole paragraph about it. Even then, I don’t want to stop. God just keeps giving me stuff to say about how He encourages us so much.
Just think about this, though. When God gave us that first nudge of encouragement with Jesus, we just went and encouraged somebody else with the Good News with a kind word about them as a bonus--then they did the same with someone else--then that person went and told someone else--and before long, it just keeps on going and going and going like that batt-bunny. We’ve got to understand that God’s given us a great gift through encouragement. He’s given us the ability to go out and tell someone that they’re doing good and get them to feel genuinely good, for once. They feel good and they recognize that there’s another side of life other than just feeling down and out. They then have a hunch that they can be up and in the happiest part of life, by acknowleding the Lord as their Lord and God. Great feeling, isn’t it? Have you ever thought about how much you might change the world by telling someone, "Hi!"? Think about it. If you were to go up to a person, with the intention of showing that person godly joy and friendliness, and say, "Howdy! How ya doin’?", that might just be the peak of their day. And if you keep on doing it, they start to like it and might start to return the gestures in some unknown way out of a whole slew. They’d probably ask you why you’re so happy all the time and stuff, then you’d tell them, "Person, if you only knew how much more God loves you, compared to the way I just say ’Hi’ to ya everyday, then you’d be happy, too, and you’d do it for more people, too. Not only that, but there’s a whole Bible and some 6,000 years of God in our world helping His people out of His infinitely big love for us, that shows us how good we actually do have it, in our life. So what if the stock market’s got one foot in the grave or we don’t have enough money to pay the rent or the water bill? We’ve got so much to be thankful for! Just think--you’ve got a job, you’ve got clothes, life, people who care about you, money. There’s people out there who don’t have a lot of those things and they aren’t out there in some small, poor country. They’re out there, in the backroads of the countryside or in the frontroads of the city alleys. Sure, they’re in the small, poor countries, too, but they’re everywhere. I know a Guy who once said, ’You’ll always have the poor with you.’ And you know something? That Guy went on to do something to make those all those poor people on the frontroads or the backroads, in the city or in the country, in America or abroad, as happy as a Dino when Fred Flintstone would get home from work. Those people don’t need your job, your clothes, your life, this person who cares about you, or your money to be rich enough to afford God’s free love, since He already paid for it through Jesus’s life. Even though Jesus died, He didn’t stay dead. God let Him get out of His tomb after He’d been dead three days, and Jesus went up to Heaven. Jesus was a sacrifice that didn’t need to happen. God didn’t have to go to all the trouble of putting a person who was as innocent as a dove through death for three days, just to show us that He loved us. He could have just let us suffer with all our junky wantings to buy clothes or CDs or go have sex, take drugs to ’get away from it all’. God didn’t have to put it all on the line like that, for us, but He did. And you know something? He did it and we’ve got a free pass to be happy at no expense to us, other than believing that He’s done all that for us. Pal, you came into this world naked, and you’re going to die naked. But one thing that you’ll always have with you is a God who loves you more than any human could love another human. And God’s love isn’t a bad thing. It’s the best thing you could possibly ever have! And just to show you that I’m being serious, I’ll give ya a hug to show that God’s love is grand. I just want you to start thinking about that! If you have any questions, then just talk to me. I’ll try and go get you a pretty nice Bible so that you can find out more about all this neat stuff that God’s just set up for you. It’s really great. You shouldn’t pass it up, at all! If you do, then, I’ll be praying for you! But remember, God loves you, and for that, I love you and care for you, too, brother (or sister)."
By sacrificing time like that to tell someone why you’re so happy all the time, you might plant a seed in the person that makes them the next Billy Graham or Charles Schulz(sp?) or Rodger Bingham. Your words of encouragement, by the way you have built your faith, may help move someone else’s mountains, because you showed them how they can have faith in the Mountain Mover so He can help them move their mountains, by faith. Wouldn’t that be a great thing to do for somebody? To show them that God loves them so much that He went to all the trouble of making the perfect man, and killing Him, after so many loved Him. Those who loved Him, took the message that Jesus used to win their love with, and shared it with the world. Now you have the chance to stop being a victim of sin and let God overflow you with an extraordinary amount of love for everyone that He’s created, so that they may know Who to seek for a happy life. If you feel like you want to commit to being the best source of encouragement to those around you who need God-brand encouragement, then say the following prayer aloud (but don’t close your eyes). If you’ve got stuff that might distract you from getting it all in, then try and shut it out till you’re finished. Here it is:
Lord, I’m a sinner, but You love me so much that You made the Perfect Man to tell us that we could find eternal happiness--more than our minds can comprehend. When we still weren’t sure of the Good News, You let the Perfect Man die for three days, but You rose Him, after the price of sin had been paid in advance for me. Lord, I THANK You! I want to be able to accept Your free love and use it to help others be encouraged to feel and accept Your love. If that works, then, Lord, bless their lives with the best blessings and let them proclaim You to others more successfully than I proclaimed You to them. May I be the salt and the light for You wherever I may go. I love You, I thank You, and I can’t wait to see You in Heaven. In Your Name, I pray. Amen.
Good luck and God bless.
