Encouragement for the Discouraged - Audio
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And all the congregation lifted their voice and cried, and the people were up that night, and all the children of Israel murmured against Moses and against Aaron. The whole congregation said unto them, "Would God that we had died in Egypt, or would God that we had died in this wilderness?" Let's begin this morning with a word prayer. "Would God that we had died in the land of Egypt?" A cry went up from the children of Israel as they stood at Katie Sparnia on the verge of entering the promised land. Have you ever felt like that? Now I realize that we're not supposed to, to let on like we got problems, and we come to church with our, sometimes our plastic smile. It's not always the case, but I've had it on every so often. I'm sure some of you do too. We come to church with that mechanical enthusiasm that we drum up, it's not really spirit-oriented or spirit-inspired. This morning I'd just sort of like to be honest with you. I don't have some kind of an elaborate introduction or any kind of an elaborate message, but recently I felt pretty low, pretty discouraged, pretty disheartened. You feel like you're in a pit, or at least this is where I feel like you're in a pit and you're just doing all you can to keep the walls from caving in, and you're pushing as hard as you can, and you're saying yourself, "Would God that I had died in the land of Egypt?" How did I ever get into this? Really I feel that, as I look at my heart, I see that I've grown cold somewhat, maybe lack vision, sometimes I see that I major on the minors and minor on the majors. Anyone ever have that problem? One person said to me once, he said, "I don't know why you preach about, that you're preaching always centers around problems. You're the one that has the problems we don't." Now, that really aligned me, someone from in the church, by the way, didn't care for my preaching, it still doesn't. You know you really feel this when you preach. Because I know the key to successful preaching is not my previous study, it's not my ability to deliver a message with dynamic, it's not the polish or the rhetoric that goes into a message. What really makes a message effective, and you know very well as I do, no matter how sloppy I be, I should be, try to do the very best I can, but what really makes it effective is the fact that God has prepared the heart, my heart to preach it and your heart to receive it. Now, if there's a breakdown in either place, the message is lost. I mean, to go out and just preach the message to a congregation where the heart has not been received, and I've had that experience before, not here, but somewhere else, I couldn't believe it. The message went zero, it was one that I knew well, it was all ready, and you could just sense them, the congregation could care a lot, an evangelical congregation, but I felt flat that day. And there have been days that I've fallen flat in the pulpit here because that heart has not been prepared by God. And I know that it's got to be a heart that's prepared. You know one of the pits or traps that I get into as a pastor, and you don't always help
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Why we as believers get discouraged and how we are to handle discouragement.