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annie's DevotionalsTaking Every Thought CaptiveLet’s fix our eyes on Jesus, "the author and perfecter of faith" (Hebrews 12:2) and take "every thought captive to the obedience of Christ" (2 Corinthians 10:5) Our Christian walk is to be a proactive walk. One of the greatest battles in my life, and the lives of those I’ve come to know, is our self-talk (our thoughts). When we are abused as children, and that includes any abuse, we no doubt have lies we have bought in to. A stronghold is a lie that we have believed. We don’t recognize them as lies. To us they are truths, and in my case I believed those truths were proven over and over again. This may sound crazy, but when a lie would be exposed to me and the truth revealed, I was very afraid to except the truth as truth. I thought, what if I begin believing that and I’m deceiving myself. Something I’ve learned to do, and still have to do it today, is take my thoughts and look at them. I actually picture myself grabbing that thought and examining it. Is it good, is it true, does it line up with God’s word. Is this truth or the voices of my past come to tear me down. If I find they aren’t true or don’t line up with what God says about me, then I take it and imagine throwing it away and replacing it with the truth found in God’s word. You can’t just get rid of lies, you have to replace them with truth. This is work. This is proactive. It’s making a choice to not allow our thoughts to dictate who we are or what we are. It’s not allowing the enemy to use the messages we received in the past either verbally or by the way we were treated, to shape how we see ourselves. Instead, we begin the work of seeing who we are in Christ. We are that precious pearl. We are his friend and a child of God. We are loved so much by him that he gave his life for us so we could spend eternity with him. We see the flaws, like a teenager with a pimple on their face. They think that’s all people will see. He doesn’t see us that way. He sees the finished product. A few weeks ago as I was reading or listening again to the account of Peter walking on the water, I had a different take on it than I’ve thought of or heard before. Of course I see Peter as kind of a boastful person, big and burley, rough around the edges, speaks before he thinks kind of man. Anyway, as I pictured him getting out of the boat and walking toward Jesus, instead of him looking down at the waves and getting scared, which obviously could be what he did, I saw him turn to the others and say, “Look at me…look what I can do!” And of course we know he began to sink. In order to stay on top of the water he had to keep looking at Jesus who gave him the courage, the strength and the faith to continue doing what he was doing. It obviously wasn’t something he could do on his own, and we never hear of any of the others ever doing that, neither do we hear of Peter ever doing it again. It was a one-time deal…I believe done to show Peter and the others a very important lesson. If we want to make it on this journey and be able to keep a straight and steady path to our goal, we have to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus. If we allow our thoughts or anything else cause us to look away, we can quickly go downhill. I want to keep my eyes fixed on him every day. I’ve let many distractions in life grab my attention (and now that I’m older, I can no longer multi-task..lol) I don’t want to be distracted. I don’t want to let the fears in this life or the cares of this world to be an obstacle. And I don’t want my thoughts to cause me to lose focus. As I finish out my journey, I want to have tunnel vision, focusing on him and trusting him to get me there safely.
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