Are You an Encourager or a Discourager?

Here is food for thought: a rhetorical inquiry that one can meditate upon, and ask themselves. Are you an encourager or a discourager? Do you build up the brethren in Christ, or do you discourage, dissuade, and sow discord?

Now why will you discourage the heart of the children of Israel from going over into the land which the LORD has given them?
—Numbers 32:7

Do you edify and exhort people with encouragement, or do you sap their spiritual vitality with insults? Christ's children often face discouragement from their own wayward brethren, and from their oppressors who hold them and the Lord God of Israel in contempt. As Christians, it's in our capacity to lift one another up in a spirit of love. How sad it is that so many take delight in the bringing others down that they might exalt themselves? The Lord is the vindicator and protector of His people. May we with reverence and fear, be mindful of the value of encoruagement and be ever so weary of being a sower of discouragement in the hearts of men.

But Zerubbabel, and Jeshua, and the rest of the chief of the fathers of Israel, said unto them, Ye have nothing to do with us to build an house unto our God; but we ourselves together will build unto the LORD God of Israel, as king Cyrus the king of Persia hath commanded us. Then the people of the land weakened the hands of the people of Judah, and troubled them in building, and hired counsellors against them, to frustrate their purpose, all the days of Cyrus king of Persia, even until the reign of Darius king of Persia.
—Ezra 4:3-5

Do you oppress men's souls? Fear God and turn from your ways. The Lord is the vindicator and protector of His people, and those idle works will be brought into judgment.

Be an encourager!