Don't Give the Enemy a Seat at Your Table: It's Time to Win the Battle of Your Mind...

by Louie Giglio

Guilt is the position of being accountable for sins and shortcomings.

By your actions or attitudes of the heart, you have fallen short of the glory of God, and you are responsible for it. You are guilty.

Shame acknowledges guilt, yet it intertwines the sin with your identity.

Whereas guilt is a legal and spiritual state, shame is an emotional and mental state. When you experience guilt, you admit that you did something wrong. You say, “I have done something wrong” or “I have thought or said something bad.” Yet when you experience shame, you take the sin upon yourself. You say, “I am something wrong” or “I am bad.”

Shame is a powerfully destructive force. It causes you to feel as if you’re unworthy of God’s love, acceptance, purposes, or plans.

When you feel shame, you’re prone to hide.

Your act of admitting guilt opens a doorway called grace, and God comes to you through that doorway and does for you what none of us can do for ourselves.

“Father, I’m so sorry I sinned. I confess it. Thank You that in Christ I am forgiven. I receive it and want You to give me the grace and power to walk in a different direction.”

The Enemy wants to define you by your scars. Jesus wants to define you by His scars.

Grace not only cancels guilt and shame; grace redefines you.

so now you’re hiding from God. When that happens, you go to a familiar place, even

though the familiar place isn’t part of Jesus’ call on your life. You go to a place you know, and know all too well. You go to the place that’s easy to go to but seldom beneficial. It might not be a place of debauchery and gross sin, but merely a place where you think you can do life without God—perhaps the grossest sin of all.

They’d been out all night. They were experienced fishermen. They must have tried the front of the boat, the back of the boat, the right side, the left side. They’d tried everything. So why was it so different when Jesus told them to throw their nets on the other side of the boat? The difference was because Jesus was behind the declaration.

Yet Jesus never focused on the failure. He focused on the restoration.

Peter failed, but he wasn’t a failure.

“Those who look to him [the Lord] are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame.” Do you think of yourself as “radiant”? That’s a powerful image and the opposite of shame. If you’re looking to the Lord, you are radiant. Your face is reflecting the light and love of Christ. You are never covered with shame.

one of the strongest things we can do to prevent the Enemy from sitting at our table is to be completely transfixed on the Host who is sitting at our table with us.

As C. S. Lewis pointed out, so many people are focused on lessening our desire for worldly things, yet “it would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

the difference between knowing a lot about something and truly experiencing something up close.

I had a choice in life: I could be a person who knew about God, or I could take up the invitation to truly know God.

First, God is holy, and second, God is full of glory. These

What is holiness? The angels are directing us to the perfection of God, the purity of God, the sinlessness of God. But even those words don’t fully convey what holiness is.

“sacred”

“set apart.”

glory

“weight”

“wo...

Scripture clearly tells us that we become what we worship (Psalm 115:8). When we set our gaze on the Almighty, we change into the likeness of the One who has captivated our souls. And we reflect His glory.

put the table in the middle of the enemies? Because the story we’re in is about the greatness of our God.

The table is in the presence of the enemies because God wants you to know that you’ll always have enough for every moment, every struggle.

How do you win the battle for your mind? Keep your mind on Christ. Period. There’s no way the Enemy will get a seat at your table.

“For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace.”

God has spoken these truths in His Word. Now it’s up to you to plant these truths in your mind, and keep tilling them and nurturing them until the Word takes root and grows and produces a crop.