To any of us that are trying to continue to preach or teach during the lockdown, maybe it is not necessarily discouraging.
Preaching to a phone connected to Facebook, or teaching via Zoom, may seem limiting, discouraging, and possibly not very fruitful.
However it must have also seemed that similar, when a man locked in a dimly lit cell wrote letters to churches that he could not speak to face to face.
Yet the word of God could not be limited, and its power was in no way affected by the apparently weak mode of transmission.
The same must be true about the preaching of the same word of God, today, regardless about any apparent weakness in its mode of transmission.