"Today you will spend solitary moments of conversation with yourself, either listing your complaints or counting your blessings." Paul David Tripp
No one speaks to you more than you. What are you speaking to yourself? Words of grumbling or of gratitude? Words that rehearse all your difficulties and sorry complaints or that recall all of God's extraordinary goodness in your life? Are you rehashing all you lack that you think you deserve or recalling all you possess that you know you could never deserve?
Are you speaking words of death and discouragement or of life and hope?
Because here's the thing: we are always, always, always talking to ourselves. What kind of inner monologue is your heart speaking? Is it based on your ever-vacillating feelings or on the never-changing Truth of God's Word?
Yes, I've repeated this mighty often...but if you're anything like me, you're a mighty good forgetter! We're all of us spiritual amnesiacs...like those Israelites wandering in the dessert. They witnessed God's miraculous deliverance time and time again--delivering them out of slavery in Egypt, parting the Red Sea, destroying the Egyptians, providing water out of a rock, giving them daily mana for food, even sending quail for meat.
But it was never quite enough, because the moment a problem arose, there they go again...doubting, complaining, grumbling, longing to return to Egypt. Egypt? Really? Egypt, where you were enslaved, starved, worked to the bone? Where your boy babies were killed and your freedom destroyed? That's what happens when we forget God's goodness--we grow delusional and bitter and despairing.
The Israelites forgot God's past goodness...they doubted His present love and power... and so they lost their hope, complained, and wallowed in misery. Yep, sounds a bit like yours truly...first I forget, then I doubt, and then I start grumbling and growing more and more discouraged.
What do we do? PREACH TO YOURSELF!! Start speaking words of truth and life to yourself. Start remembering God's faithfulness and goodness. Start rehearsing His gifts to you.
Paul puts it this way: "Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say , Rejoice!...Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things." (Phil.4:4,8)
Choose to consciously remember and recount the gifts, and then choose to rejoice in them.
Choose to marinate in His supernatural Word and be encouraged and strengthened.
Choose to think about the true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent. Preach those words of TRUTH to yourself rather than your words of doom and discouragement.
Because we can all choose what we will think about. We can all choose the meditation of our hearts. And that which we think about will increasingly dominate the mediation of our hearts. That which we think about and meditate upon will be what we're relentlessly speaking to ourselves. And that which we speak to ourselves will ultimately determine our attitudes and actions.
Let's stop listing our complaints and start counting our blessings. Let's stop rehashing our troubles and start rehearsing the Truth.
Help us, Father, to preach the Truth--Your Truth--to our hearts on a daily basis so that we increasingly count our blessings and are filled with Your hope, peace, and joy. Help us this day to choose to preach Life to ourselves and to others. In Jesus' name, Amen.
To God be the glory.
No comments:
Post a Comment