All right, everybody, welcome back to I Just Want to Talk About the Bible, the podcast where we talk about the Bible, and most importantly, the one to whom it points.

If this is your first time joining us, my name is Christian. I live on the east coast of the U.S. with my beautiful,

amazing, godly wife and our two incredible daughters. And I am on staff at an international

discipleship ministry called Mentoring Men for the Master that's also based out of North Carolina.

So let me go ahead and say, we're going to just jump right into the content

here, but let me go ahead and at the outset tell you what my goal for this episode of this podcast is.

And the way I'm going to explain it is actually I'm going to read Romans 1513. So Romans 1513 says,

may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing

so that by the power of the Holy Spirit,

you may abound in hope.

My goal for our conversation today is to give you some hope,

to give you some encouragement, and hopefully to give you a paradigm through which you can look at your life and your circumstances. So anytime we

find ourselves in unpleasant circumstances of any kind at all whatsoever, we immediately start coming to some conclusions,

whether or not we realize it. We immediately will start to try to explain why we are in the circumstance.

We will look for a reason. And there could be a host of reasons. There really could be. I'm going to add

one layer, a potential reason today. That's a very valid reason, but there could be plenty of

reasons. If we're in an unpleasant circumstance, it could be that we put ourselves in that

circumstance. We do that sort of stuff, unfortunately, where we make decisions

and then we suffer the consequences of those decisions. And oftentimes when we do that,

we look to shift the blame, though. In fact, I didn't put this in my notes or anything like that.

But there's Proverbs 193 says,

when a man's folly brings his way to ruin,

...