Empowered by Encouragement: Strengthening Our Spiritual Journey

And I'm telling you, I could just picture, you know, the Harley jackets, the Harley mamas, the Harley kids, the Harley babies, the... I don't know, everybody is there and they all, like, watching a guy.

And then he finishes his long operatic, or, you know, thing in tongues. And the bartender leans over and says, "That's beautiful, can you do it again?" I had no idea what in the world he was doing.

And Bill's like, I see, it's like... seeing God just can do things that we don't give Him permission to do, because we are smarter than Him. We have been to a church that told us, "You can't." We have learned, because we found a verse that we could twist to say, "God can't."

Isn't that an insult to use the words that He's given by inspiration of the Holy Spirit to tell the Holy Spirit He can't? Thanks, Chloe, tell me that every now and then. I'm going to preach, and she's like, "Come on, come on." And she's like encouraging me over there.

And so, I think it's time for us to let the Holy Spirit work in our lives again. The Holy Spirit, our advocate, the one that we were told in Acts 1:8, that we would receive power to be a witness for Him. This is important stuff.

All right, I want to take a little bit of time here. So let's pause in the normal progression of this message and let's talk about some of the concepts that are, I guess, used in Scripture to teach what encouragement looks like.

So I'm going to get geeked out here for a couple minutes, say it's okay because you can't stop me anyway. I want to focus on both the Hebrew concept of encouragement and then the Greek concept of encouragement.

And I'm not going to dive so deep that we're going to take a long time in this, but I want you to understand that it's more than just what we often think of as encouragement. It includes a lot of what we think of as encouragement.

If I were to ask you today, what is encouragement, you would probably say what I would say, it's like when a friend or somebody comes along and they kind of, you know, give you a pep talk, kinda like a cheerleader, good job, you know, something like that, and it kind of helps you.

Or you're feeling down and they come along and they kind of listen to you and then tell you, you're an idiot, and tell you how to get out of it, you know? No, I don't know. And you would say something along those lines. Maybe you would describe it a little different way, but I mean, encouragement just looks like encouragement, right?

The Bible talks about encouragement in these ways. So it starts off, this Hebrew concept is the hand of power. This concept starts with the hand of power.

So I want you to look at your hands. And when there is power in your hands, that means quite literally, you have whatever you need to accomplish what your hands are meant to do.

So if you're supposed to be, you know, an MMA fighter, you gotta know how to fight, right? If you have to be a mime artist, you gotta know how to do mime, right? And if you are a musician, you got to learn all that kind of stuff.

Any one of the skills, welding. Everything that you guys in this room, all you people. You have skills, things you do with your hands, your mind or whatever. And you know what you've got to have? That stuff.

And when it's lacking, that means you don't have the ability to do what you were created to do. That's called discouragement. In one concept of the Bible, encouragement is putting that power back into your hands.

So this is the first big way to understand encouragement. Now think about how broad that is. What a beautiful banner.

So when the Bible talks about, "Be strong in the Lord," He's saying, "I want you to be encouraged." And when the Bible says to Joshua, "Be strong, Joshua," He's actually saying, "I want you to be strong in your hands. I want you to be bold with what you were called to do.

I don't want you to let anything come and steal that power and ability to do what I've called you to do. So you need to be obedient to this command and be courageous. Be strong."

And so that hand of power is very important. It also involves a concept of direction...