Discouragement is the number one attack on a believer. Discouragement means losing the benefits of salvation. If you are a true child of God you cannot lose your salvation. That is an eternal settlement sealed with the Blood of Jesus. But you can experience seasons of discouragement by losing hope, faith, strength and the joy of your salvation. You may feel depressed and tired, distracted and afraid. You will experience doubt; the Word of God is not ‘sweet and alive’ anymore. Church looks boring and just religious routine…
If you do not recognize the attack as a spiritual wickedness directed to you personally, you will become passive and weak. That will give time to the devil to increase the attack from other directions. If you are a leader, a husband, a father, a wife, a mother, a minster of God, then the attack is to bring you down, to strike the shepherd so that ‘the sheep’ will scatter. Just imagine: if the father is crying, what will the children do?
When all seems lost, when no man has pity on you, when your friends talk about stoning you… do what David did: ‘Encourage yourself in the Lord’. This is the privilege of the believers!
Never forget this! THE BLOOD OF JESUS GIVES YOU THE POWER TO ENCOURAGE YOURSELF IN THE LORD!!!
By the power of the Holy Spirit, stand up on your feet and pray, and worship…until the building shakes and God comes down! For as long as you have breath in you, there is still hope for the future!
‘You hear, O Lord, the desire of the afflicted; You encourage them and You listen to their cry; defending the fatherless and the oppressed, in order that man, who is of the earth, may terrify no more’ (Ps 10:17, 18)