Sherri Sand's Blog, page 8

Rejoicing When Life Goes Sideways

How does God want us to love?

I used to “love” through control. A parent’s perspective has the hindsight and wisdom gleaned from their own journey.

And it’s our job to share our journey, with all its successes and mistakes, with our kids. Hopefully, imparting wisdom and learning lessons packed with love.

Occasionally, I’ll see my child’s eyes light with understanding as they get an “aha” application for their own passage through life.

Other times, I see them heading toward a bump in the road and I start pounding my wisdom down their throats, trying to get that light to turn on so they avoid the wreck I see coming.

The hardest lesson for me? Recognizing their journey is not mine to hijack or fix. That bruise on their shin from falling down becomes an opportunity for God to teach them His lesson, His way, and in His timing. (And amazingly enough, He’s never asked my advice on how to go about that.)

How much do we trust our kids to God? Our marriage, our finances, our relationships?

That changes for me depending on how full my tank is. I have earned a master’s degree in yanking the wheel from God’s hands.

So what am I doing about it? I’m practicing rejoicing when a difficulty comes barreling up the sidewalk and crashing through my front door (James 1:2).

Many of us can recite the verse, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds.” But familiarity doesn’t mean friendship. How many of us go straight to rejoicing when a difficulty lands on our front porch?

Rejoice in Hardship

Sounds crazy. But if God asks us to rejoice, what does He have in store for us?

Joy
Strengthening of character
A changed perspective for our situation
A peace that passes understanding
A heavenly resilience to earthly problems
An overcoming nature

That sounds so much better than what we normally have in challenging times:

Worry
Fear
Uncertainty
Disastrous outcomes running through our imaginations
Depression
Negativity coming out of our mouths
Judgments

What if we tried rejoicing? What if we got a couple of friends and decided to try it together? To help remind each other—-when we start grumbling over the missed promotion—-to rejoice in God’s goodness. To rejoice in what He’s about to do in our lives. To rejoice in His provision (not our boss’s) for our survival.

We can practice together.

What if our rejoicing creates an atmosphere around us that invites God’s presence to work in a way He couldn’t through our negativity (which is so closely tied to unbelief).

What if He asks us to rejoice in order to change us, so we can change the world around us?

Prayer

Father, teach me how to look to You and rejoice in Your goodness. To rejoice in the promises You have in store for me. To rejoice in how You promise to shape me through my circumstances. Help me to get my eyes off what I see in the natural and rejoice until I see through Your eyes and gain a heavenly perspective for Your purposes in my life. Help me to persevere and gain the strength and character that You are wanting to develop in me. Teach me how to trust You when all I can see is the hard thing in front of me. Teach me an elevated perspective by rejoicing in how good You are and how much You love me and have my back. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Photo via Faramarz Hashemi via Flickr

Photo by xia.aike via Flickr

Rejoicing When Life Goes Sideways On Us

How does God want us to love?

I used to “love” through control. A parent’s perspective has the hindsight and wisdom gleaned from their own journey.

And it’s our job to share our journey, with all its successes and mistakes, with our kids. Hopefully, imparting wisdom and learning lessons packed with love.

Occasionally, I’ll see my child’s eyes light with understanding as they get an “aha” application for their own passage through life.

Other times, I see them heading toward a bump in the road and I start pounding my wisdom down their throats, trying to get that light to turn on so they avoid the wreck I see coming.

The hardest lesson for me? Recognizing their journey is not mine to hijack or fix. That bruise on their shin from falling down becomes an opportunity for God to teach them His lesson, His way, and in His timing. (And amazingly enough, He’s never asked my advice on how to go about that.)

How much do we trust our kids to God? Our marriage, our finances, our relationships?

That changes for me depending on how full my tank is. I have earned a master’s degree in yanking the wheel from God’s hands.

So what am I doing about it? I’m practicing rejoicing when a difficulty comes barreling up the sidewalk and crashing through my front door (James 1:2).

Many of us can recite the verse, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds.” But familiarity doesn’t mean friendship. How many of us go straight to rejoicing when a difficulty lands on our front porch?

Rejoice in Hardship

Sounds crazy. But if God asks us to, what does He have in store for us?

Joy
Strengthening of character
A changed perspective for our situation
A peace that passes understanding
A heavenly resilience to earthly problems
An overcoming nature

That sounds so much better than what we normally have in challenging times:

Worry
Fear
Uncertainty
Disastrous outcomes running through our imaginations
Depression
Negativity coming out of our mouths
Judgments

What if we tried rejoicing? What if we got a couple of friends and decided to try it together? To help remind each other—-when we start grumbling over the missed promotion—-to rejoice in God’s goodness. To rejoice in what He’s about to do in our lives. To rejoice in His provision (not our boss’s) for our survival.

We can practice together.

What if our rejoicing creates an atmosphere around us that invites God’s presence to work in a way He couldn’t through our negativity (which is so closely tied to unbelief).

What if He asks us to rejoice in order to change us, so we can change the world around us?

Prayer

Father, teach me how to look to You and rejoice in Your goodness. To rejoice in the promises You have in store for me. To rejoice in how You promise to shape me through my circumstances. Help me to get my eyes off what I see in the natural and rejoice until I see through Your eyes and gain a heavenly perspective for Your purposes in my life. Help me to persevere and gain the strength and character that You are wanting to develop in me. Teach me how to trust You when all I can see is the hard thing in front of me. Teach me an elevated perspective by rejoicing in how good You are and how much You love me and have my back. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Photo via Faramarz Hashemi via Flickr

Photo by xia.aike via Flickr

Our Thoughts Create Our Feelings

Do we determine our own emotional state?

Many of us tend to believe that it’s the people around us, or our circumstances that have the greatest impact on our emotions.

But I wonder if we’ve ever considered how much the thoughts we think influence the feelings we feel?

That while we may believe other people dictate our happiness, we’ve actually chosen to agree with a thought that aligns itself in a negative way with those people or circumstances.

And it’s actually the thought that determines how we feel.

I’ve been finding out the painful way how true this is. And I think I’m allergic to emotional pain. I hate it, hate it, hate it.

Lately, my tank has hit a low and I’ve been running on spiritual fumes. Living on those fumes instead of daily drinking from His cup tends to twist our perceptions of people and life.

But I launched a negativity fast last week (don’t ask how well it’s going—–especially after last weekend’s basketball tournament. I really am a nice person and don’t normally yell at men running up and down a court wearing black and white shirts.).

I started reading a devotional designed to show us how to speak and declare life into our lives, and I began to feel differently.

Because I started thinking differently. What we fix our minds on, we move toward. Thinking influences feelings, which determines behavior.

A thought comes and we either agree or disagree with it, and then our feelings follow the agreement.

For example, if I have a thought that says, “I’m never going to be happy,” and I agree with that thought, then my feelings are going to become sad and depressed.

But if I decide that I want to agree with what God says about me, I’ll start declaring, “I am who God says I am. I am an overcomer. I think great thoughts because I have the mind of Christ. I live with hope and peace. My hope is in God—-not my circumstance—-and He has great plans for my life.”

When we become aware of what we are agreeing with, then we can begin to change how we feel.

The other day, I was pouring out my heart to Mat and he said, “You’re agreeing with a spirit of regret.”

I’m not going to pretty it up here. It’s dog gone hard to stop feeling negative emotion when it’s filling every cell of your body and crying out for relief, just because you realize you are believing a lie from the enemy.

But regardless of how we feel, we still have the ability and power to nail the thoughts and spirits that are fueling those feelings to the cross. And break agreements with them. And repent for aligning ourselves with them.

That’s the power of the cross and the beginning of our journey to a life as an overcomer full of joy (Rom. 8:37).

So even though my heart was complaining and digging in its heals with thoughts of, “But this is how you feel,” I nailed regret to the cross and broke agreements with it. I asked God to remove it far from me, and I asked Holy Spirit what He wanted to give me in its place. As I quieted my thoughts and listened, I heard, Joy and Peace.

I placed a hand on my heart and asked God to seal joy and peace in there.

Watching our thoughts and what we are agreeing with is a powerful step toward freedom (2 Cor. 10:5)

Prayer

Father, I give you permission to illuminate the thoughts that I’m agreeing with. Both positive and negative. Help me become aware of how my thoughts, and my agreement with those thoughts, determine my emotional state. Whether happy or sad. Joyful or depressed. Continue to remind me that You have given me the authority and power to take back the ground the enemy has stolen from me. I declare You as Lord over my thought life. I’m giving the enemy his eviction notice, and from here on out, I’m dedicating my mind to You. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Photo via Pixabay

Praise by Ricardo Camacho via Flickr

Living Close to Him

How does living disconnected from God’s presence affect our daily lives?

When I’m immersed in His presence, and that love is flowing through me and spilling onto the people around me—–my kids, that crabby customer service person, the harried barista—–nothing dents my joy. It’s like a fountain that can’t be plugged.

And it infects people. Lifts burdens, raises a smile in an otherwise dreary day. Joy is powerful and strengthening (Neh. 8:10).

And then there was this week—–where I barely gave God a brief nod each morning.

Looming deadlines elbowed my usual routine out of the way. Where I would normally spend the first portion of my morning in stillness or worship or journaling with God, I went straight to work. Or hummed a quick worship song. Because I’m nothing if not a creature of habit. Need to GET MY QUIET TIME IN.

I didn’t soak; I speed-walked through my time with Him and my main tank and reserve drained to near empty.

The interesting thing was how irritating and dense and frustratingly inept the people around me became.

My tolerance level for less than stellar performance hovered around zero.

And God allowed me many, MANY opportunities to work out my lack of love. Including the two hours out of my evening I spent on the phone with a customer service center that had misapplied one of my payments and terminated our business service.

That was my come to Jesus moment. As I lay in bed that night, feeling drained and out of sorts, I told God that I didn’t believe I said anything I shouldn’t have, but I didn’t feel good about how I’d handled myself either.

He took me back to a few sound bites and showed me that the words weren’t wrong, the spirit was. When each of the customer service people I was transferred too started getting frustrated that I wasn’t willing to just pay what they showed I owed—–when I stopped feeling heard—–I started pushing back. I walked in pride instead of love.

I didn’t apply patience, which is what the situation called for. I let go of love and gained frustration, resentment, anger and offense.

Why are the Fruits of the Spirit spelled out for us in scripture? Are they a resource or just part of our daily Bible reading (when we happen to land on Galatians 5)?

They are meant to be a weapon and a source of strength and help.

I was vulnerable to negativity because I wasn’t filled. I wasn’t prepared to deal with another’s lack. I wasn’t tapped into the Spirit living in me, so I stepped into another kingdom.

I walked on the dark side and felt so yucky.

Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control.

These fruits are always available to us, but I wasn’t positioned to draw on them. We can’t conjure them out of our own strength (or they’d be called the Fruit of Sherri or Mary or Steve).

I can work hard to muster up love or joy through my own efforts, but those are “dead works.” Because abiding love, joy and peace ultimately come from Him.

We have to be plugged into the Source to have the Spirit and His fruits and gifts flowing into and out of our lives.

Steve Backlund’s devotional, Igniting Faith in 40 Days, is designed to free us from negativity. I’m a few days late, but joining the Backlund’s in a Negativity Fast & Positivity Feast in observance of this Lent season. Care to join me?

Father, give me an awareness of where my thoughts go when I step out of kingdom living. Help me to catch myself when I’m at that crossroad and strengthen me to choose how to live from Your fruits. Increase my passion for the things of Your kingdom so I live life in abundance and fullness through Your Son. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Photo via Pixabay

Praise by Ricardo Camacho via Flickr

The View from the Top

How do we change our view so it reflects what God sees?

The other day I was struggling with not feeling connected to God. So I journaled with Him about it.

I was going to pretty it all up and give you the highlights, but decided to just share my journaling process with God.

Me: I just don’t feel connected. I feel like I’m fighting to get into Your presence instead of just being in it. And I’m getting hit with feeling that we haven’t done it “right” with our kids. But there is comparison in that. I look at [I’m keep anonymous church leaders I very much admire and have absolutely no contact with other than their podcasts and live streaming events] and figure their kids must be so close and connected to You. Then I get stuck in feeling responsible to pray my kids through.

That it’s my responsibility to get everything in order and fix anything that is broken. This weight of responsibility is heavy and not my burden. How do I shake this feeling that I have to find the “right” prayers and if I don’t, our kids won’t make it and it will be my fault?

God: Love. I’ve asked you to love them and you’re doing that well.

Me: I don’t see evidence that they’ve been loved well.

God: Your eyes need an adjustment. You’re looking through the lens of problems and difficulty. See them from My perspective. Change your view point. You’re at the bottom of the ravine looking at the gravel road. You’re stuck on that section of road. But the road goes to the top. Where the views are beautiful. Come up here. The view is BEAUTIFUL!! I have your children in the palm of my hand.

Me: Why can’t I believe that? Why do I feel this yucky sense that it’s my responsibility? And if I don’t do it right, you can’t or won’t fix it?

God: I work all things for Your good. Do you think I don’t know your heart, your struggles? Where you’ve been at each moment of your parenting? I know what is you and what is not. I see your heart. I gave you this heart. All is not lost, sweet girl. I weave it all together. Judgment has tripped you up. There is a belief that if you parent and correct “this” way, your kids will be close and connected to Me. You’ve judged others and that judgment is hitting you. Repent and release. Trust Me. Take your hand from this plow. It’s hitting control in you.

What you can’t control you feel hopeless in. So you’ve looked through crooked lens at what is NOW in the natural and focused on that. It is hitting hopelessness in you because you can’t control behaviors or heart conditions. And you so badly want peace and joy to flow through your family at each and every moment. Conflict and difficulty trigger fear and you try to avoid this by controlling your kids and inserting yourself into their difficulties.

Me: What do I do? How do I get free from this?

God: Trust Me. Call on My name. Freedom is coming. Nail hopelessness and despair to the cross.

Soooo, that’s my struggle on a bad day, and once again He pulled me through. Gave me eyes to see from higher ground, because I do so desire peace and connection in each moment. Yet I live with four teenagers who are learning to become adults with all the stretching and discomfort that comes with that.

But God’s perspective moves us from despair and hopelessness to hope and beauty because He’s already written the end of our stories.

Prayer

Father, help me to find You in my difficulties. To be brave enough to share my heart with You and let You share Yours with me. Give me the ability to receive Your comfort and help. Teach me how to hear Your voice more clearly. To recognize when You are speaking to me. To not dismiss it as my own thoughts. Teach me how to love myself as You love me and cherish me. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Serving Without Grumbling

What does love look like?

Sacrifice? Surrender?

Kris Vallotton says that it’s easy to die for someone. That’s a one-time decision. It’s the living for someone that is hard.

Those are a multitude of big and small choices. Daily. Making dinner. Feeding the dog. Taking out the trash.

Sacrifices of time, energy and attitude.

Why attitude, you ask?

Because living for others doesn’t have comparison wrapped into it. Or complaining. We don’t get to see how much better or worse our service is than someone else’s.

Truly living for others is an elevated attitude that reaches for love. It’s not so much a sacrifice for others as it is sacrificing all the parts of ourselves that don’t want to die to self.

Mat had an emergency appendectomy in the wee hours of Saturday morning. It was ten pm and he wasn’t feeling well. The flu had been going around, so we both assumed he was coming down with that. I was E-X-H-A-U-S-T-E-D and so ready to lay my head on the pillow when he wondered aloud if it could possibly be his appendix.

Internally, I was ordering his body to behave so we could go to bed. Externally, I made the phone call to a nurse friend who ran us through some tests and told us to go to the emergency room.

My exhausted self wondered if he could drive himself even as I climbed behind the wheel and motored to the ER.

A series of tests and scans resulted in the appendicitis diagnosis. He nodded off on the hospital bed I looked at with envy, while my sweet daughter and I waited and waited and waited until they finally put him under just after 3am. Two hours later, my bleary-eyed self climbed into the car and drove home, while my daughter chose to sleep in her dad’s hospital room.

She stayed with him, fluffing his pillows and fixing his covers for the next two days. She epitomized sacrifice.

When I asked her about it, she said she just did what she would have wanted in his place. And she did it with love.

I tend to want the pampering and complain over the nursing. Is it a sacrifice when we do it begrudgingly?

So often we “serve” out of a sense of obligation or resentment. We fill in where no one else will. But we don’t jump in with our hearts. We drag our feet and cast resentful glances, muttering under our breath. And occasionally shut a cupboard door a tad loudly, just to make sure someone notices.

When we look outward and attribute motive to someone else’s behavior or lack of it, our love starts to shrivel.

How can he just sit there when I’m in here slaving away?

How come no one else takes the trash out?

Why am I always the one feeding the dog?

Sometimes it is selfishness in other people. Sometimes it’s their lack of awareness. And sometimes it’s our inability to ask for help—–assuming a lack of care in others if they don’t see our effort and jump in to help out.

What if we traded in attitude for love?

What if we stopped focusing on the couch potatoes with their smelly socks and worn out remote controls and looked inward where Holy Spirit is waiting for us to tune into Him?

To use that time to talk to Him. To pray for the ones we’re serving. Almost every time I throw a load in the washing machine, I thank God for its invention and the kids that make it necessary. (And I’m so grateful to live in an era with appliances that do my job for me.)

What if we chose to kick resentment to the curb and practiced enlarging our hearts?

Prayer

Jesus, I repent for my complaining and grumbling. I want to love well and choose to serve from that love. Teach me to find You when I doing the work I have resented. Show me how to find joy with You in serving others. Teach me how to love with my actions, wrapping others in prayer as I serve them. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Photo via Pixabay

Inscription on the Sand 1 via freeimages.com

The Torment That Ensnares Us

What does torment look like?

I’m not talking medieval torture, but the barrage of negativity that persistently bangs against our door.

For some, it’s fear. Unreasonable, unrelenting fear. The vague sense that something bad could happen to us or someone we love. An undefined sense of doom that hangs over us like a cloud.

For others it’s temptation. The incessant pull to engage in thoughts or activities that promise fulfillment and then shame us horribly. Food. Shopping. Porn. Gambling. They lure us in and then nail us with a right hook that drops us to our knees.

Torment covers a gamut of areas. The enemy is good at setting us up to fail and then accusing us for the failure.

Tonight I tripped into sin. A lie of omission. A manipulation of words that kept truth in the shadows.

Like the scene from the Pink Panther in which Peter Seller’s character, Inspector Clouseau, walks into a hotel and spots a man and a dog standing in the foyer. He asks the man, “Does your dog bite?” The man says, “No.”

When Clouseau reaches to pet the dog, the animal tries to attack him. Clouseau leaps back and turns his offended gaze to the man and indignantly states, “I thought you said your dog doesn’t bite.”

The man barely raises an eyebrow as he replies, “That’s not my dog.”

My words were truthful, but they hid the real truth. The motive in my heart was to deflect away from my error. To keep from being judged.

But once the words were airborne, I felt guilt. Lots of it. Even after I repented. Shame stalked me, condemning me for lying.

The torment became so much bigger than my poor choice. It was a mountain I couldn’t shake free.

Then God reminded me that He is not the author of guilt or shame and I really needed to nail those lying spirits to the cross.

So I did. I broke agreements with them and asked God to remove them far from me.

Holy cow! Something lifted off me and I felt joy and freedom welling up inside.

I asked Holy Spirit what He wanted to give me in place of the guilt and shame and He said, “Redeeming love.” Isn’t that beautiful?

So often we accept what the enemy throws at us without questioning it. If we feel badly about ourselves, then we must be bad. We snuggle dejectedly into the tattered blanket of the enemy’s lies.

Is it possible that not everything we feel originates from us?

Is it possible we are being manipulated into accepting a way of life that we have the ability to reject? To kick to the curb and command it to stay away from us and our families?

What if we picked up our sword (Eph. 6:10-20) and started standing our ground (James 4:7). What if we went after the joy and peace that is promised to us?

What if it worked? What if we started guarding our thought life and rejecting negativity and gossip when it tries to engage us?

What if we looked for the best, forgave quickly, and loved the unlovely?

What if we let Love transform us?

Prayer

Holy Spirit, guide me into deeper places in Your heart, where the tempter can’t reach me and fear has no hold on me. Teach me how to fight for pure thoughts. Thoughts that are full of goodness and kindness toward myself and others. Help me to know You in deeper ways. To walk free from what entangles my mind. Speak Your goodness to my heart so that I can walk in Your freedom. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Iraq by U.S. Army via Flickr – no changes made

Medieval Sword by Soren Niedziella via Flickr – no changes made

Attitudes Impact Our Perceptions

What colors our vision?

There are mindsets we step into that dictate what we think and feel, what we expect to see from others, and how we behave.

Love thinks the best.

It delivers a buffer of grace, giving people time to explain, to share, to go through their process and land without being pushed into defensiveness, avoidance or lying.

So if love allows room for mistakes and growth, what hinders that process?

When we step out of love, out of kingdom, and judge…when we embrace a critical attitude…we are set up to anticipate the worst from others.

And we get what we are looking for.

If I expect to feel annoyed by someone, then I’ll feel it the second I notice them breathing air in the same room. If I expect someone to make poor choices, that’s what I’ll be looking for.

Mat and I just came through a rough parenting week. One of our kids got in trouble at school. His choice made no sense to us and had a rippling effect on others. In our frustration we came down hard on him. But when we cooled off and sat down and actually listened in a way that he felt safe to share, his choice made sense. It wasn’t the wisest choice, but we have thirty years on him in the maturing process. Hindsight is a great teacher and he learned.

If we had stepped into love, we would have avoided the distance that initially came between us and our child. Our assumptions about his motives colored our perception of him and sparked a negative interaction.

We didn’t see through love.

Our attitudes impact others. It’s as if our thoughts and feelings either perfume or poison the air around us.

We don’t have to speak a word for people to know we are spitting mad or about to burst with joy. It seeps from our pores. In the same way, we can take someone’s “temperature” in a nanosecond.

At my kids’ basketball games, tempers can rise quickly over a bad call that impacts the game’s momentum. It’s hard not to get caught up in that swirling anger. I can easily trip into being a yeller. I hate injustice.

But Holy Spirit lives in us so we have access to His fruits: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control (Gal. 5:22,23).

I want to be an atmosphere changer. I want others to tap into the best parts of themselves when they are around me. I want them to feel lifted up. Encouraged.

So when the anger of the crowd presses in and stirs my emotions, I’ve been practicing connecting to God and releasing His peace.

I want to be a releaser of the aroma of His presence.

I don’t want to find out later (from the media room in heaven) that angels were waiting for my prayers to send them on assignments, but instead my angry words were empowering demonic influences in the room. Anger. Strife. Judgment. (And the occasional, ahem, heckling. I said I’m working on it.)

We have the ability to walk in the peace and joy He’s given us. It just takes practice.

Prayer

Holy Spirit, teach me how to connect with You in a deeper way. Reveal Yourself to me and give me an awareness of Your presence that lives inside me. The love You feel, the peace You live in, the joy that is the essence of Your being. Let me experience You living through me and loving others. Teach me to think the best of others and myself. To laugh and have fun and enjoy the life You’ve given me. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Pictures via Pixabay

Freedom is for Us

What does freedom look like?

I watched a friend get free today.

The enemy had her believing lies. About her parenting. About her child. About the future.

How often do we fall in the trap of believing the reality the enemy is feeding our minds?

Letting fear and hopelessness dictate our outlook and determine our next steps…to quit on the relationships closest to us. To fight back when we’re hurt. To believe the worst as if that’s our only option.

At the marriage conference my husband and I attended a few months ago, I received healing and deliverance for some core areas in my life. It changed my perspective in ways I didn’t anticipate.

At Christmas this year, I fell in love with my husband’s family in a way I hadn’t in the twenty plus years we’ve been a part of each other’s lives.

Prior to the freedom I received at the conference, I would have said the issue lay with them. But that wasn’t true. I was the one who changed and it gave me new eyes. More love. Acceptance and joy.

We are flawed, damaged, wounded and oppressed in a variety of ways. Some seen, some hidden.

But as victory and love come in and extinguish the rights the enemy has been given to our lives, we are changed and become a conduit of love to the ones who desperately need it.

So how do we know where we need freedom and healing in our lives?

Years ago, I knew there was something broken in me. Fear and control ruled my life. I’d lay in bed at night and catalog my every failure. Reliving the moments I’d reacted harshly to my children’s behaviors, hurting their hearts with angry words.

Guilt and condemnation would envelop me, as I longed so badly for a do-over for my out-of-control tongue. I could move from love to harshness so quickly when they disobeyed. Shame over my reactions tormented me.

I knew the Bible well. I knew shame, guilt and condemnation were not from God. And eventually, I realized the torment came from the enemy.

Shame is a darkness that presses in and weighs us down. It steals our hope and our esteem. I hated how it made me feel and I hated that my failures took me to such a pit of regret over who I was and what I’d done.

Shame takes our failure and tells us that we are the mistake.

Today, my friend walked through prayers of deliverance and freedom, breaking off areas God revealed that had given the enemy the right to cloud her vision and perspective.

It was beautiful to see freedom come in and regain what had been stolen from her. Deliverance isn’t something the body of believers talks much about, but it truly changes lives.

What if we pursued everything God has for us in the Bible?

When Jesus lives in your heart, freedom shouldn’t be an intellectual concept, or accepted as something we’ll arrive at when we get to heaven. But instead, understood that it is something we can actually live from.

Prayer

Father, show me the areas You desire to free in my life. Reveal the path to freedom in my life. Help me to become aware when the enemy is influencing my thinking, skewing my perspective about myself and others. I reject his plans for my life and receive Yours. Help me to grow in intimacy and freedom with You. In Jesus’ name, amen.

Pictures via Pixabay

Sickness and Negativity

Do our emotions affect our health?

As I listened to the radio on the drive into work, two morning show hosts discussed a study on hugs. They said hugging actually keeps you from getting sick.

Hugs leave us feeling happy which boosts our immune systems. While negativity depresses the immune system and leaves us vulnerable to colds and such.

I have always hated being tired. It’s painful to me. Might be from those early years with newborn twins and a toddler. No sleep at night and no rest during the day. E-x-h-a-u-s-t-i-n-g.

So, when sleep was short and I could barely pull myself from bed, I’d start complaining. Complaining about how tired I was. How little sleep I’d had. How horrible I felt.

When my head finally hit the pillow, I’d glance at the clock and focus on how few hours I had before the alarm would wake me up for another exhaustion-filled day.

But there is a principle that states, “What you focus on, you get more of.”

If I focus on my tiredness, my tired state grows. If I focus on how little help I get around the house, my radar hones in on every dirty plate that made it to the sink, but not the empty dishwasher.

Kicking Negativity to the Curb

But when I choose love, choose peace, choose patience and battle the negativity trying to overtake my thought life, my joy grows. These are weapons and emotions we have access to through the Holy Spirit inside us

(Gal. 5:22, 23).

Love battles fear. Peace battles stress. Patience battles all the little irritations that come at us.

And doesn’t it feel so much better to be a little tired and full of joy, than exhausted and embracing a boatload of negativity?

Negativity doesn’t happen in our lives without our agreement.

Imagine if our spiritual eyes were opened. What would we see? Angels and demons. Light and darkness. Battling over us.

We were designed to enter that battle, but too often we accept our circumstances as our lot in life. We survive, and sometimes just barely.

We’ve heard stories of wealthy people slowly being robbed into bankruptcy by their managers. What if our stories are actually like theirs? We’ve been born into an incredible inheritance, but just out of our line of sight the enemy of our souls is slowly robbing us blind.

Wouldn’t we want to know? Wouldn’t we want vengeance against him?

Often, we haven’t been trained to think beyond what we can see in the natural. Very crafty on the enemy’s part, don’t you think? If he can keep us ignorant about his presence in our lives, we’ll do nothing to kick him out of it.

It would be a game changer if we could see how he’s robbed and stolen from us and understand how to fight back and win.

When we recognize it as a spiritual battle, our perspective on who we are battling changes. Not people—–not the kids who leave the dishes on the coffee table, the husband who isn’t affectionate, or the boss who doesn’t appreciate us—–but the realms of darkness

(Eph. 6:12).

Someone once told me that our fear and negativity attract darkness to us—–satan and his demons. While speaking light and life (God’s truth and grace) attract the kingdom of God and sends darkness fleeing (James 4:7).

Our physical health and emotional well-being is tied to understanding what we are battling and who we are agreeing with.

Prayer

Father, show me where the enemy is robbing me. Open my eyes to see what I’m agreeing with in the realm of darkness. I want to walk in agreement and alignment with Your kingdom. With Your thoughts and Your ways. Teach me how to wrestle my mind into submission to You. Into agreement with peace and love and joy. I break all agreements with negativity and I invite You into the deep places in my life. Teach me Your ways and surround me with Your peace. Thank you! In Jesus’ name, amen.

Hug by Tania Cataldo via Flickr

By Staff Sgt. James Bowie [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons