Discouragement is losing the courage to be happy. Sometimes it happens by degrees and other times it crashes through your confidence like an avalanche. I personally don't like the degrees business because it manifests as enduring one bad experience after another until it drains your spirit of all bravery. The crash-down-upon-you trial is swift and the recovery seems swift.  At least you know what your facing all at once instead of wondering each day what's around the corner.  It is my opinion that discouragement of Christians is often an attack by Satan.  Satan sets us up for his attack by distracting our focus from Christ, or causing us to believe that we can relax our defenses, and even sends people to work their way into our friendship.  We may begin to believe that we are really hitting on all the cylinders when "pop, pop, pop!" one after another the fiery arrows of Satan dance on our shield of faith.  We desperately try to get back to full power and face the onslaught, but one fiery dart gets through. Before we can recover another one strikes us.  It is then that we realize that we are in trouble and the trial is on.

How does one bounce back from satanic persecution?  You don't bounce back, you just sort of work your way through it until you're standing victoriously again.   All along the way there are various discouraging things that you must deal with.   First, there are comrades on the left and right that are falling. It does not encourage one's faith to see someone fall from grace. Then, there are others who are complaining loud enough to discourage the entire Body of Christ. All this and then comes several comforters who appear to be back from a mission to encourage Brother Job. They make sure you know that all your problems are a result of your errors, flaws, faults, sin or secret rebellion. About the same time as they arrive you might get a visit from old mealy mouth himself, Satan. He also got a few things to say and none of them are good. "Why don't you just quit?" he snarls. "No one appreciates you any way. And besides, you've got too much to offer to be stuck in this place going nowhere." Satan really knows how to lay it on!

When you think that it couldn't get much worse, something breaks down that you really need. This puts a financial strain on top of the whole pile that’s fell on you. You begin to wonder if you're even saved or if you have angered God somehow and now He is getting even. Maybe the whole thing happened because one time you were half-asleep or fell asleep while you were praying because you drove yourself to a near collapse working in the ministry. Maybe you said the wrong thing while you were half-asleep, such as, inviting God to test you beyond measure.  It could have been something like, "O God, just hit me with everything you got!" What you really meant was for Him to send you everything that He had to pep you up because you were so tired, but it came out wrong. Maybe you cursed Him by mistake with a remark intended for the devil.  Heaven forbid!

Wrong thinking will sometimes get you into trouble especially when you start thinking thoughts like, "Am I out of His will?" The current path of ministry seemed right when you got on it. Now it looks as if it leads to hell! You begin to think, "Maybe this is really the path of rebellion where demons get to beat you at will." You might ask yourself questions like, "Am I too thick-headed to hear God? How can I so easily be led astray?"  Sometimes you just ask in frustration, "Why do these things always happen only to me?"  You can always look about you and see pastors who are living it up without a care in the world.  You wonder what is wrong with you that trials seem to follow you every where you go. Oh boy, the things that can run through your mind when you are under stress! It reminds me of a fellow who got up to say something in the testimony service. He had never spoken in public before and was a little nervous. He said with all the courage he could muster, "Pastor, I was just setting here on this thought and a pew ran through my mind."

The answer to all of this is to encourage yourself in the Lord. You may as well do it because there may be no one else on this earth that will do so, especially if you are in the ministry. People in the ministry live a lonely life and are often isolated from human encouragement.  People tend to think that pastors do not need encouragement, that they are iron men or something.  I've often wished someone would stop by and say, "Brother, I was just thinking about you and decided to come by and see if you needed a friend." Such a thing is rare in this day of "me first" and inconvenience-phobia. We have to learn how to encourage ourselves and maintain a high degree of encouragement because we are living in dark times. Not only that, but today the pastor is called on to perform almost superhumanly. He's got to be "Mr. Perfect" and have all the right answers for everyone's problems.  And those answers had better not be "just look to Jesus, child" or "all things work together for the good" and "just hold out to the end" because people demand a lot of time and rhetoric, not quick answers to their problems.

This present church generation has been taught that the pastor is God's "feel-good merchant," a holy emotion-massager who is supposed to make them feel better. After all, that's what they hired him for. Even though they keep on sinning or doing other things that keep them in a cycle of defeat, they want the pastor to make them feel like they are on top all the time. What a waste and what a drain on a man of God who has not learned better than to throw good blessings on bad people!  Bad people need to be taught to conform to the image of Christ rather than have their guilty conscience's soothed with gratuitous, hyper-religious, words. Someone once called them "high maintenance, low impact, Christians" and they are the source of power drain in the Body of Christ.

Where did these "high maintenance, low impact" people come from?  I call them hundred-fold Christians because most of them came about as the result of the "hyperfaith" movement.  It is not that these people produce a hundred-fold on the talent God gives them, but that they expect a hundred-fold blessing from everything they invest in religiously.  They sit on the pew, that is their investment, so the pastor needs to make a hundred times more profitable as a result.  Thus, they get entertainment and short sermons that tell them what they want to hear. Everything that the church has to offer has to be a hundred-fold blessing.  The pastor has to be a hundred-fold pastor and out perform every other pastor else they will change churches, or pastors.  Everything is done for the hundred-fold Christian when they attend church services.  Many churches now advertise themselves as if they are competing with other churches for the available church attendees instead of winning lost souls. "Church" is advertised as exciting and hot, then they set out to make it such, not with fire from heaven, but the false fire of emotion.  Television religion gives hundred-fold people so much return on their investment of time that it is difficult to compete.  Christianity has become a spectator sport to these people and they will pay for the show.  Unless you have a forty-piece worship band and singers, light show, a gilded set, and a way to edit out all the uninteresting stuff, "church" is just plain boring to them.   The priority of preaching the gospel has been completely replaced by the desire for excitement, fame, wealth and social superiority.   This is very discouraging for the minister who is pouring out his life with little or no recognition and remuneration.  He begins to wonder if he is missed the point somehow, or if the meager rewards are worth all the effort.

Encouragement during trials comes by first establishing a cause or a purpose for the trial. The modern hyperfaith teaching  is so shallow that a lot of people have not accepted the fact that a true servant of God can go through trials. As a result, many people never discover the reason they are in the trial. Modern faith teachers teach the doctrine of faith diametrically opposite of God's word. Although they sprinkle their teaching with scriptures throughout, they do disservice to His word and harm to His body with the error that they add.  This tragic misrepresentation of the truth propagated by the hyperfaith movement has wafted its foul odor throughout the whole of evangelical Christianity. Everyone is affected by it, so it seems, and mostly for the worst. It makes a good cheer on the sidelines, but it is brutally crushed in the game of life. This type of teaching and the residue of it that I consistently see and deal with in people is a drain on my time, energy and other resources. If the false hyperfaith doctrine is the reason that many ministers are going through discouragement and the resulting power drain, then it is time to get a healthy dose of encouragement by reading the word and let's don't read between the lines.

Let me elaborate on this for a bit for I believe the "hyperfaith" people teach a blatantly false doctrine. Peter declared that we need to go through trials for the purpose of refining our faith. Paul said that Jesus learned obedience by the things that He suffered. The whole implication of God's word is that trials can come because we rebel against the counsel of God, because Satan is attacking us, because our faith is being tested and refined, or because we are sharing in the fellowship of Christ's sufferings.  They can also occur because we are learning obedience or are being purged or cleansed from something foreign to God's nature. What ever the reason is, we know that trials are definitely a part of the Christian experience. By denying this fact, the "word of faith" movement has made a flabby, slothful, selfish, spoiled group of religious brats out of God's children. These people have not grown into adulthood spiritually and are tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine and the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting (Eph. 4:14).

One of the most detrimental and discouraging challenges to my faith came from watching Trinity Broadcasting Network. Watching TBN continually caused me to get a false cause and purpose.  I thought I had to "succeed" as the examples that were constantly paraded before me on television before I could be accepted by God as successful.  The odds of fulfilling such a cause or purpose is astronomical to say the least. Most ministers are not going to become Gospel "stars", wear expensive clothing, drive elaborate automobiles, be admired by millions of adulating fans, and be counted a super saint. This is the standard that is being pounded into the head of thousands of ministers daily. I got to the point to where I thought I must be trash in God's eyes. I mean, in comparison to these super saints, I was a dirt ball. I had a house and car payment, bought my suits and dress pants off the rack in a discount store, wore myself out preaching three times each week, plus doing endless mundane tasks and working a secular job. There were no television cameras when I preached my best messages and plenty of yawns when I didn't.

According to these super apostles, if I had real faith,  I was suppose to be on top. Is there even that much room at the top? Where is the top anyway? If I wasn't at the top, I must not be in God's will. If I can't find God's will as much as I pray and read His word, I must be one of His rejects. This was a confusing thing for me until I realized what was going on. God has one standard of success for a man and these false teachers had presented an opposite one. The TBN-infected churches are full of people who believe in and promote a false standard of achievement because of the influence of the "Hyperfaith" message.  These are the hundred-fold Christians and they cannot be satisfied with anything less than a gospel of comfort and convenience.

Most hundred-fold Christians have an opinion of the pastor and his wife that is extremely egregious. They view them as a team of staff psychologists whom God called to take all their burdens away. A trial to hundred-fold people is not an opportunity to grow, but a cue to call the pastor. Their concept of a pastor is that he is suppose to preach encouraging sermons that help Christians live mediocre lives and feel good about it. Many of these people have bound themselves in a deceptive state with fleshly cement and get highly irritated at sermons calling for them to progress, mature, change, or get committed.

Forget all that stuff anyway! What every minister needs to realize is that all they need is a solid ministry that produces results that are pleasing to God. Think about it for a while and you may be more successful than you first believed.   You can be in a little town of 500 and have a fourth of the town in your church and they could care less, but how many of these folks have won a fourth of their town. Some of them live in cities of over four million people, have about seven or eight thousand in their church and yet are in high demand as convention speakers. Is this a good percentage? Did you know that 8000 is 0.002% of 4,000,000? What percentage of your town are you reaching? You may be doing better than you think.

Ever try writing TBN and telling them you are winning 25% of your town of 500? It is possible that one of the producers might think you've achieved success and invite you to speak on a religious talk show.  Don't accept the invitation because you'll probably get bumped off the program by some "Spray-Can, Harry" evangelist who has a new revelation. The revelation he had might be entirely stupid, but it's new (such as one ignoramus who said, "Woman were originally meant to have babies out of their sides." What! Does God do design flaws and therefore is less than perfect? Give me a break, Mister! That guy's a nut!).  Most of the hundred-fold people watching TBN do not care what you have done, they just want to hear something new.

You may have seen 800 souls truly saved in one year on the evangelistic field, but some lightweight evangelist can sing better than you can. He has more charisma and has healed the rich lady with a tumor no one even knew existed in the first place. Since she's a big giver to TBN, he'll be on the next talk show describing the special gift of tumor-casting God has given him instead of you telling people how to really reach the lost.

One must be careful not to let discouragement turn into despair. I heard somewhere that despair was suffering without cause. It is extremely difficult to take suffering when there seems to be no cause. Satan strikes when you doubt yourself, doubt your calling, doubt that you are in God's will, and doubt that God will answer your prayers.  Your enemy is doing this evil deed all for the purpose of taking away your cause to serve Him and plunge you into dark despair.

There seems to be no cause for some of the things that crush us with stress. I personally see no cause in filling pews for a couple of hours on Sunday morning just to have them all forget your message before they touch the front door knob. For this reason, I don't let people day dream or sleep while I'm preaching. I intend to pierce them with the truth somehow, someway. Otherwise I will get discouraged at the slow thickening of their heads and hearts and probably lose my motivation. If they want to sleep, I tell them to go home where they have a bed. If they come to play, pass notes, read books, then there are better places to do it than cluttering up the assembly of the saints. I realize that many pastors may not be able to do this, yet I pioneered the church and established from the start that assembly times are serious events. Such times should not be wasted by frivolous activity and unnecessary disturbances.

One might ask, but aren't you afraid you will run off sinners? The church is an assembly of the saints. When the lost come for the right reason they usually do not make disturbances. Sinners who come for the purposes of causing disturbances should immediately be informed that there are places where that sort of thing is tolerated and the assembly of God's people is not included on the list. Christians who cause disturbances should be corrected for that sin as well as other sins.

If you are going to take the time to pray the amount it takes to prepare a message, study, and go through all the other things in order to preach, then it should count for something more than a passing moment people endure, rather than are grateful for. I try to say something worth saying and say it with confidence and anointing. I preach somewhat fatalistically. In other words, I decide what I'm going to say after praying and meditating. Then I approach the pulpit with the mind set that no matter what they do to me, this is the message God gave me.  The people can either receive it or reject it, stone me, or throw me out; it's not my problem what they do with it. I've been kicked out of a few places but I've found out they can only kick you so far. After that, God steps in and puts you in a place where no one can kick you out.

I know. It sounds like I'm a mean man, a dictator who rules with an iron fist, ramming the gospel down everyone's throat. I assure you this is far from the truth. The fact is that a true minister of the gospel sets himself against the flow of the World System. As a result, you are going to be attacked by people who are in harmony with the World System but attend Church services and are often members of the Church. If the rules and standards of the Church are not clearly defined, then the vagueness or lack of such guidelines will sooner or later cause horrendous problems including Church strife. In defense of my blunt, candid, style of ministry, I have to point out that people understand they must accept knowledge from other people who are deemed professionals in society. They go to a physician and expect to be told the cold, hard, facts no matter how dire it is. They expect the same thing from the lawyer, the mechanic, the weatherman, and etceteras. Why do they except anything less from a preacher who attends to their eternal soul?

God is anointing men and women who will say what He tells them to and not lose their courage and dilute the message.  It takes time to build preachers to the degree they will stand without wavering. You've got to go through some hard knocks to learn how to weather storms. In the midst of the storms is where you will learn how to encourage yourself. I heard a godly man say once, "Remember, when you're in the storm, don't let the storm get in you."

We must realize that if we are going to be true, faithful servants of God, we will often find ourselves in unglamorous positions doing things that don't make headlines. Most of us counsel people about minor problems over and over again. Our phones ring constantly, we get little sleep, don't eat right.  We live under constant stress and in fact seem to be addicted to it. We don't know any other way to go but full speed ahead. The job requires us to keep a constant smile and never let anyone see us frustrated or discouraged. Everyone else can have a bad day, but we have to be up all the time. Other people, including church leaders, get to stay home from church services when ever it is convenient, go hunting, go fishing, go to the beach or mountains, but a pastor has no such luxury. They come back refreshed and tell you what a good time they had which is amazingly inconsiderate.

Let's face it, the cause or purpose comes from God. We must all, that is, those who truly love Him, surrender to His call and be satisfied in His work through us. We will become dissatisfied when we are not surrendered to His will or let someone else describe what our success should be. We must be willing to labor in relative obscurity doing what pleases Him and He may be the only one who takes notice, but oh what a notice!  There is nothing like knowing the favor of God.

I have a friend who labors as a Christian apologist defending the faith against aberrant doctrine. He gets a hundred hate letters until that one comes that makes it all worth while, the soul that he has made a difference in. It is those genuine successes that let us know that our labor is not in vain. I also get letters from time to time, not many of them, but occasionally one comes and the person lets me know what a difference I made in their lives. This makes it all worthwhile.

Paul is a mighty example. Forget that he wrote over two thirds of the New Testament since he wasn't around to receive the honor. It's for sure you are not affected by the honor of man when you are dead. Paul suffered many things to do the work of God and God used him mightily. The Lord allowed a thorn in Paul's flesh to keep him humble because of the powerful revelations he saw in the third heaven. Do you want a thorn? I don't and intend to stay where I don't need to be humbled by thorns in my flesh.  I must admit God seems to allow a few cone heads to persecute me from time to time.  I must need it so I should be grateful, but He doesn't let me simmer in pride until I become another gospel prima donna.  So what if we have to face a few pulpit munchers from time to time?  Do we really believe this is suffering?  I can't imagine setting in heaven listening to the saints tell how they overcame torture and then pipe up, "Hey, what about me?  I had to face a bad deacon board."