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Every battle that we face is an opportunity for us to prove that we can keep God's commandments. That we can, you know, hold to the Word of God, that we can pray during a difficult time, that we can win these battles. Let me read to you from Exodus 23. Exodus 23 verse 27 says this, I will not drive them out from before thee in one year, lest the land become desolate and the beasts of the field multiply against thee. By little and little I will drive them out from before thee until thou be increased and inherit the land. I love this verse. Actually I preached a sermon called By Little and Little a couple years ago and it was that faithful word. I preached that faithful word and the concept of it was this is that, you know, the Christian life is a little here and a little there. So this should be an encouragement to us when we feel discouraged like we're not growing enough. Like, man, I'm not where I need to be. Yeah, but just little by little though. You know, you're not gonna be a great Christian overnight. It happens by little and little, right? Hey, how do you build some muscle, right? How do you, how do you deadlift a certain amount of weight? Well, 2.5 pounds. 5 pounds, 10 pounds, right? That's how you do it. How can you get stronger? By little and little. The problem with the children of Israel, they're like, we want to be like the other nations. Well, what was the problem? They were comparing themselves with other people. What they should be doing is recognizing that God told them, hey, I can just drive them all out. I can just cause you to deadlift 500 right off the bat if I wanted to, but then where's the struggle in that? How are you gonna learn? Gotta learn how to struggle. Gotta learn how to fight. Gotta learn how to discipline yourself. Gotta learn how to be, to have tenacity. Gotta learn to have patience. Gotta learn to be disciplined. And so, what he's telling them is, you know, I have work for you to do. You're gonna war against these people, but it's not gonna happen in one year because no one is a great Christian in one year. It takes years to learn the Bible, to learn how to be a great husband, to learn to be a great wife, to learn how to raise children, to be a great employee, to be a great church member. It takes a lifetime. And we're constantly learning these things, okay? Not only that, look at verse five of Judges chapter three. I've mentioned this already, but he says in verse five, And the children of Israel dwelt among the Canaanites, Hittites, and the Amorites, and Perizzites, and Hivites, and Jebusites. And they took their daughters to be their wives, and gave their daughters to their sons, and served their gods. And the children of Israel did evil on the side of the Lord, and forget the Lord their God, and served Balaam and the grove. So what happened here? Well, the concept is basically, it's simple. Fight the flesh or the flesh will reign over you, right? So instead of fighting the Canaanites, they made an affinity with them through their daughters, okay? And they begin to intermingle. Obviously, one of the principles that we can learn from here is that God does not want us as his people getting married to unsaved people. Be not unequally yoked together with unbelievers, the Bible says. And look, this is not a command of the Lord, this is just my opinion. I think you should marry a Baptist. I mean, what's wrong with that? If you're gonna get a Christian, if you're gonna marry a Christian, you might as well get like the best ones. I would even go a little further and say you should get yourself an independent fundamental Baptist. I would even go a little further than that and say you should get a new I of B Baptist. Or convert them to being an independent fundamental Baptist. Convert them to be a new I of B Baptist. But what I'm saying is this, is that, you know, obviously the Bible strictly condemns marrying an unsaved person as a Christian, okay? It's forbidden. Why? Well, because what we see here is that they begin to intermingle with the foreign nations and the instead of the believers, the children of God, or the nation of God, influencing the heathen to worship the true God, the reverse happened. The heathen caused them to worship their false god Balaam, okay? And I've seen this, you know, in my personal life with people that I know where, you know, they got involved in a relationship with an unsaved person, they got married to them, and now they're like visiting a Mormon Church and stuff. They're going to the Catholic Church, they're going to whatever, you know, something that's not Christian at all. And you think to yourself like, man, people would actually do that? Yeah, when you're in marriage you're kind of kind of screwed, let's just be honest. You have a covenant with that person and, you know, a lot of people just choose not to fight that battle and be like, I'll just go to the stupid Catholic Church with them. And I mean we see it over and over again in the Bible where this happens. This is why God tells us, he tells his people not to be unequally yoked together with unbelievers, because they'll drive your heart away. And I'm not saying that if you marry like a Catholic you're just gonna become a Roman Catholic or something like that, and if that's the case you just believed in vain. What I'm saying is that you will compromise, and you might even step into a Roman Catholic Church, you know, you go into a Roman Catholic Church and you'll kneel down, but in your heart you'll be like, but I'm standing up in my heart though.