Text: Esther 5-6 | Listen to Message Sometimes obeying God just doesn’t seem to pay off. You know the feeling, right? You decide to take your faith seriously, so you read your Bible, go to church, and try to live an obedient life . . . and things go worse for you than before! Worse yet, you look around at all the people who couldn’t care less about obeying God, and most of them seem better off than you! This is where God’s people find themselves in Ezra 5 and 6. They’ve responded to the call of the prophets Haggai and...

Text: Ezra 4:1-23 | Listen to Message Fighting for Hope I don’t mean to be a downer, but if you’re not discouraged about something right now, you’re probably in the minority. Discouragement is that common. And it requires no definition or explanation – you know it when you feel it. Discouragement is also self-perpetuating in that it typically drives us to actions (and inactions) that make our situation worse, rather than better. All too often, discouragement death spirals into full-blown depression and despair. As C.S. Lewis implies in The Screwtape Letters, discouragement is a particularly effective weapon of our adversary, the...