Romans 11:29 For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.

Are you called? Do you know the gifts that have been given to you?

Luke 19:43 For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side

When fruit has been pressed on every side, what comes out is what is inside.

Galatians 5:22-23  English Standard Version

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.

2 Corinthians 2:14 But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere.

Proverbs 3:5 Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.

Now is the time to use faith, not to lose faith.

1 Corinthians 10:13 No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.

John 16:33 I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.

Tribulation:

trib-u-la’-shun (tsar, tsar, “staid,” “narrow,” “pent up”; :

1. In the Old Testament:

Closely pressed, as of seals ; of streams pent up ; of strength limited: in other places “distress,” “affliction” 

2. In the New Testament:

The Greek is thlipsis, a “pressing together” (as of grapes), squeezing or pinching (from verb thlibo); used figuratively for “distress,” “suffer affliction”; “persecution,” The word is used generally of the hardships which Christ’s followers would suffer.

In this present age, given all that is going on around us, it feels like we, who are in Christ, are being marginalized. Our influence on society is being ignored.

Deuteronomy 4:30 When you are in tribulation, and all these things come upon you in the latter days, you will return to the Lord your God and obey his voice.

It is not as if God has not been warning us about what is coming.

2 Timothy 3:1-4  English Standard Version

But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, 

But are these the last days?

Isaiah 46:10 declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose,’

Another way of looking at these times is that God is not finished.

And neither are we, for we walk by faith, not by sight.