Postcards of Encouragement

1 Thessalonians 5: 11 Therefore encourage and comfort one another and build up one another, just as you are doing.

I THINK Paul and his team were on to something God-good when they wrote these words to the Church in Thessalonica.

They were saying that we see what you are doing, keep at it, it is what is needed for the church! Encourage and comfort, exhort and pray, console, strengthen, and teach each other. Build-up, edify, restore, promote growth in wisdom, grace, holiness, blessedness with one another.

What a message to receive! These are words that spotlight the good in a community of faith and seek to amplify that good so it influences and shapes those around the community, that the encouragement, comfort and exhortation spreads transforming the area.

We catch sight of the love between authors and recipients and their community. All of them strong enough to demonstrate their love for one another, hoping it grows that sense of belovedness of God in the other. Belovedness that could be explained as that contentedness and deep peace that God is for you, not against you, where we are held close to the very heart of the God of love.

Isn’t this what we so often read in the articles from the Life and Work team?

Beginning at the start of every edition with Lynne’s editorial comments and the many stories from the rest of the team throughout the rest of the magazine. Our Life and Work team are so faithful in living out 1 Thessalonians 5v11. Every month they bring us postcards of good news from around the nations. These ‘postcards’ highlight the goodness of God and inspire us all on. I was a bit ambivalent towards sending postcards when I was on holiday. It meant being still and writing and there was always so much new and unexplored to venture into! I did, however, thoroughly enjoy receiving them! And now, with social media, we can send digital postcards very easily, can’t we? Photos and reels of where we are shared on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and the other platforms.

What if your Church committed to sending a digital postcard to your community every week of this summer with words of encouragement and comfort? A message you knew would lift up wearied hearts to consider the love of Jesus?

With church attendance increasing by 50 per cent in the last six years*, let us keep encouraging, comforting and building one another up just as we are doing, perhaps, we too are on to something God-good!

(*The Quiet Revival, a survey in England and Wales commissioned by Bible Society and conducted by YouGov).