Hallelujah, we love you so much. Thank you for being in the House of the Lord this morning. You may be seated. You guys not only sound good, but you look amazing. You look like champions. My friend had foot surgery, and the doctor told her that she would have to stay off of her foot for about a month.

So after a month of recovery, I saw her and immediately I wanted to know, how is your foot?

She said to me, I'm now going to physical therapy.

And then she began to tell me a little bit about her physical therapy

sessions. And she said to me, when I first got to physical therapy, my therapist said this,

does your foot hurt right now? And she stopped and said, no, I'm not in any pain right now. And she said, she looked right at me

and said, if you're not in pain, why are you limping? It kind of took her back for a minute.

And she said, well, I'm trying to protect my foot. I don't want to hurt it again. I don't want to

do anything that'll cause me any more pain. Can you understand that line of thinking today?

I certainly can. You know, when you're in pain, the last thing you want to do

is start acting like you normally did. The last thing you want to do is step out in boldness.

The last thing you want to do is go out on a limb because you certainly don't want to hurt yourself

again. That physical therapist looked at her and she said, I need you to quit limping.

She said, if you don't begin to do and walk like you normally do, your foot will not strengthen.

Those ligaments will not go back in place and you won't be able to do

what you want to do you won't be able to walk like you did before you'll always walk with a limp

i just want to encourage every one of us to not allow pain, hurts, discouragement to cause us to walk with an emotional limp.

Pain comes to all of us. Discuragement is a part of life, but we have to understand that god is bigger than all of those things

combined you see my friend didn't even recognize that she was walking with a limp she had had to have her therapist tell her. You see,

what she had done is she had formed what the Bible calls a stronghold in her mind. A wrong way

of thinking. She was on the thinking pattern that she could never walk on her foot the way she used to.

That it would always be less than, that this foot would always be weaker than the other foot.

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