Flattery fades. Encouragement produces fruit.

Pastor Devon Ortiz opened by drawing a line between flattery and real encouragement. Telling someone you like their hair might be kind, but it fades within seconds. True encouragement produces something, it leaves fruit behind. The question he set up for the rest of the message was simple: how does a Christian actually become the kind of person whose words build others up rather than just sound nice for a moment? He answered it from Hebrews 10:19-25, working through three things encouragement requires.

Encouragement starts with access, not words. Hebrews 10:19-22 says believers now have boldness to enter the holiest place by the blood of Jesus, through a new and living way, and are told to draw near with a true heart and full assurance of faith. The pastor's point was that encouraging speech cannot be manufactured directly. It flows out of the heart, and the heart has to be made new first. If someone wants to speak truthfully and kindly, the place to start is not with better words but with drawing near to Christ, who gives the new heart the right words come from.

Encouragement holds a line, and calls others to stand on it. Hebrews 10:23 says to hold fast the profession of faith without wavering, because He who promised is faithful. The pastor illustrated this by bringing two young men up front and having them link arms to physically hold a line, leaning into each other's strength so no one could push through. That is what real encouragement does among believers: it holds a position and invites others to stand in it together. He told the story of moving into a new rental with only twenty days' notice and stubbornly trying to move his family's entire household alone, until a young man from the church, Christian Catalan, took a day off work without being asked and showed up to help. That is what it looks like when someone stands the line with you rather than leaving you to hold it alone.

Encouragement considers one another, to provoke love and good works. Hebrews 10:24 says to consider one another, and the pastor explained that the word means to study, to actually pay attention to where a specific person is and how to speak into their life. He set this against James 1:22-23, where the man who hears the word but does not act on it is like someone who looks in a mirror and immediately forgets what he saw. He gave a personal, honest example from his own family, that he speaks very differently to his daughters than to his son, because discernment about a specific person is what makes encouragement actually land instead of deflating someone or missing them entirely. To provoke, in this verse, does not mean to irritate. It means to push someone with a sudden, sharp urgency away from danger and toward Christ, the way you would physically pull a child back from a car in the road.

Barnabas, the son of encouragement

The pastor then turned to Acts 11:19-26 to show what this looks like in a real life. Barnabas's given name was Joses, but the church renamed him Barnabas, son of consolation or son of encouragement, because of the kind of man he had become. When he arrived in Antioch and saw the grace of God at work, he exhorted the believers there that with purpose of heart they would cleave to the Lord. He was described simply as a good man, full of the Holy Ghost and of faith, and much people were added to the Lord through him, not because he pressured anyone, but because people were drawn to the kind of person he was and wanted to know his God.

The pastor connected this to a current member of the church, Brother Noah Clark, now serving as a missionary in Brazil. By his own admission Noah was never the most eloquent speaker and considered himself awkward, but he loved music, and he used it to pull people in. He would simply ask, do you play an instrument, let's play together, let's sing a special together, and people responded to being invited rather than guilted. The pastor recalled entire services where a whole row of instrumentalists ended up serving together because Noah had gone around asking one person at a time.

The pastor closed on the harder half of the Barnabas story. After his success in Antioch, Barnabas traveled to Tarsus specifically to find Saul, someone with a complicated reputation at the time, and spent a full year there teaching alongside him and building him up before anyone else would. Barnabas was willing to risk his own name to lift up someone else. That, the pastor said, is the real measure of encouragement: not whether your words sound nice, but whether you are willing to spend real time and real reputation building someone else up. He closed by asking the congregation directly whether they were encouraging people or only flattering them, and challenged them to start practicing the difference that same night.