Barnabas

His name was Joseph. But he “was also called by the apostles Barnabas,which means, "son of encouragement,” in Acts 4:36. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to be such an encouraging person that your friends simply called you Encouragement?

Courage is the resolve to face a fearful threat and is fueled by hope. That hope is in something stronger than what we fear. Discouragement sets in when our hope leaks. We begin to tremble before our fear. When this process happens, and it happens often, we need an infusion of hope. That’s what encouragement is. Barnabas went around giving people hope-infusions, which helped them keep fighting the fight of faith. We need Barnabas people and we need to be like Barnabas.

Our day is filled with discouragement, criticism, contempt, critique, and correction. It’s the language of our sinful world. These things roll easily off the tongue far more than affirmation and encouragement, because the fallen human heart has an abundance of pride. Human beings are by nature viciously critical of one another. We’ve even made “critic” a profession. The vast majority of the analyses of people, ideas, organizations, movements, and governments we hear, whether in the press, on blogs, or at the table next to us, are negative. There are, of course, things that legitimately need critique and correction, but the overabundance of negativity is largely due to the fact that the prideful eye of the fallen heart is trained to see others’ weaknesses, mistakes, and sins. It looks for them and relishes in them. It even sees ones that aren’t there.

We are always on the lookout for any reason to lighten our own discouragement and the guilt of our own failings and sins. When faith in the gospel of the grace of the God of encouragement is absent or deficient in our hearts, we look to others’ failings and sins to make ourselves feel better. We should not be surprised when the church falls into a disproportionate amount of discouraging negativity. Critical discernment is necessary for spiritual survival because in the chaos of the battle, we can easily wound each other with critical friendly fire and forget that encouragement is also necessary for spiritual survival.

Encouragement is spiritual warfare. If we’re going to encourage anyone, we will have to fight Satan and our own sin to do it. The devil is constantly trying to discourage us. He’s the “the accuser of the brethren" in Revelation 12:10. And his minions are frequently throwing “flaming darts” of condemnation, jealousy, and resentment at us according to Ephesians 6:16. That's why the Word says "to resist him" in 1 Peter 5:9. Our sin nature wants to discourage others. It desires self-exaltation more than anything and relishes focusing on others’ weaknesses and sins out of arrogance or envy. Pride is why so much of what we think or say or interpret or hear about others is negative and uncharitably critical.

Joseph was called Barnabas most likely because he had an eye trained to see the grace of God in whatever happened. No matter what theological controversy, persecution, financial crisis, criticism, or failure, Barnabas had a resilient hope in God. When some threat discouraged his friends, he would consistently remind them of God’s promises in such a contagiously hopeful way that their courage would revive.  And that’s what we want to be like. We need to be Barnabas people.

Barnabas people are those who soak in and store up God’s word and, by doing so, are able to walk and talk by the Spirit. And when they talk, they tend to only speak what “is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear” as Paul wrote in Ephesians 4:29. This is not a simplistic call to stop thinking critically and be nice to each other. After all, Barnabas, the paragon of encouragement, clearly had a backbone. He went toe-to-toe with Paul over Mark in Acts 15, but he was characterized by encouragement, not combativeness or critique.

So this is a call for us to cultivate a culture of encouragement wherever we are. It’s a call for us to become Barnabas people, odd people who are so characterized by being encouraging that it becomes part of our identity. Barnabas people give grace to those who hear them. They are at large hope-infusers to the discouraged. Becoming a Barnabas person really begins by asking the God of encouragement to transform us into sons of encouragement who have Spirit-empowered discernment so that we leave whomever we interact with today more encouraged than we found them.