Good morning.
If you would, turn with me to 2 Corinthians 10:2-6, please. We are going to kind of camp out here and move about the New and Old Testaments throughout our time together, but we are going to keep coming back through here, so you might want to put a finger in it or something to mark that place.
I ask that when I am present, I need not be bold with confidence with which I propose to be courageous against some who regard us as if we walked according to the flesh.
For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh.
For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses.
We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God.
And we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, and we are ready to punish all disobedience whenever your obedience is complete.
Lord, we ask You to take this time and open our hearts to hear the word that You have for us in Your Scriptures, that You would enlighten us in the ways that we are to walk. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Years ago, back in 1998, I took my first job doing full-time therapy. It was at a very nice facility out on the bluffs of the James River in Powhatan. It is called Beaumont Juvenile Correctional Center.
This is where the most violent and out-of-control juveniles in the juvenile justice system landed. These guys grew up real hard and really rough, and they were there now because they were making everything hard and rough on the rest of society, to the point that they needed to be separated off.
Needless to say, this was not the most trusting group of guys I ever worked with. They did not want to listen to you. They did not want to trust you, particularly when you were one of those psychology people.
Oftentimes, they would say to me when they first started working with me, “Mr. Murphy, you’re using that reverse psychology on me, aren’t you? That is the only psychology you guys know.”
What I would do when they did that was actually explain what I was doing with them rather than just denying it, because that was not going to get me anywhere. I explained why I said what I said, where I was trying to take them, and the purpose of what I was doing.
In that process, we began to establish some trust. In addition to trust, as they learned what I was trying to do and where I was trying to take them, they were able to better make a decision about how to engage in this process with me rather than just receiving the things I said, answering my questions, and being kind of lost.
What we see here is Paul responding to an accusation. He has been accused of walking in the flesh. He could have denied it. He could have fired back, “Good grief, did you guys read my first epistle? You’re accusing me of being in the flesh?” But he did not. He gave them an answer, and he told them what he was doing.
What he was doing was engaging in a kind of spiritual warfare. He talks about fortresses and taking captive. He uses a lot of military terms.
This spiritual warfare is not for their salvation. The church in Corinth was the church in Corinth. Those were believers; they were already saved. But he saw something going on in their lives that was impeding their spiritual growth.
From the context of what he says, you can draw that he is really concerned with their sanctification process, their relationship with God, and these things that are getting in the way of that. That is what he is working on in his letters to them.
He identifies two main targets of his warfare. You might count it as three; I would count it as two. He identifies the lofty things and speculations, and he identifies fortresses. He says, “This is what I’m working against.”
So, I want to look at the first part of Paul’s response, where he says what he is fighting against. Then we will look at how he is fighting against these things.
When we think about a lofty thing or speculation, it is obviously something that comes from our own mind. Now, the human mind is probably the best pattern identifier ever created.
We have computers that can multiply twenty-digit numbers in probably a fraction of a second now, but the human mind is better at identifying patterns than the computers we have today that are even that powerful.
This works out very well for us sometimes, and other times it gets us in trouble, because our brains are always trying to figure out things using their own internal logic. When this happens in a spiritual sense, or about spiritual matters, we can get ourselves into trouble, especially when it becomes too internal and is not based enough on what we know.
Paul talks about these lofty things. He says they are raised up against our knowledge of Christ. It is a very poetic sentence. He is painting a picture here, because he talks of these speculations, these lofty things that are raised up.
When he gets to that word against, he chooses a word in the Greek that means against with a downward relationship. He is telling them he is concerned with their speculations that are presuming to be above what they know of God.
They are not thinking about the Scriptures and meditating on the Scriptures as much as they are supposing their own internal logic to be superior to what they have already experienced of God. That word for knowledge is gnosis, and that means our knowledge, though incomplete, gained from our own experience.
The problem he has with them is that they reject what he has been teaching them, what they learned of the Lord, for their own ideas. In some ways, when you look at that, it seems strange. You think, “Who would do that? Who would reject what you know from your experience with what you have made up on your own?”
But the truth is, this is something that is extremely common. We see it throughout the Bible. We see it throughout our lives.
There is an example of this with the children of Israel, and we are privileged to see God’s direct response because that is in Isaiah 30. We see His response to their lofty idea.
The children of Israel were very afraid that Syria was going to attack them. As a response to this, they came up with a lofty idea that they would go to Egypt for help. With Egypt helping them, they thought they could conquer the Syrians.
It makes some sense. Egypt had a strong army. You know, the lay of the land—they are kind of south of them. If Syria was coming to attack Israel, they might go for Egypt. It makes a lot of sense in the flesh.
But there is a problem with this. There are a number of problems. They had forgotten what Egypt was like. When they had gone to Egypt before, they were eventually enslaved. Their children were thrown in the Nile.
Their spiritual sense was even worse. When God was calling Moses to take them out of Egypt, He introduced Himself to Moses not as, “Hey, it’s Me, God.” He said, “I am the God of your father Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”
Moses understood who that was, but then he turns around and asks God, “Well, who should I tell the Israelites sent me?” There is an indication there that the Israelites did not know who Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were. There is a suggestion, because God does not repeat Himself; He gives him a different answer. He says, “Tell them that I AM sent you.”
So, they were completely spiritually bereft at that point. But they had been taken out of Egypt. The very army of Egypt that they were looking to for help at this time was the army that God drowned in the Red Sea on their way out.
These men that they trusted were the men whose gods God, through a series of plagues, had shown to be false. But they wanted to go back to Egypt.
Here is God’s response in Isaiah 30:1-2:
Woe to the rebellious children, declares the Lord,
Who execute a plan, but not Mine,
And make an alliance, but not of My Spirit,
In order to add sin to sin,
Who proceed down to Egypt without consulting Me,
To take refuge in the safety of Pharaoh,
And to seek shelter in the shadow of Egypt.
Then, in Isaiah 31:1-3:
Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help
And rely on horses,
And trust in chariots because they are many,
And in horsemen because they are very strong,
But they do not look to the Holy One of Israel, nor seek the Lord.
Yet He also is wise and will bring disaster,
And does not retract His words,
But will arise against the house of evildoers
And against the help of the workers of iniquity.
Now the Egyptians are men, and not God,
And their horses are flesh and not spirit;
So the Lord will stretch out His hand,
And he who helps will stumble,
And he who is helped will fall,
And all of them will come to an end together.
God’s response to their choice makes clear the gravity of their sin by seeking help from Egypt. In Isaiah 31:3, God is revealing the error of their ways to them.
They have a fear in their flesh, and so they turn to things of flesh because they think they are superior. But God says to them, “These are men and not God. This is flesh and not spirit.” They are making the wrong choice. They are choosing what they see as opposed to the spiritual things, which they do not see.
Then, in Isaiah 30:1, God points out another problem with the way they did this:
Woe to the rebellious children, declares the Lord,
Who execute a plan, but not Mine,
And make an alliance, but not of My Spirit,
In order to add sin to sin.
Now, at times God has used an army from a foreign kingdom to rescue the children of Israel. At times, He has not. Part of their sin, which is the adding of sin to sin, is that they did not bother consulting God. They had their own lofty ideas.
Since they came out of Egypt, they had been commemorating that with the Passover. They had been looking back, and they were supposed to give thanks for that every year and remember it—remember how God brought them out and started them out as a nation again. But they forgot, and they turned to their own thinking and turned away from the Lord.
We see this again in the New Testament with Peter when he confronts Christ. Christ says that He is going to be taken up to Jerusalem and delivered over to the authorities, and Peter has a lofty idea. He thinks that Jesus may just need a pep talk. He is getting discouraged, so Peter pulls Him aside to talk to Him.
We see another strong response. The Lord says, “Get behind Me, Satan.”
Now, these lofty ideas—we could spend a year going through the Bible, and we could spend a year going through our lives. You know, sometimes these are kind of fun, particularly when you are looking at ones that are held by other people as opposed to ourselves.
But we only have like four verses where Paul is covering this. He did not give an exhaustive list. He chose another way to deal with them.
He talked about these ideas being held captive to the knowledge of Christ. He wanted them to know Christ so that whatever speculations they had would not rise above, would not presume to be above, the knowledge that they knew of Christ. They would be limited by that.
A lot of times in our life, when we think, “Well, you know, I don’t know if I can really—what if God doesn’t—will God really look out for my best interest? Will God really love me?” we doubt.
Well, if we know God, we know that He loves us. We know that He is always working things to His good. We would not have that lofty idea. It would be captured and not allowed to go off on its own, to presume to be above what we know of God.
Now, the question of the strongholds, or fortresses, remains. Paul is also trying to tear down these fortresses. He is using a metaphor to explain something that he sees in their life.
A fortress, back in those times and up until the advent of air power, would be where you would, in a battle plan, concentrate your troops in one area, and maybe war machines, and that would protect that area and the land behind it.
There is one, or where one used to be, not too far from here down in Petersburg. During the Civil War, the Union surrounded Petersburg, and the Confederates surrounded Petersburg with a defensive line because there was a vital railway junction in there.
They thought that if that land were conquered, if they got Petersburg, their supply lines would be disrupted and the war would be even closer to being over. So, they would find places along the line and put a stronghold there because that made it harder to take that line.
Usually, they would find a piece of ground or an area that kind of controlled the land around it. If you held this piece of land, it was a lot easier to hold the land around it. If you had that land, you had the land around it. If you got that land, you could take everything behind it. You know, it would be yours.
Now, if we are looking for what this could be in a spiritual sense, we would probably want to find something in our lives—some area of our life that we do not want to surrender to God, something that we are fiercely defending.
Because maybe, just maybe, if we gave God this, He would have everything, and we would be wholly dependent on Him.
I do a lot of work with Christian addicts, and this is something that I have seen repeatedly in working with them. These guys really want to follow the Lord. They really want to do His will. They want to leave their addictions behind.
But they are terrified. If they do, what will happen? What if they truly leave their addiction behind, and then something happens and they do not feel right, and they feel depressed, and they pray to God and it does not work?
They are always leaving these fortresses in their life so they can run back into them. They can still have access to their addiction, and that is impeding their growth.
An example we have in the Bible is a familiar one. That is in John 4:13-18. This is kind of picking up the story of the woman at the well partway through.
Just to catch us up, Jesus is in Samaria with the disciples. He sends them in to buy supplies, and He waits outside at this well, Jacob’s well.
A woman comes out there to draw water in the middle of the day in the Middle East, when it is probably the hottest time of the day. According to biblical scholars, this well is about a mile outside of the village, and there was a well inside the village at that time. Yet she is still walking all the way out here in the middle of the day.
Jesus, of course, asks for a drink, and then they get into an interchange about who has the better water. So, let us pick up from John 4:13.
Jesus answered and said to her, Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again;
But whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst;
But the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.The woman said to Him, Sir, give me this water, so I will not be thirsty, nor come all the way here to draw.
He said to her, Go, call your husband and come here.
The woman answered and said, I have no husband.
Jesus said to her, You have correctly said, I have no husband;
For you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband;
This you have said truly.
A funny thing happens when we are living in the flesh: we protect those coping mechanisms. We build these fortresses up to protect them so that they cannot be harmed.
This woman had a huge fortress system set up to protect her relationship with this man, where she was avoiding everybody at all costs. Despite all the pain of it, she did not want to give that up. She wanted to give up the side effects. She wanted to give up the consequences of what she was doing.
Jesus kind of takes a shot at this fortress and says, “Go get your husband,” because if the issue was truly that she did not want to come out and draw water from the well, all she had to do was solve this issue with the man she was living with but not married to. But that was not what she wanted.
The woman responds to Him. She is starting to catch on a little bit in John 4:19:
The woman said to Him, Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet.
Our fathers worshiped in this mountain, and you people say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.Jesus said to her, Woman, believe Me, an hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.
You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.
But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth;
For such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers.
God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.The woman said to Him, I know that Messiah is coming—He who is called Christ; when He comes, He will declare all things to us.
Jesus said to her, I who speak to you am He.
This woman does what many people do when they are confronted with sin or an error in their life: they turn to religion as a way to protect themselves from it.
Believe it or not, as we are looking at these fortresses in our lives, sometimes certain religious manifestations can be part of the fortress that we can use to keep God at bay. That is what she is trying to do with Jesus right now. She wants to find a way to worship that will make everything okay.
We see this a lot. People will say, “I need to get back in church because my life is a mess.” It is like, just by going back into church, we can get some sort of spiritual tune-up, winterizing service. We go back out, and we will be completely unaffected by the choices we make and the life we live. We just want those side effects taken away.
That is what this woman is seeking. She says, “Take away these side effects. Take away the consequences of my actions so I can live this way.”
But Jesus does not fall for this dichotomy, this choice of mountain or temple. He tells her what the Father really wants for worship. He says the Father wants someone to worship in spirit and truth.
The word for truth here means something where the reality of it is consistent with the way that it appears. So, Jesus is saying the worship has to be genuine. It cannot just be an outward worship, a fleshly worship. You need to worship with your spirit, and you need to do it for real.
You cannot just do it for the sake of avoiding condemnation for what you are doing.
The Samaritan woman, at this point, has a fortress that starts to crumble. She realizes she cannot keep this up. She cannot do it. She says, “Well, I know when the Messiah comes, He will explain all things.”
When Christ introduces Himself, that fortress crumbles. You have this woman who, just a short time earlier, was traveling out in the middle of the desert in the middle of the day to get water so she would not see anybody. Now she is running back to her community, trying to pull out everyone she can to see Jesus.
When that one fortress fell, she completely surrendered.
Now, this woman, at the beginning of her encounter with Christ, was not a believer. Paul’s letter here is to believers. We can understand and recognize that non-believers would have certain fortresses. They were not ready to surrender their life to Christ.
But Paul is addressing the believers here and telling them they have these strongholds which they are not surrendering to the Lord.
Now, in this Scripture here in Paul’s epistle, he does not really go into why or how these come up in the lives of believers. I think, if we can be introspective for a moment in our chairs, we know, looking through our lives, there are things we have not wanted to surrender to the Lord. We do not always know why, but we know they are there.
James goes into a little more detail on this. If you turn with me to James 1:14-15:
But each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust.
Then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin;
And when sin is accomplished, it brings forth death.
The words drawn away illustrate this very well. The NASB refers to it as carried off, which is another way to look at it.
We start right. We start out with good intentions. When we become a Christian, we surrender our life to Christ. You know, we think of the hymn, “I Surrender All,” and we say, “I give my life to Christ.”
Many of us have struggled. Some of us have grown up in the church and kind of knew from the beginning. Others have struggled and struggled and refused until they finally said, “All right, it’s Yours.”
But something happens, and we fall back away. There is a part of our life that we do not want to give to the Lord.
Both these lofty ideas that are apart from what we know of God and these fortresses turn us away from God. It helps to understand this if you look at ourselves as the tripart beings that we are: spirit, soul, and body.
Our soul is our mind, will, and emotion. Our spirit is the part through which we connect with God, and our flesh—that is our body.
When we are having a troubled time, it frequently comes from an injury we have received of some sort, an emotional injury. That is actually what this word for lust refers to. This word for lust is always a very particular kind of lust.
It refers to a lust that stems out of another Greek word called pathos, which means a wounded soul.
Something happens. We have a wound. We are hurt in our mind, will, and emotion. It could be something major, like abuse. It could be something minor. It could be irritation. It could be somebody driving five miles an hour below the speed limit when you are late for work, and it is bothering us somehow in our soul.
We have a choice. When we have that wound, when we have that pain, we can turn to God through our spirit for healing, or we can turn to our flesh to feel better.
Very often, we fall into the idea of just feeling better rather than healing.
Sometimes just the mere anticipation of trouble in our flesh also causes us to turn from God to our flesh. This is what we saw with the Israelites. When they were afraid of the Syrians, they turned away.
They turned from their spiritual relationship with God, which they were trying to maintain through the Feast of the Passover, reminding them of things like this. But in their fear, they turned away.
Oftentimes, if we are not really prepared, if we are not really grounded, it is our fear—those times of fear—when we are even more susceptible.
I can remember a time in my life when I was very, very afraid. It was one of the most fearful days of my life. It was the day I got married, and I was scared.
I remember asking my dad two nights before, “Dad, I don’t know what I’m doing, do I?” He said, “No.” That was it. He did not say anything else. There was nothing else to say.
Well, we went through what was typical for a wedding. You have a rehearsal, and at the rehearsal they take you through the process and the steps. It was not that complicated. I was going to a Southern Baptist church at that time. It was not Greek Orthodox or anything; it was not going to be real tricky.
But it was a lot for me. When we were up there getting married, I was kind of overwhelmed. I looked out, and I do not know for you guys when you get married, but it is kind of weird when you look out and see, as opposed to a wedding where there are a bunch of people you do not know, you know almost everybody.
My sister-in-law was sitting there staring at me the whole time behind my wife-to-be. I got nervous, and I thought, “I’m going to mess this up.”
So, I got an idea. I might call it a lofty idea: I would just listen to the pastor and do whatever he told me to do. I did not need to remember when I had to face him, when I had to go here, when I had to go there, or what I had to say. He was going to give it all to me. All I had to do was listen.
Well, at one point, when I was on overload, the pastor—and we were looking at the pastor—said, “Mark, turn to Carrie when you’re having times of trouble.”
I had already turned and looked to the side, looked right at her, and I was supposed to be looking at him. My family was in the front row, snickering and laughing. So I just did what I could. I had to slowly turn back the best I could.
The point of this illustration, which really in some ways may be more of an example than an illustration, is that we are not going to make the right decision. We are not going to make the right move when we are under pressure if we are not rehearsed, prepared, and grounded in Christ.
I had rehearsed getting married one time. It was not enough. I could not make it through the ceremony.
This helps us understand what Paul is talking about with his intervention. If you turn back to 2 Corinthians 10:6:
We are ready to punish all disobedience, whenever your obedience is complete.
This last line troubled me for a while as I was studying this. I originally started studying, really looking at this verse in depth, a number of years ago, and I was just brought back to it recently. This one has always confused me.
But what I think I can see in this, as I look deeper into it, is that this is how Paul is dealing with these speculations. This is how he is dealing with these fortresses. It has to do with obedience. We know he is talking about obedience to Christ.
This word for disobedience, again, does not translate fully. This word for disobedience means to do the wrong thing because you have not really been listening or paying attention.
Okay, those of you who are parents are probably familiar with this concept. If someone does not really listen to what you say when you tell them how to do it, they are likely to mess it up.
The word for obedience means to do the right thing after having listened fully.
Paul brings this thing about being ready to punish what they have gotten wrong as soon as what they do is right. He is laying out a priority for them.
It is not about, “Okay, you guys are in the flesh. I need to categorize everything you are doing wrong so you know it. Here is everything.” That can come later.
The first and foremost thing you need to do is learn what is right. You need to learn what the Lord wants from you. That is how you are going to have your victory.
There is a parallel verse to this in Colossians 1:9, where Paul goes into a little more depth with the idea of this ongoing learning.
For this reason also, since the day we heard of it, we have not ceased to pray for you,
And to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding,
So that you will walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, to please Him in all respects,
Bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God;
Strengthened with all power, according to His glorious might,
For the attaining of all steadfastness and patience; joyously.
It is our understanding of God that is going to enable us to walk in a way that pleases God—not our understanding of what we are not supposed to do, but our understanding of Him.
There is some interesting fruit that springs out of this growing of wisdom, knowledge, and true understanding. It mentions steadfastness and patience.
When we look at the Scripture in James about being drawn off, maybe we start okay, we are trying to go the right way, but something happens and we are drawn off. It is this wisdom and knowledge of the Lord which creates steadfastness. If we are steadfast, we are not going to be drawn off quite so easily.
If we are patient, we are not going to give up too quickly. “Lord, please help me deal with my anger and not be upset.” “Oh, well, that didn’t work.” You know, you are going to wait for it a little more.
One of the times back when I was working at Beaumont, one of the kids who worked with me—I spent a whole session talking with him about how to ask for things appropriately from people. He was too much of a thug at times. He did not know how to ask.
So, we worked on it, we worked on it, we worked on it, and I finally thought he got it. Later on, probably that same day, I saw him in the hallway. He was yelling and cursing at a sergeant up one side and down the other.
I looked at him and said, “Come here.” He walked over to me real casually. I did not think he would even come at first because he seemed so angry. He just walked over and said, “Hey, what’s going on?”
I said, “Didn’t we spend a whole session talking about how to deal with this?” He said, “Yeah, but I tried your way and it didn’t work.”
He had asked for what he wanted. They told him no. So he was like, “Hmm, okay. Go back to my old ways.”
Our ability not to give in to our own ideas that are counter to Christ, and not to run back to the fortresses which we have kept in our life, comes from being rooted in Christ—not a superficial knowledge or relationship. It comes from our being rooted.
Turn to Colossians 2:6-10.
Therefore as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him,
Having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him,
And established in your faith, just as you were instructed,
And overflowing with gratitude.
See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception,
According to the tradition of men,
According to the elementary principles of the world,
Rather than according to Christ.
For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form,
And in Him you have been made complete,
And He is the head over all rule and authority.
If the Israelites had remained rooted in God like they should have been, with that constant sacrifice—if that had been in a more spiritual sense for them at this one time, if they had really taken heart in the Passover—they would not have thought about turning away from God to the Egyptians for help. They lost that connection.
There is a word that looks kind of like it is hanging out there on the end in verse 7. It mentions gratitude:
Having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him,
And established in your faith, just as you were instructed,
And overflowing with gratitude.
That word for gratitude is eucharistia. It may be familiar. Some denominations refer to the Lord’s Table as the Eucharist. That word means thankfulness for what has happened in the past—looking back and being thankful for what has already happened.
When we are rooted in Christ, our thankfulness is going to overflow from what has already happened.
It is like if you think of a plant. It does not sink its roots into the soil when it is hungry, when it is thirsty. The plant stays there. It does not move around.
Jesus talks about Him being the vine and we are the branches. Apart from Him, we can do nothing. Branches on a grapevine do not go about their own way until they want to bear fruit and then come back and reattach to a vine.
But for some reason, I think we lose some of these agricultural illustrations because we are so used to grocery stores. We are so used to restaurants and fast food. We go, we want food, and it is there. When we need it, it is there.
But that is not what the Bible is telling us we need to do. It is not, “Go to God when you need Him.” Stay with God. Be rooted in Christ, because apart from Him you can do nothing.
Apart from Him, you are going to be drawn off to your more inaccurate thinking.
If we try to solve our problem outside of Christ, it would be just like if the Lord had said to the woman at the well, when she said, “Give me this water so I never have to thirst again and do not have to come up here,” He could have done that.
But what would have happened? If Christ had taken away her need for water, she would have continued in isolation from God and man. She never would have surrendered her spirit to the Lord.
But when we are not grounded in Christ, we are not rooted in Christ, so often when we look to Him, we ask for that help because we are looking not at Christ; we are looking at our problem. We are like, “Lord, take this away. Deal with this.”
When it does not happen, we can get frustrated because we are not rooted in Christ. We are not looking to Christ.
If we are truly rooted in Christ, with that thanksgiving for everything He has done, starting with our salvation and moving forward in our life, those other things that we are looking at, those other challenges outside of us, are not nearly so intimidating anymore.
They do not matter, just like for the woman at the well. Once she fully connected to Christ, she was no longer concerned with how she was going to draw her water. It did not matter anymore.
As we live in this world, we are going to be in the flesh. We cannot escape it for this time. It will be with us.
But our victory in this life is not going to come through our flesh. It is going to come only through our constant seeking and our constant connection to Christ—our knowing Him and letting our knowledge of Him captivate us entirely: our thinking, our soul, and those spots in our life that we did not want to surrender.
Those are the only ways that we will have the joy that He talks about here, even in trial.
Pray with me.
Lord, we just ask that You help us to draw close to You, to stay connected to You, to not think of You only in times of trouble, but to stay connected to You all the time; to learn from You and learn Your ways. In Jesus’ name, amen.