Hey there and welcome back to Pastor Rick's Daily Hope. Today Rick continues in his series called

Connecting with God, the Lord's Prayer. In this series, Rick shows us what it means to be truly

spiritually connected to God and to each other through the power of God's love and God's word. Well, I can't wait to get

right into Rick's message today. It's part one of a message called the Prayer of Connection.

So I've been doing a lot of study of the parallels in the Bible to different kinds of recessions

in the nation of Israel.

And one of the passages that I found was in Second Chronicles chapter 15 where it talks about

this. And here's an appropriate verse, verse 5 says, during those dark times, it was not even

safe to travel. It's talking about in Israel. Problems troubled the nation

on every hand. When I read that phrase, I thought, deja vu all over again. Problems troubled the

nation on every hand. You see, we don't just have economic problems in our

nation right now. We've got international problems. We've got social problems, cultural problems,

spiritual problems, relational problems. We have problems troubling the nation on every hand.

But even in the darkest of times, God always gives a voice of hope.

And in this particular time in Second Chronicles chapter 15, he brought along a preacher

named Azariah.

And Azariah had these words of hope to say to the king at that time,

Asa, and the entire nation. He said this, listen, all you people, the Lord will stay with you as long as you

stay with him. And if you seek him, you will find him.

But if you abandon him, talking about God,

he will abandon you.

For a long time, Israel has been without the true God

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