This is Pastor Daniel Stevenson, I'm director of the Southside Life Station and pastor of New Heights Fellowship Baptist Church of East Toledo.
And you're receiving this message because you opted in to be encouraged.
Stuff that's going on in the world that just make my heart ache, tragedies, illness, violence, it's terrible.
Hebrews chapter 11 in a long list of fathers of the faith and people who were found faithful talks about Lot and how he was living in Sodom and Gomorrah.
And it says that that man's righteous soul was vexed daily as he lived amongst that unrighteous people.
And my first thought was, well, I'm kind of like that.
I feel vexed over everything wrong in the world and all the bad stuff that's happened and the bad stuff that's in my life and the stuff that I don't like.
And so I said, my righteous soul is vexed.
And then I realized, well, I get my righteousness from Jesus Christ.
Jesus paid the price for my sins.
I'm righteous and I live righteous the best I can, but I'm righteous because of Jesus, not because of me.
And then I was thinking about the vexed part and I realized that that long passage of scripture talking about all those people were waiting for the Messiah to come.
They were a cloud of witnesses for us.
They were waiting for the coming of the Messiah.
Now, here we are on the other side of the coming of Jesus and he's already sacrificed himself for sins and we can see that.
Not only that, we have the Holy Spirit.
Those of us who have believed in Jesus received the Holy Spirit of God enough and he sets us on a path for eternity.
They didn't have that.
And so I'm thinking about the difficulties that they faced and they went through.
And I think, you know what? I think we can do it too.
I think we can stand firm and do what we have to do and be God's people living for Jesus and practicing gentleness and kindness and all the fruits of the Spirit.
Let us be good.
Even though we're waiting for Jesus's second coming and we see all this bad stuff happen, just like they did, we can wait through it for the next coming of Jesus.
Doing the right thing and being found faithful just like they were.
Won't you strive with me to be found faithful?
No matter how difficult your situation might be, we can do it.
God bless you today.