Self Help 101? No thank you!

Have you ever gotten in your own way before? It is easy to answer this question but hard to answer the next one; Why? Why do we get in our own way?

Just throwing this out there, but it may be because we try to do things on our own.  I don’t know about you, but I get tired of trying to be everything I am “supposed” to be all of the time. I get wrapped up in the peer pressure of the church and of the world and both can be dangerous things. We need to stop comparing ourselves to one another and JUST FOLLOW CHRIST!

Whoa, you say, there is no peer pressure in the church….to that I ask where do you go to church, because I want to go there.  Look, people are people, no matter where they are, everyone is broken: otherwise we wouldn’t need Jesus!

I have always considered myself to be a bit of a black sheep when it came to everything, my family, my church, my life in Christ. This negative view of myself has allowed me to wrongly excuse my poor choices in life and only in the light of Christ do I begin to see this stronghold for what it is: it is a lie.

2 Corinthians 10:4 (NLT)

We use God’s mighty weapons, not worldly weapons, to knock down the strongholds of human reasoning and to destroy false arguments. 

I am the righteousness of God in Christ, I am the head and not the tail, I rejoice because God is not a respecter of persons and He has plans for me. These words, ones written in the Bible, must become my ammunition in my battle against lies. These words must become my words, they must build my faith. They must carry more weight in my life than the lies I believed because someone of authority once told me a falsehood.

You are not worthless, you are not forgotten, you are not just like your deadbeat father, or destined to be a failure. Whoever told you these lies, well, they are wrong!  And it is time to get free of the strongholds these lies created in you.

One of the lies I have believed is that I have to always “be” a certain way now that I am a Christian. While it is true we strive for the “high Calling” of God perfection is not an option for me, because I am human. Here is another lie: I grew up thinking I was constantly a disappointment to God because the other people in my life seemed to be disappointed in me so often. If it was so impossible to please my dad, how could I ever please God?  The truth is I do not frustrate the grace of God. The truth is God loves me, and His grace is enough. The truth is God sings over me, HE is not waiting with a big stick to knock me over the head whenever I fall short.

We need to grab those things that exalt themselves higher than God in our lives, those lies we believe because our parents always said, or because we always thought a certain way, and bring them down! Pull down those strongholds by building up our faith. Asserting who we are in Christ is the only way to become free of the lies about ourselves that we believed until now. This will allow us to get out of our own way, and become more like Christ and less like that black sheep. After all, we are HIS sheep and we follow HIS voice!

This is not what I intended to write today. This is not what I studied last night and it is not where I thought God wanted to go when I first sat down at this keyboard. But I know that this is the only thing I could say right now. It was like a groaning in my spirit. I have believed so many lies before, I still struggle with the walls these lies erected between me and God. I want them torn down! I want to live in the freedom of God’s grace. I want to know the truth because it is not just truth that sets me free, BUT THE TRUTH I KNOW that sets me free. Don’t you want the same? Doesn’t your spirit cry out in the wilderness for more of God? 

Be blessed and be a blessing and remember that breakthrough is a VERB!