Are your thoughts rooted in the truth?

When we begin to submit ourselves to the anxiety and stress of the past, we make decisions based on the experience we had in the past. We fuel these emotions when we rehearse the negative.

When this happens, the enemy undermines our identity in Christ. We cannot be the creative expression of God when we are full of anxiety.  

You and I subconsciously agree with many lies, and they must be dealt with. It is not thinking of something else when a bad thought comes to mind. It isn’t mind over matter or mental exercises. It is about perception.  

So, how do we know and deal with the lies, you ask?

When we notice something shifting in our emotions that would cause us fear or anxiety, we must ask ourselves, what happened?

It is taking our thoughts and replacing them with God’s words. It is doing what we are instructed to do with our thoughts.

2 Corinthians 10:4-5 (for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but mighty before God to the casting down of strongholds); casting down imaginations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.

Anxiety is exalting another belief over God’s promises. When we do this, we give our heart and thoughts to what is inferior to the word of the Lord.

Perfect love indeed casts out fear. So, when we embrace anxiety and fear, we have allowed them to replace our first love relationship.

If the enemy can compromise on our first love, he can get us to lose our sense of identity. That is what fear and anxiety do; it causes us to lose track of our identity.

We need to be aware of our reactions to information or situations. If they lead us to anxiousness, we’ve embraced a lie. We have embraced inferior information over the words of the Lord in our lives. It doesn’t happen as a conscious decision, but it happens.

We gain ground by repenting and returning to where we lost our peace. We confess our sin of partnering with the enemy and return to where we last experienced peace, and then we reconnect with peace.    

Remember, peace is our permanent possession. Peace in the Kingdom is profound because it is not the absence of something. It’s the presence of someone. Peace is a person; it is the abiding presence of the spirit of God in our lives.