Amen and amen and good evening you can be seated glad to see you those of you online

I can't see you but you can see me so we're glad that you're joining with us and we're

just going to get right to it. Five months ago, we finished Zachariah chapter 9 in our trek through the Old Testament, book by book, chapter by chapter, verse by verse.

And so we're going gonna pick it up.

I already pushed Skip Recap.

You know, like when you're,

I heard about this from a friend.

I don't binge watch, you know, these series.

You know, anyway.

So I'm not going to, otherwise we'll be here too long like I kept you here too long

on Sunday.

Don't worry, the Lord's, he sat me down.

We're going to talk, ball. So I listened. So we're just going to jump right in.

And here's why. The chapter before us is, I mean, packed full of encouraging, life-changing truths and bonus prophetic promises

about how the Lord will always strengthen us through our seas of affliction.

Now I would have much rather have titled this chapter, The Lord will get you out of your sea of affliction. But I can't. I want it to,

but that would not be truthful. Because sometimes God puts us in the furnace of affliction, the sea of affliction,

to refine us, to teach us things that he could not otherwise teach us, were it not for that

affliction. I think of the sweet Psalmist of Israel, David, in Psalm 119. Two times he says, it was good that I was

afflicted because now I keep your statutes. The inference there is that prior to the affliction,

he wasn't keeping the statues.

The second time he says it, a few verses later, it was good for me to be afflicted because

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