On the eve of Pastor Doug’s 40th birthday he sat quietly bummed. I thought it was about age but instead he said, “I had a pastor tell me once that if you didn’t have a big church by the time you were 40, you failed and weren’t gonna have one.” I was wondering where this came from because this had never been his line of thinking. He had never felt it was about numbers. I sat beside him and in a brilliant moment of clarity and wisdom, I answered, “Who told you that, because I know that we, you and I, only receive the word of the Lord and God did not say that. What you have received was not God speaking.”
Be careful to receive only the word of the Lord. God tells you that you can. God tells you that you will. God tells you that all things are possible. So whose words do you receive? Who told you that you’d never buy a house? Who told you that your marriage would never be restored? Who told you that you couldn’t get that promotion? Because I am blogging here today to tell you that God never said that.
Remember the cartoon of the angel and the devil sitting on your shoulder and one would tell you to do good things and the other would tell you not to worry about it? Well, it may have been a cartoon but it’s real. There is a God who wants you to succeed in life and there is an enemy of your soul who tries to keep you from trying. The battle is held in your mind as to which one you are going to believe.
Then there are words spoken by people are often ingested and believed both positive and negative. Those words shape our lives when we decide that they are true about us. Those thoughts then become actions and actions shape our lives as they lead us down paths that are either right or wrong for us. What needs to happen is you have to have a sense of who you are and what your purpose is and a plan on how you will fulfill that purpose.
So the task before you is to determine which words are just idle words, in other words, words that don’t define you at all and are just merely a belief of the person speaking and which ones are words to live by. Notice that I didn’t write only accept the positive statements about you, there are some negative things that have been said that are true as well. You have to know the truth about yourself for in that truth will lie freedom. Many of the things that you are doing today and the way that you feel about yourself is not even close to being true about you! So ask yourself, who told you that? Why did you believe it? Now that you know it might not be true how you can you overcome it? What can you change today to undo the damage it caused?
Pastor Susan 