“Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing” (1 Thessalonians 5:11).

I was recently surprised to learn that JRR Tolkien could get discouraged about his work. He wrote the epic Lord of the Rings trilogy, perhaps one of the greatest movie epics of all time. It chronicles the battle between good and evil in Middle Earth.

Apparently, he was considering giving up on his story. That’s when his friend intervened. His friend was none other than C.S. Lewis, the great literary critic and author. This is what Tolkien said about the experience in a letter:

“I have never had much confidence in my own work, and even now when I am assured (still much to my grateful surprise) that it has value for other people, I feel diffident, reluctant as it were to expose my world of imagination to possibly contemptuous eyes and ears. But for the encouragement of C.S.L[ewis], I do not think that I should ever have completed or offered for publication The Lord of the Rings.”* 

In other words, if it weren’t for the encouragement of a friend, Tolkien would never have submitted The Lord of the Rings for publication!

Have you ever heard someone say that they get “stuck in their own head”? The meaning is that they ruminate on their own negative thoughts and lose perspective. It can happen to all of us, myself included.

That’s why encouragement can make such a difference. When done in the context of faith, it is a positive and God-honouring perspective that someone needs to hear. It can break through someone’s unceasing cycle of unproductive babble, and nudge them forward in a better way. Our brains can be like a broken record. Sometimes someone else needs to come along, lift the needle, and ensure the song keeps playing.

Our society tends to downplay the importance of words. That’s a mistake. Encouragement is a tool that God tells his people to use for their own good. 

Just think back to JRR Tolkien. As we encourage one another, we just never know the difference it can make.

Notes:

-*J.R.R. Tolkien to Clyde S. Kilby, December 18, 1965, in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed., Humphrey Carpenter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 366.

-The Up Daily Devotional will be going on pause next week while I engage in a week of study and prayer. It returns on November 24, 2025.

-Bible quotes are from the ESV.