who are you listening to?

In his Good Friday sermon this morning, Steve quoted a sentiment attributed here to Pastor John MacArthur: that strong people talk to themselves and discipline themselves and pull themselves into line with truth, while weak people listen to themselves. We are to listen to the word of God, and then talk to ourselves.

In the past several weeks, God brought the importance of this truth home to me in the context of trial. I need to be thankful because I can no longer remember exactly what I was struggling through, but suffice to say I was listening to my circumstances and letting them talk to me. They were saying to me, "woe, woe; life is hard and things are going badly. Are you sure God is a good and kind God? Maybe He's like that in the Bible and to other people, but not to you right now." What terrible thoughts right? I have no trouble labelling them as lies from Satan. It is Satan's great desire as the father of lies to cause us to doubt God's goodness and to walk away from saving faith in Him. After all, isn't this what he did to Adam and Eve?

In the face of my circumstances and the lies in my mind, it took sheer discipline to remember the truth and to work it into my thoughts so that it supplanted the lies. I had to actively pray and ask God to help me trust Him, to ask Him to show me 'the truth of His truth', to help me cling to it despite my circumstances until such time as when it would be easy again to believe it, rather than hard. Happily, He did, as He does! He is the source of truth as well as truth embodied and He loves to help us conquer Satan's lies by resting in His word.

Having said this, I don't believe (and didn't experience) that God just zaps away the difficulties or the emotions of struggle. Until we see Him clearly we will keep encountering trial, including Satan's lies as he challenges God's truth. But we do have everything we need for life and godliness through His powerful word and Spirit and the support of the Body of Christ around us. And if you're like me, we do need to fight: to not so easily listen to our weak thoughts and to Satan's lies, but to listen to God's truth and then to tell it back to ourselves so we can keep standing firm no matter what our circumstances. This (as our psychologist has been so helpfully guiding us to do) is part of what it means to not "conform to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of our minds."

So - my encouragement to you is to keep reading the truth, believing the truth, and telling the truth, even to yourself. It's the only form of 'positive self-talk' that has sure and lasting power.