GREATER GLORY | DEFEAT DISCOURAGEMENT BEFORE IT DEFEATS YOU

There's a story about the devil having an auction of all of his tools and instruments that he had used to deceive and defeat humanity. A man came to the auction and was looking at all of these instruments and items and he came upon an old ancient dagger seeming to be worn out and

useless and yet it had the most expensive price tag. So he went to the devil and he said, "What is this dagger?" He said, 'It looks so old and useless and yet is the most expensive of all of the instruments that you are selling. The devil said, 'It's most expensive because that has been my most effective

tool against the people of God. The man said, "What is this dagger?" And the devil said, "It is the dagger of discouragement." 500 years before the time of Christ, the Jews came home from Babylonian captivity. They'd been there for 70 years. had been decimated by war. Daniel the prophet grew up in Babylon. Ezekiel

the prophet and priests grew up in the Babylonian exile. Esther was a victim of the war. The Persians conquered the Babylonians and Cyrus the great of Persia allowed the Jews to come home and funded the project. They got back home and they had to lay the foundation of the temple. That was the first order of a city

destroyed. They wanted the house of God. They laid the foundation. They built the altar of the Lord. And then discouragement and fear set in and the project stopped for 14 years. This period of history is called the second exodus. How many of you have heard of the Exodus in the Bible? Let me

see your hand. We all know the Exodus when the Hebrew slaves have been in Egypt 400 years and Moses appeared and God brought them out and through the Red Sea. The Exodus. And yet now hundreds of years later, they have gone into Babylon into captivity. They have repeated the same drama. And this