40acts: Ready to ActSample

Act 25: Shout Out

Today’s the day for getting out your trumpet and making a noise about someone who’s gone above and beyond recently. Don’t swamp feedback forums and online review sites with negativity and complaint. Use them as a way of shouting ‘Well done!’ and ‘Thank you!’ from the cyber rooftops. Small scale, large scale, pen, phone or computer, individuals or organisations, you choose.

Ephesians 4:29 says ‘Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.’ Encouraging other people ‘gives grace’. In other words, there is something about our kind words that releases a measure of God’s Spirit to those who hear you. Why does Ephesians say this? Why is that how it works?

Encouragement gives those who hear the ability to live the way that God has given them to live. Whether it’s telling a speaker, ‘Wow, you spoke with such clarity today!’ or a close friend, ‘You’ve always been so faithful and consistent,’ our encouragement gives them momentum in how they live. It points out something that they might not have been aware of, or might have only half-appreciated. Your encouragement doesn’t even have to tell them to keep going. All you have to do is encourage, and that plants a seed that grows in their hearts. 

There’s a beautiful thing that happens as we become encouraging people who focus on others above ourselves. Our lives become more attractive, more Christ-like, more winsome. 

Paul puts it this way in his letter to the Ephesian believers he was unrestrainedly encouraging: ‘God’s grace… was given to me for you’ (3:2). Or, as Bill Johnson expands on this: ‘God’s Spirit is in me for my sake, but upon me for your sake’. The Lord lives in you. But he has grace on you that goes beyond the margins of your life. It is meant to go out to others, and, today, to reach those who need an encouraging word to lands right when they need it.