The other day, I left a voicemail with a friend of mine to share about how isolated I felt and how I was coping with it in unhealthy ways. He returned the call with a message to my voicemail to remind me that God's desire was to be with me in those moments more than me getting my act together. In his voice email he treated me with dignity and respect.
This morning I sent the same friend an email. He replied to my email saying that he felt like he couldn't breathe, he felt so overwhelmed with work and life during the day. I was able to send him back a message reminding him that God had turned him into a new person, that he was doing better than he thought he was, and that God and his wife love him.
In Hebrews 3:13 it says, "Encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin's deceitfulness."
In both situations, my friend and I were tempted to believe the lies that try to creep in our minds pretty much every day. These lies threaten to tear us apart, no matter how much we might wish we could manage them. Look at the next part of the verse.
Hebrews 3:13 "We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first."
The author is implying that these lies threaten to tear the very fabric of our hearts and minds apart. Destruction.
Let me tell you something. When our very sanity is what's on the line, there is no time to worry about our present state of "togetherness". There is not time to worry about whether or not we are good enough to give another person the encouragement that they need to get through the day. This is warfare and the enemy wants to take down whom he can take down. He knows he's losing. He's lashing out, trying to do what he can out of sheer bitterness and vengeance.
My friend and I have a destiny paved in perseverance, but we're talking about the here-and-now. Are we gonna live right now? We've got to. We've gotta tell each other the truths that we can't remember on our own. It doesn't matter what our state of mind. We have to move forward in acts of encouragement and bonding. We don't do it, hoping for something in return from the other. We do it because they need our words of encouragement to survive.
The humble are found bold in declaring the truth to fellow brothers and sisters. It isn't about waiting until our state of being seems to be better than normal before we encourage one another. It is about survival. To this end, our encouragement is what begins to heal us in the first place (1 Pet 4:11). It's about telling the next person the truth about who they really are and being vulnerable enough to let them in on our own lives for the sake of our own survival as well. Both encouraging and being encouraged require humble hearts.