Encouragement: Oxygen For The Soul

We can breathe life or death into others by our words, Amen? Watch the faces of your hearer and you can most certainly discern this truth. Encouragement blesses the hearer, strengthening them and breathing life into them. And Scripture says, “the tongue that brings healing is a tree of life”. It is amazing, is it not, how people simply need to be noticed and loved – that they have purpose and presence - demonstrating to them their great value and worth – and it costs the encourager nothing. And how good is a timely word! We are all valuable in God’s eyes and He is familiar with all our ways. He created our inmost beings, knitting us together in our mother’s wombs. We are all fearfully and wonderfully made. He looks not at the outward but at the inward. Searching our hearts, strengthening and encouraging His children. 2 Chronicles 16:9 tells us: “For the eyes of the LORD range throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him.” 
Encouragement is not merely an add on nicety – a mere tip of the hat so to speak. It is genuinely caring for the hearer. It is wholeheartedly desirous to strengthen and empower others with our words of affirmation and kindness. Many of us are too caught up in our own little worlds to look to the interest of others yet in God’s upside down economy as we give out we get. Indeed, often more than the hearer receives. We are never to be stingy with kindness and affirmation towards others as we do this to our own detriment and loss. Be faithful to breathe life to the hearer and not the stench of death. In doing so we will be a blessing and we will also be blessed.