I don't know whether you count yourself as a patient person. We live in a society where patience is short. People want things instantly, don't they? Whether it's food preparation, instant meals, you just put them in the microwave. Or whether it's material possessions, you can have them today and pay for them over the next many, many years. Or even some kind of emotional adjustment. People feel that they need something, go to the bookshop and, you know, you can see five steps to happiness and all sorts of other issues that people think that they have. And in some ways that's a relatively new phenomenon. In years past people were content to save for something, or to wait, or sometimes simply to go without. And things are similar, aren't they, in the Christian world today. You know, we as Christians can be very much in danger of being impatient. You know the Christian life, we don't know how long it is, because our days lie numbered in his hand, but generally speaking the Christian life isn't looked upon as a sprint. It's a marathon, isn't it? and in a marathon, which I've never run and I have no intention of running, you know, it's a long race, isn't it? And you can get so far and you begin to perhaps flag and they say you have to go through the pain barrier. Well, the Christian life is like that. Sometimes we do feel that we're flagging and we do need those bottles of water that people throw at you. And there is a number of pain barriers to go through, but we have the Saviour there beside us. But Christians today sometimes don't take that patient route. You know, the scripture says, persevere in prayer, doesn't it? Pursue holiness. We're to continue in service, even when things are difficult. And when we get impatient, particularly with the things of God, we're actually getting impatient with God, although perhaps not really realising it, then we have even more issues that we have to deal with. patience in Portnish and it's one of the things that we see in the passage before us. Before we get there, I just remind you that we did look at Nehemiah chapter 1 when I spoke last in the evening. We saw Nehemiah, a man with great patience and a man of many virtues and we looked at, I think, four things in particular. We saw the need to be affected in our hearts when we see the state of the things of God as Nehemiah was. we should see there that the natural reaction of the Christian is to take those things to the Lord in prayer. And we spent a while looking actually at Nehemiah's prayer and the structure of it and what we could learn from the pattern that is set down there. It was an excellent pattern for us not to follow in parrot fashion but to see how he praised the Lord, exalted his name and came with the supplications and came with repentance and all the things we saw in that pattern. And then the last thing we looked at was the providence of God in the life of the Christian and how it was that Nehemiah was the right man in the right place at the right time. And so we left Nehemiah at the end of chapter one. Well, I'm not going to go through all the way through the book of Nehemiah, but there are one or two things I want to bring out and I want to look at one or two things from this second chapter this evening that I think, at least I hope, they'll be helpful to us. And the first thing I want you to know is, as I mentioned a moment ago, is Christian patience. Nehemiah's prayer in chapter 1 was no doubt not his only prayer. That is the one that is recorded for us to view as it were. He would have continued in prayer. He had patience in prayer. Now we don't know, do we, quite often when we come to the Lord over a particular matter, whether he will answer it yes, no, later on, we just don't know when that prayer is going to be answered. We come, as it were, with faith, we come on the authority of God's word, and we bring it to the Lord. And if we don't get that answer when we think perhaps it's a suitable time to get an answer, we keep bringing it to the Lord. Well in this passage we find if you look at the dates and they are set out for us, we know when chapter 1 was and we know when chapter 2 is, it begins. and it came to pass in the month Nisan in the 20th year of the king of Babylon there, Artaxerxes, we know then that four months have passed by since Nehemiah was told the sad news that the state of Jerusalem was in a state of decay. The walls were down and the gates were burned with fire and he immediately was touched with sensitivity, he prayed, he fasted, and we have this pattern of prayer. But he continues in prayer and he continues for those four months. That's a long time really, isn't it? If you're burdened about something and you're as sensitive as Nehemiah. He just kept going. He's still serving the king. He's still waiting on the Lord. He's waiting for the Lord's time. Now he could have done something different. He could have said, well, you know, I need to be in Jerusalem. I can't stay here. But he didn't. He just waited for the Lord to move and continue with his providential hand. And we have to be careful, don't we, not to run before the Lord. If the Lord lays something upon our heart for a work to be done, We wait his time because his time is always the right time. If if Nehemiah had after one month thinking I pray for this a month and my heart is really taken and consumed about the state of Jerusalem and it can't be wrong for me to want to go and rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. I'm off. I'm going to do that and we just say well his heart was in the in the right place on that but it was the wrong time. We have to wait for the Lord. And sometimes that doesn't make sense to us. Just move forward to the New Testament for a moment. You think of the story of Lazarus and they called the Lord to come and he could have been there quite quickly, but he didn't, he waited. And when the Lord Jesus turns up, they've already had the funeral. And people were saying, but he's late, he's four days late. When we read the scriptures and we read what the Lord Jesus said, and then we read what the Lord Jesus did in raising Lazarus from the dead, we have to say at the end, of course, four days late was just in time. That was God's time. God's time is not always our time. But it is very wise if we make his time our time. We opened with the words from Isaiah, didn't we? My ways are not your ways and my thoughts are not your thoughts. And we could add to that without adding to scripture, but we could also say that our times or his times are not always our times because he dwells in eternity. We need patience. We practice patience when, as it says in Psalm 46, we are still and know that he is God. It is a time sometimes to be still. There's also a time to walk and a time to run. But here we're looking at patience in this particular aspect of the Christian life. It is good sometimes to just be still or another word that has been translated from the Hebrew there is to be in silence. It's the still silence of God. In other words, we come into God's house and sometimes we like to sing the hymns and, you know, we're making a joyful noise unto the Lord, but there's also a time to just sit in that silence, to be still and know that he is God. We're waiting upon the Lord. You know, when like Job, we keep trusting in God, when everything else gives way, our family's gone, our possessions have gone, and our health has gone, what does Job do? He keeps trusting in God. He comes out with some stuff that takes a bit of thinking about but then we might also if we was in that situation, but he's still trusting in God. He might not realize the fullness of who God is until he gets further on and we read it later in his book, but he's trusting God. He's exercising patience. And when we get to 2 Peter 2 5, we're told there to add to our faith, patience. So this isn't something we're to sit back and say, well, I hope I'm a patient person because we've all got different dispositions. And indeed we have, we have different characters. Some are naturally more patient than others. And so if we're naturally impatient, then we should take more notice of these verses. when it says add to your faith patience. In other words there is something to be done there, we don't just sit back and say well that's how I am. The word add there is from the Greek, it means to furnish. Add to your faith patience, talking about adding to our lives, there's a number of things that are listed there. Add or furnish, you know you furnish a room, we're going to put the sofa there and we're going to put this there and perhaps it looks better this way round and we need to add a cupboard here and that's how he, it's the language he uses there. Take patience and furnish your life with it just as you would furnish a room. We also have to notice you know that patience comes to an end. There's a time to be patient, and there's a time when our patience runs out. I don't mean incorrectly runs out, I mean there is a time, a limit to our patience. Later in this account of Nehemiah, Nehemiah actually returns back to Babylon. He goes back to Artaxerxes, because he promised her he would. Artaxerxes sends him with all this timber and all this stuff to do a work, and when he's done the work, and it's pretty much done, he returns again for a while. And I think, if you read it carefully, he returns for about nine years. After those nine years, he returns again to Jerusalem and he finds that most of the reforms that he brought about have been reversed. The enemy, who we read about here, where are we? Tobiah was one of them in verse 19. He was someone who was speaking against these people and was mocking the Jews for what they're about to do. They find they've actually brought him right into the temple, they've cleared out a little room for him, taken out the things of God and let Tobiah come in and live in the temple. Unbelievable. The priests aren't there anymore. Where are they? They're out in the fields because they're having to earn their income because the people have stopped giving their tithes and offerings. And as for the marriages that are taking place, they're taking place with the ungodly. And then if he was to get up on the Sabbath day, people were coming into the city and trading. Everything that Nehemiah had set right had been reversed. Nehemiah's patience is over. There is a time when our patience is over. And so we read in chapter 13 of Nehemiah, verse 6, it says, but in all this time was I not in Jerusalem, But then it says he returns again after certain days I obtained leave of the king. I came to Jerusalem and understood of the evil that Elias did did for Tobiah in preparing him a chamber in the courts of the house of God and it grieved me sore. So was this a time for patience? No, it wasn't. He says I cast forth all the household stuff of Dubai out of the chamber. You can see Nehemiah absolutely livid with what he saw. This was against the things of God. He come into the temple. There's no priests and this man who had been such a pain to him was actually living there. Threw his stuff out on the street as it were and I commanded and they cleaned the chambers. And thither I bought again the vessels of the house of God, with the meat offering and the frankincense. He put things back where they should be. And I perceived that the portions of the Levites had not been given them. For the Levites and the singers that did the work, they fled every one of them to his field. And I contended with the rulers and said, why is the house of God forsaken? I gathered them together, I set them in their place. And so the scripture goes on. Christians have patience, but understandably, there are times when our patience runs short. But you see, there's a greater than Nehemiah, isn't there? We read in Romans 15, 5 that we have a God of patience. Ah, that's something we should be thankful for. Be thankful that the God of patience was patient with us. Elsewhere, we read that God is slow to anger. How patient the Lord was with many of us when we resisted his grace. But you see, he was patient with us and his spirit won the day, didn't he? And how grateful we are that the Lord didn't give up on us when we didn't want to know, when we wanted to go somewhere else other than hear the gospel. And how patient the Lord is as he sees the world in rebellion. As he hears people in his pulpits deny his deity, as we were saying this morning. As he sees the wolves, as it were, in places where shepherds should be. When he sees world leaders mock his people. And it'll be just like Nehemiah. God is a God of patience, but his patience will end. God was patient at the time of the flood, wasn't he? We have Noah there, all that time building that ark, all those years, he was a preacher of righteousness. And we have, I've forgotten his name now, what was the man who lived the longest? Methuselah. We have Methuselah and as many of you know his name means until it comes. Till what comes? Until the flood comes. His mum and dad didn't know that when they named him that. They might have thought, well, I think we ought to call him Methuselah until it comes. And you can imagine mum and dad talking, well, what comes? I don't know. I just feel that's what God wants us to name him. But God knew it. He was going to live until the flood came. And it's not insignificant that he was the man who lived the longest that demonstrates to us the great patience of God at that particular time. But his patience ended. Judgment came. God shut the door and the floods came. And so it's going to be for the world, isn't it? God's patience will come to an end and judgment will come. So then for us, let's be like Nehemiah. Let's keep on in prayer, prayer for the prosperity of God's house, prayer for souls, prayer for our friends and families who don't know the Lord, prayers for our brethren and sisters who are going through great tribulation at this time. Add it to your faith, furnish your life with the very patience of God. But secondly, will you notice here, that's a Christian patience, Christian sensitivity. And we touched on this last time where in chapter one, Nehemiah was sensitive to the state of the things of God. And we were challenged as to whether our hearts are sensitive and we're touched when we look at the state of the church and the state of the world around us. Chapter two, we see that that sensitivity continues in the sense that Nehemiah still seems to be affected by those things. He is naturally sad. It's something that's come upon him. The state of Jerusalem has been weighing on his heart and mind and he can't be happy in a carefree way while he knows that that is the situation. Now in Babylonian culture, it was the height of rudeness to be sad in front of the king. Now I don't want to compare Artaxerxes too close with the ruler of North Korea, but we see a lot of clips of him on the news and on the computer news, etc. And whenever you see the North Korean leader, have you noticed he's surrounded by people with notebooks and they have to write down literally everything that he's saying. Presumably it's been recorded in a fantastic volume somewhere. But if you notice something else about them too, they're smiling. They've got smiley faces as they write these things down because how can they be anything but happy in the presence of their ruler, of their great grand leader. And we think that's a bit farcical but it was exactly the same. That's the Babylonian culture. You had to be happy in the presence of a king because the king makes us happy and we can't be sad. Well it was like that here then. And in our account the king notices Nehemiah's countenance and It says there, I gave it to the king, but I hadn't been sad in his presence before time. Wherefore, the king said to me, why is your countenance sad? Since thou art not sick. So it was a fairly pointed comment. You're not meant to be sad. And why are you sad? You're okay. You're not ill. You have no reason to be sad. The scripture says then or Nehemiah says then I was very sore afraid. That underlines to us the importance of what was going on in that culture. He wasn't just a bit put out and a bit embarrassed. He was sore afraid. My understanding is he could have been taken out and just dealt with. because he had been accused by the king of being sad and so he has to explain himself and he replies within the culture of the time let the king live forever that's kind of something you always had to say and he explains, talks about the place of his father's sepulchres and it was important to people in that culture to care for the places where their deceased were. So he comes in with again a sensitive particular point and he explains doesn't he what the issues are and he's still affected by these things. Look at his, look at the way that the way he feels is noticed by other people. And that's a natural thing. We should be noticed by other people, not always because we're sad. We're meant to be a happy people because in a sense we may be sad by what we see around us, but we're also joyful in what God has done for us in the Lord Jesus Christ. You see the king here was concerned with his kingdom. And this is where we see the difference in people, don't we? The king was concerned with his kingdom. History records the various battles that he was engaged in, particularly perhaps during this time. The king was concerned about preserving his life and he wanted things to continue so that he was the great king and that he could enjoy all that he did enjoy. But Nehemiah's concern was something very different. He was concerned for the people of God, he was concerned for the cause of God, he was concerned for the glory of God. And Nehemiah could even look above all of that and he could ponder the glory that was yet to come. So people have different aspirations. If we are the people of God, that's another reason why we're to be a separate people. Our aspirations and our desires are very different to those of the world. And so when you do hear people speaking against the word of God, when you do hear our rulers, et cetera, saying things, we think, oh, I wish they wouldn't say that, and that is wrong, and that's sinful or whatever. Remember that they have not known the intervention of God's grace. They are speaking in an unregenerate way, and their aspirations and their desires are by their very nature different to those of the people of God. And so it was here. Nehemiah's sensitivity is going to be very different to the sensitivity of those round about him. And ours should be the same. But let's come again to the Savior. We must always take him as our example. The eternal God who created the heavens and the earth, the one who is God from everlasting to everlasting. What does he do? Is he a sensitive God? What do we read? He weeps. He weeps. We read his shortest verse in the Bible. The children soon learn that. Jesus wept. And Jesus Christ was sensitive to the plight of sinners. He was sensitive when he went to the grave of Lazarus and saw people weeping and realized the awfulness of what the fool had done, that people die and this is the sorrow and mourning that they have. And he was sorrowful at so many things. He wept. So may we be sensitive to the sin we see around us. And despite the quantity of it all, let's be sensitive to all of those things that detract from the glory of God. So the Christian's patience, the Christian's sensitivity, the Christian's requests. Everybody has requests. Someone said to me today, what do you want for your birthday? I don't know. What aspirations do we have in life? Look at Nehemiah's requests. King said unto me, for what does thou make request? Verse four, what does thou make request? What does he do first? He prays. He prays. And so I pray to the God of heaven. Now, that's not like the prayer we had in chapter one, is it? That was a more lengthy prayer. This is an emergency prayer. You know, we're put on the spot. It didn't take a few seconds to say, Lord, help me now. That's really what Nehemiah was saying here. You know, not every prayer needs to be long. Indeed, not every prayer can be long. Now that doesn't mean all our prayers should be short, no more than it teaches us all our prayers should be long. It teaches us that our prayers should be appropriate to the particular need as the Holy Spirit leads us. You know sometimes people have what they call bucket lists, don't they? Kind of a bucket list of requests to themselves, things they want to do before allegedly kicking the bucket, before they die. People have requests, I want to do this and I want to do the other. But again, this just shows the difference between the people of God and the world. There may be commonality, we might like to visit certain places, but if someone says to you, what's your request? The king, not the queen of our country, but the king of kings comes to us and says, what is your request? Because we will pray tonight, we will pray tomorrow, we may bring our requests unto him. What is your request? Our greatest request should be, or should it not, to see the glory of God among his people, to see souls saved, to see one another change more into the beauty and glory of our great God, that our aspirations and our requests are heavenward for his glory, rather than wanting something for ourselves, that we might learn even from the early life of Solomon, who said, give me wisdom that I may rule this people aright. I think the sad thing is that many Christians would agree that those be our aspirations and our aspirations should centre around those things. But in practice, in practice, it doesn't take us much, does it, for us to be kept from the things of God, to be kept perhaps from visiting the sick, to be kept from being at prayer, from being kept at what we actually claim is our first priority. Oh, my friends, may our requests under God come from the heart and be seen in what we actually do. What did he request for? Well, he requested me there that he asked for quite a lot of things, really, whether he thought, well, the door's open, we might as well go in and say for in for a penny rather than a pound or a pound rather than a penny. He asked for a lot there, even timber to build himself a house. But the Lord was leading and guiding and the King gave him all of those things. What did our Lord request? See, let's bring this back to the Savior. He said, I come, what did I come for? To do the father's will. That's what he wanted to do. He came, everything he did whilst he was here on earth was to meet the request of his father that he should come and do this great work. What was his father's will? Well, we put it briefly. It was to make a way of salvation, wasn't it? Whereby his people might be brought back again through his life, his death, his shed blood and resurrection. Will our requests be such that we want to please our Heavenly Father? Christian's patience, Christian's sensitivity, Christian's requests. What about the Christian's work? Nehemiah saw the need here, didn't he? He realized, as Esther did of old, that he'd been brought to the kingdom for such a time as this. And he rolled up his sleeves and he got on with it. We read there later in the chapter that he went out by night. It seems maybe he had one or two with him, but he didn't have a whole number of people. And he rides around the walls and he has a look to see what really needs to be done. He didn't want to take a load of people with him. He didn't want to say all that was going to go on. He wanted to be cautious. It was back to patience again. Let's see what needs to be done. But let's unpack that a moment. What are the requirements for service that we see in Nehemiah? And we see as a principle in all occasions, first of all, Nehemiah was a man of God. Tobias and Sam Ballot weren't going to do this. We have to be born again of the Spirit of God to be used of God. And he was a man where God wanted him to be. He had had that patience, he had waited, he had pursued the Lord, he had pursued him in prayer, and he was just moving at God's time. And he was a clean man, not a perfect man, but he was a man that the Lord was able to pick up and say, I can use you. And he was a skilled man, skilled as you read through the book, He was a skilled man in planning. He was a skilled man in managing the task, in discernment. He was skilled in everything that was needed here to manage this great project. He was willing to do the work. It's all right being skilled to do something, but we need a willing heart, don't we? And he knew that everything that he was doing was for the honour and glory of God and not for himself. today, God's people, we're asked to serve the Lord in one capacity or another. We're not asked to do what we're not equipped to do. If we're ever asked to do something we're not equipped to do, we can be sure that the Lord is about to equip us to do it. And after all, in the New Testament, are we not called fellow labourers? Fellow labourers. I've used this expression before. You know, is it a good career move? Say, what are you going to be? I'm going to be a labourer. You say, well, can't you find something better than that? That's what we're called to be, fellow laborers, servants. Again, think of our savior, his work here on earth. He was the only one equipped for the work to save sinners and he was willing to come and he did it all for the glory of his heavenly father. How we need to see that we are serving the Lord. Let me bring you one more. We see here the Christian's enemies. We know the devil is the enemy of God and his people, but he comes in many disguises. We thought of the wolf this morning and in the passage before us, there were what you might call normal thieves. That was an enemy. And that's why we find that the king gave him soldiers. to come with him, verse 9, now the king has sent captains of the army and horsemen with me. He must have been carried a lot of money, he must have been carrying, there were people with him, he must have been carrying provisions and he must have been carrying some of the things he needed for the work to be put into hand. That's the obvious enemy, we will find obvious enemies. But then there were the less obvious, there were these two particular individuals, I think, no there were three weren't there, but two in particular that we read off further on and that's Sam Ballat and Tobiah. Sam Ballat is described as a Horonite. He was a governor of Samaria in Moab, a place that was often a pain to the people of God and Tobiah He was from the east of Jordan and again he was a Samaritan of background. Both these men did not want to see these walls built up. They didn't want Jerusalem to be grander than where they were. They didn't want someone to rise up in that city for the Jews to be great again in order that their particular positions might be seen as diminished. And the Samaritans were no friends of the people of Jerusalem. And these people were frustrated. They were frustrated too, because the king of Persia, the king of Babylon, had actually given permission for this to happen. Because they say towards the end of our chapter 2, why do you rebel against the king? And Nehemiah has to remind them later on, we're not rebelling against the king, we've got his permission to do this. So these enemies were particularly frustrated. Look what happened here then. We find, first of all, they were grieved in verse 10. Sam Ballat and Tobiah, when they heard of it, they were grieved exceedingly. Then verse 19, it got a bit more, it says, they mocked us. When they heard, they laughed us to school. They despised us. What is this thing that you do? Later on in the book, they try to engage Nehemiah in discussion. And Nehemiah, he knows what they're up to. He says, why should I come and talk to you about this? This has nothing to do with you. He says here, you have no portion in Jerusalem. You have no right. You have no memorial in Jerusalem. And he says, I'm engaged in a good work, the work of God. Then if you read on, there was trickery. They said, well, come and meet us over here. In the scriptures, they meant to do harm to Nehemiah. He had that discernment not to go. And then as we read a few moments ago, when the people of God let their guard down and Nehemiah was back in Babylon, they actually let the enemy move right in to the temple. Isn't that a pattern of where we are today? People laugh at Christians. I mentioned it this morning, they'll laugh on quiz shows and all sorts, not because of who people are, but what they believe. It used to be people would talk about, well, it doesn't matter what you believe, it's what you do. It's got further than that now, you're not allowed to believe things because if you believe that you might do something different. And then people engage in discussion, don't they? But that discussion is only to remove us from scripture. They talk about moving and allowing funds for theological colleges to be able to explain the scriptures within the culture of the die. In other words, coming right in and changing the word of God. Well, we have to say with Nehemiah, but these people that are not Christians, you have no portion in the scripture. You have no portion in the church. You have no right. You have no memorial in these things. You're welcome to come and hear the gospel. You're welcome to come as we did. but you have no right to change the things of God. And then of course, just like Tobiah, we find the enemy has actually moved in to the places of God's house and they teach people a false gospel, which is no gospel. So what did Nehemiah do with all these enemies? He resorted to prayer. He resorted to prayer and encouragement. And as we've read, he removed her by from the house of God, he cleanses the temple. And often we read in this book, nevertheless, we made our requests unto God. I was reminded of those words last week, we had some visitors with us. And actually the lady who was visiting, I didn't know who she was till after the meeting. She was the sister of a man who has preached here, Simon Gay. I think he's only been the once, some of you may remember him. But when he was about 19 years old, he came with me to Poland. And we drove two trucks to Poland and it was the time when things were a bit more dodgy to what they are now. They didn't really like you going into their country and they didn't like you taking Bibles and things in there. And they stopped at the border and they did big checks, etc. And then one of the soldiers came out and he pointed to this lady's brother, to Simon, and said, in, get in the truck. And he got in the truck and the soldier got in the other side and they drove off. And I remember distinctly thinking at that time, what am I going to tell his mum? Seems a little strange now, but it was serious at the time. And I remember that we went immediately to the words of Nehemiah, where he said, nevertheless, we made our request unto God. And that's what we did. And it might have been probably an hour or so later that they did reappear again and we thank God for that. But there are little instances in life where these portions that seem sometimes fairly insignificant but all of a sudden they're there. Make your requests unto God. That wasn't time for a chapter one prayer, it was a time for a chapter two prayer and the Lord heard and answered prayer. Well, let's praise God tonight when we think of the enemies of the church of God, we come back to our savior. He's overcome the enemy and the enemy knows his days are numbered and that's why he's panicking all over as he is. He's still at work. We can see the work of the evil one as indeed I've set it out, but he's very subtle, isn't he? And he will try to attack any work of God and we need to be alert. We need to be as discerning as Nehemiah. like Nehemiah, we've got the permission of the king, we've got the permission of the king to come and meet together, we have the permission of the king to gather boys and girls together, we have the permission of the king to preach the word, to proclaim the glorious gospel and to gather together in fellowship. Now, governments don't like that anymore and just reading today, the subtlety of it is that even with the young people where they wanted us to register, if you have You spend so long with the children, which we certainly wouldn't want to do, but the underlying current there is that they want to know who you are anyway. So it's really an underhand way of registering schools and church work. We don't have to do that. We have the permission and the authority of God to do these things. And like Nehemiah, we can say, no, we do not want to meet you on these things. We are doing a good work and we will continue with that. So I've said enough tonight. From this passage then, and some of the other little bits of Nehemiah, we see Christians patience, we need to have it, we need to add it to our faith. Christian sensitivity, we need to be sensitive to what we see around us, that it may touch our hearts. Christian requests and desires, that our requests might be those things that belong unto God for the progress of the things of God and his glory. And the Christian's work, as we see it here, we must be ready, as it were, to be laborers for him and with him, and to be alert to the enemy and how he comes at us in various disguises. So a little bit of application. Well, just work your way through those headings. Think about them, pray for them, pray through them in your your quiet time. So for example, patience. Am I patient? Lord, make me more patient. Help me to add it to my faith. Am I sensitive to the plight of the things of God and the people of God? Are my desires the things that I should be desiring? Do I labor for the Lord? Am I alert to the enemy? Do I pray for the preservation of the Christians who really are under attack? And if we're not the Lord's, then you can go through the same process really. Am I patient in the sense that I'm continuing to seek the Lord? Am I sensitive to my soul's need? Are my desires well directed, or are they to the Lord that he might save me? I cannot labor for the Lord as I am, and I know the devil will keep me from these things. Persevere unto God. Well, may the Lord bless these things to our souls and to his own glory. Amen.