All right, good morning and welcome to our first service on Sunday morning.

We have two services, the first of which is our weekly Bible prophecy update.

And second service is our sermon.

And we're currently in a verse by verse study through the book of Hebrews.

Lord willing, today we're going to finish chapter 11. And in so

doing, we're going to look at how it is that we can hold on to our faith, despite the weakness

of our faith, or even the increasing persecution for our faith.

And that'll be live streamed at 1115 a.m. Hawaii time last week.

I know a lot of you online were off because in Hawaii we do not have daylight savings

time and you do. So anyway, hopefully you're back on

schedule. And for those of you that are on YouTube or Facebook, we would encourage you to,

at this time, go directly to the website at jd.frog.org. Ford.org for the unc uncensored, uninterrupted entirety of today's update.

All right, let's get to it. I want to talk with you today about how it is and really why it is that

God allows affliction and difficulty to increase in the lives of his people right before

he's about to deliver his people. Throughout the pages of Holy writ, we see this common theme as it relates to hardship, difficulties, trials,

right before God is about to take out his people. And such was the case with the exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt, slavery in Egypt.

Right before God took them out, it became unbearable.

The affliction, the hardship.

Right before God brings the plagues and then he takes them out.

If you would join with me in Exodus the fifth chapter, let me kind of give you the

back story of what's going down at this point. This is where God now has called

Moses to deliver his people out of Egypt. Now this is after Moses tried to take matters into

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