Speaking Truth To Your Own Heart.

A great friend and counselor once taught me what she calls the ABC method, in which the letters stand for Activating event, Beliefs, and Consequential emotions.  It is a way of sorting through the emotions at the surface, to find and uproot deeper problems. The key here is that when something happens and I find myself in a morass of negative emotions, there may be a wrong belief in between the two, forming the bridge from a triggering event to feelings of fear, shame, loneliness, or despair.  She taught me to write down or say out loud, my answers to the following questions:

What am I feeling?
What’s happening to cause that?
What am I saying about myself, others, and the world?
Is that true?
If not, what does God say about it?

For example, I could be feeling lonely because a friend who said they’d call tonight never called.  If I let Satan’s whispers seed my thoughts, they’ll sound something like this: “I’m a loser waiting by the phone. My friend doesn’t care about me. I’ll never find true friends in this world.” Of course that isn’t true, but somehow I don’t feel much better simply by reasoning that it’s false.  That’s because lies aren’t defeated merely by being pointed out as lies. Lies crumble under the weight of the truth.

When I find that I’ve swallowed a lie, I need to search the Scriptures for the truth antidote. In this case it could be Jesus’ promise to never leave me nor forsake me, or the fact that “God sets the lonely in families,” (Psalm 68:6).

The truth is a weapon given to us to win our daily battles against Satan’s accusations, and ultimately the spiritual war. “For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ,” (2 Corinthians 10:3-5).  We know the end of the story:

“For the accuser of our brothers and sisters,
who accuses them before our God day and night,
has been hurled down.
They triumphed over him
by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony,” (Revelation 12:10,11, NIV).

I challenge you to take your thoughts captive today and make them obedient to Christ,  by speaking the truth to your own heart.