Oh yes – I’ve had faith for amazingly huge things and have seen incredible answers to prayer. I can believe for big things and march up and down my kitchen floor early every morning declaring that faith with my fist victoriously pumping in the air!
Then in a flash, during worship at church, as my hands were raised and tears pouring down my face, the word came crashing down on me from heaven. I couldn’t take one more thing to think about. Ironically, as 2018 drew to a close, I was such a mess that I wasn’t even going to choose a word for the year. To be sure, I would have moments of surrender, only to return moments later to snatch it right back because I was too much of a control freak to even let God control my situation.Īnd it was in one such tempting moment that I found myself last weekend, when God promised me to take me on a journey of intense spiritual warfare – if I would only dedicate myself to learn from Him and surrender control once and for all. How often I’ve stepped right into this trap in an effort to gain control of my situation, because I didn’t trust God enough to let go and leave it in His hand. We suddenly think, “Oh yes! Why didn’t I think of that before?”Īnd we frantically begin planning a path to victory, never realizing that our “wisdom” and dynamic solutions are not coming from God, but are the strategy of the enemy for our defeat. They will drive us to seek answers, comfort, and fill that emptiness we feel in anything other than God.Įven worse, they trick us into relying on our own strength and wisdom for results: that “wisdom” that so suddenly fills our thoughts with dynamic solutions to our problems.
There is nothing that can defeat a Christian like worry, fear, and anxiety. They are the demons that hound our minds and continually battle for control of our soul and spirit and if given even an inch of room, they will overtake us and multiply inside of us until we’re nothing but a frail shell of our former spiritually strong, warrior selves. That questions is one of the most plaguing questions, and it causes us to look to every solution but Christ! Instead of taking the time to lay that decision before the Lord and allow Him to bring peace to my heart and mind, and fill me with His divine wisdom, I gave place to that fear and the question it would bring of “what if”. Without fail, I have lived to regret that decision – and sometimes greatly. Looking back, I can point to times in my life when I was faced with a very important decision but instead of going to the Lord in prayer, I hastily responded out of fear and anxiety. (Ephesians 4:23) It is also why we must daily put on the helmet of salvation.
This is why Paul urged us to be renewed in the spirit of our mind.
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