Guarding your heart, retraining your mind.

Dear blogosphere,

What might have been doesn't exist. 

Going back in the past to change something isn't going to happen.  

I love a Hebrew word picture of the word know...it is a man in a canoe rowing backwards in the future but very much focused on the past. The apostle Paul is taken out of context when he says, "forgetting what is behind..."  God never tells us to amputate our history from our present reality. That's stupid.  But the whole, "what might have been..." Is a game of the enemy aimed at the mind to rob you of contentment. If you allow it to fester it will resurrect a stronghold in your mind and keep you stuck! I know this one. We are so wise to learn from our past. Look at our nation...we clearly have forgotten that to forget history is for history to repeat itself. Paul was speaking of forgetting past achievements. We can't live off of yesterday's relationship with The Lord or just forget some of the field trips we have taken and learned the hard way that God was right and He can be trusted. The only prescription for tearing down a stronghold is not with carnal methods but divine ones. Namely the Word of God, fasting, prayer, and choices to retrain your thinking. Learn and your do over will be not repeating the same stuff the next time. As a dog returns to his vomit so a fool returns to his folly. I remember our dogs eating grass, puking, and then eating their vomit.  Hate to ruin anyone's breakfast. I would stand slack jawed and yell how sick!!!! Yet that's what we do when we refuse to learn and choose differently. Some of you have been pining away over a person, place, or thing and in essence you are wandering in the wilderness spiritually speaking. Yet The Lord has called you out of darkness that He might bring you into a good and spacious place. Yet there is a mountain in front of you that won't move. You've got to go around it (deut 1 and 2). You didn't get where you are overnight and being free isn't for the faint of heart. You are going to have to go after it but as you do...you will find a liberation in your soul and a knowing of Jesus that's not words on a page. How bad do you really want to be free?  For me it's meant intense time in the word and The Lord performing heart surgery while I was wide awake with no anesthesia!!! His word works. That's all I know. He may not change your circumstance but He will set you free. He invites each of us to come and drink for free...even though it was so costly for Christ. He instructs us to not spend ourselves on what doesn't satisfy (isa 55). He is proved right always...this I know.  You have to make some choices, drive some stakes in the ground, and set your face like flint determined to do His will. You can't phone this one in. I've been the biggest fool on the planet...you can't out school me there.