Who is encouraging you? Who is encouraging your pastor?

I hope that your pastor is a great encourager and cheerleader in your life! 

I personally try all the time to increase my availability and to improve my efforts at affirming and building up my family and friends and parishioners. 

The truth is that many times I have dropped the ball. Many times I have gotten too busy, too distracted and too preoccupied to either notice the people around me or to see what they might need by way of prayer and support and Godly counsel. 

But when I slow down and allow God to open my eyes to the struggles of people around me and to break my heart for what I see, then I also notice that God places in me a deep desire to help them to know that if they will look to God and call on His name then He will save them. He will save them from their sins and even from their enemies and will deliver them through the circumstances they find themselves in. 

I find great joy in praying with someone, telling them that with God nothing is impossible and that as they look to Him they are going to make it! In one sense it kind of becomes compelling that once I encourage one person I can’t wait to find another to encourage as well. Kind of like a snowball building up as it rolls down a hill, so too one opportunity “snowballs” into another and it just builds momentum as it goes. 

If you don’t have such a pastoral encourager in your life, let’s pray together, you and I, that God will supply just such a person who can cheer you on, speak timely words of the gospel and of God’s truth to you and who will pray with and encourage you. But let’s also pray that God will compel you and I to be and to do this for others. Let’s receive the mantle from those who have gone before and take seriously God’s call on our lives to encourage others.

Can I ask you one final question? Who is encouraging your pastor? Many people seek the pastor out for help and counsel and prayer (and to complain too!) but who is the person who is praying for and encouraging your pastor? We hope and pray that your pastor is going to Jesus and that God is the One who is ultimately sourcing their inner heart and outward life and ministry but who is the earthly mouthpiece that God is using to build them up in their faith? Think about it, you may not be called to pastor a bunch of people but perhaps they are. And if you encourage and help the pastor, then in turn you are actually helping to encourage perhaps even hundreds or thousands through them. And in the meantime you are showing God’s love and tender mercy to someone who is just as human, just as in need of encouragement as you are.

Let’s pray to be encouragers and let’s pray for all the encouragers of this world!

Grace and peace, I know that with God helping you, you can do it!