Welcome to the In Touch podcast with Charles Stanley for Monday, July 21st.

When life doesn't go as expected, it is easy to slip into disillusionment.

In today's podcast, learn how to strengthen your faith and defeat discouragement.

Do you find yourself struggling with disappointment and difficult in hardship and trying to express what you're really feeling on inside?

And somehow you just feel that there's this cloud of discouragement that seems to hang over you no matter what you do.

If I should ask you, well, what do you think

that discouragement's all about? Some of you can say, well, I think I know what it's about,

but probably some of you would have to say, I don't know. I just feel discouraged. It's like

a cloud that hovers over me. I can't identify what it is. I don't know why it's there. I don't know how to get rid of it.

I just feel like I'm trapped.

If you don't know how to deal with disappointment, it can become the beginning of discouragement in your life.

And once it does, oftentimes it'll take you down a road of hurt, pain, disappointment, after disappointment,

after disappointment, and the kind of hurt and pain that those around you feel the consequences

of your unresolved conflict in this disappointment that you face. So I want you to turn,

if you will, to the book of Nehemi in the Old Testament.

And I want to give you a little background of what's happening, and we'll read just a couple of verses here,

and help you understand why this man, who had all the reasons in the world to face disappointments

and become discouraged by what he saw and what he

heard. And yet there's not a single verse in this passage that indicates he was ever

discouraged. So the truth is you and I can suffer disappointments. We'll have moments of

discouragement, but they should only be moments, because if you and I know

how to deal with them, there'll only be moments. They won't take us down that long road of

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