Welcome to the in touch podcast with Charles Stanley for Wednesday, June 19th.

Are you in what seems like a hopeless situation?

With God, believers can endure and thrive during the dark moments in our life.

If you want God's best in your life and you want to make your life count, then you can expect to travel

the road of adversity. It's always there. And it's amazing how somehow God uses adversities in our life to shape us, to make us fit, and to equip us to do the things that he desires to do in us and through us in life. And when you think about what adversity is,

adversity is those dark moments in our life. That is the times when we feel tried

and tempted.

We feel hurt, misused, and abused.

We feel depressed, anxious, fearful, thoughtless, sinful, all those things that personally goes to sorrow and loss.

These are dark moments in our life and God does not promise that we'll have life without dark moments. We're going to have them.

And what we have to ask is this, how are we going to respond to them? And the way we respond

to them is determined by a number of things,

one of which is how long that moment of darkness lasts.

Somebody says, well, for me, it hasn't been a moment of darkness.

It's been hours, days, weeks, moments, years of darkness.

Well, let's ask the question, why do you think God has allowed that in your life for so long?

The dark moments of our life last only as long as is necessary for God to accomplish his purpose. So there is a limitation on

them. There is a purpose for them. There is a very specific purpose. They last only as long

as is necessary for God to accomplish his purpose.

And what I'd like for us to do in this message is to illustrate this very truth

through the life of Josie, because beginning as a teenager his dark moments

began as a teenager and lasted 13 years. So I want you to turn if you will to the book of Genesis and let's it on his father in his life so that you'll see how this all relates together.

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