Last week I said that it’s good to remember, but we need to be reminded (full story here).  In summary, Joshua had the Hebrews take 12 stones from the Jordan River to set up as a memorial.  We take the Lord’s Supper because he said “Do this in remembrance of me.”  It’s good for our faith to remember what God has already done for us.  But we often need reminded.  Our nature – just like the Old Testament Hebrews and Jesus’s own disciples – is to forget.

We also need to remind each other. In the ESV, the word exhort is used 15 times in the New Testament.  10 of those refer to a person that was exhorting and 5 are instructions for us to exhort each other.  Heb 3:13 says “exhort one another every day…”  We need to build each other up, and offer encouragement.  Nichole Nordeman says we all need an ata’ boy or ata’ girl once in a while.  When things are going badly, it may be hard to read the scriptures and remind ourselves of God’s promises.  If we’re a little down, we may not feel like praying.  As a community, Christians ought to be lifting one another up.  There’s enough junk in the world – stress at work, traffic on the road, bad on the news, bills in the mailbox, moral decay on television – to bring us down.  We certainly don’t need to be cannibalistic and devour our own kind.

So, don’t just IM an lol to your friends this week.  Remind them God loves them as well.  Some of us still have telephones, you know the kind that plugs into a phone jack?  And of course smiles are contagious, and still free.

🙂

That didn’t hurt a bit.