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including our gathering times in Atlanta and Washington, D.C., visit us online at passioncitychurch.com.

I want to open with a question. Who is the most encouraging person that you know? Who is that person?

When you think, when you go through your life, you know there's some people who are

discouraging and you think about them, you're like, oh gosh, I do not want to meet with that.

But then there's those encouraging people

where you get in their presence and you feel built up, you feel lifted. What is it about them

that makes them so encouraging? I want us today to look at how to become an encouraging people. We live in a world that needs encouragement.

I was reading this last night, according to the American Psychological Association,

the percentage of American adolescents whose symptoms of major depression has nearly tripled

from 2005 to 2019. That's before COVID. And anxiety has almost doubled. The percentage

of American adults of all ages who are not too happy about their lives has doubled from 2000 to

2020. And this is almost hard to comprehend. Women have been especially hard hit.

45% of female Americans between the ages

of 12 and 26 have received a formal diagnosis of anxiety or depression by 2024. We can sometimes

look out there in the world and think, oh, people in the world are doing great and enjoying their sin.

Not true.

Arthur Brooks, in studying American society, said that the fault experience of people in America today is anger, sadness, and fear.

And a lot of that has snuck into the church.

I see so many people losing heart,

particularly when they think about the future. And what a phrase to lose heart. In the Greek,

it has the idea of a bow, like a bow and an arrow, where the string is taken out and it just

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