Here is what the Lord encouraged me with this morning:
“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life and have it to the full” John 10:10
“…the sheep listen to His (Jesus’) voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When He has brought out all his own, He goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know His voice, 5 but they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger’s voice” John 10:3b-5 (my emphasis added)
I saw an interesting bumper sticker last week, it said: “don’t believe everything you think”. Have you ever had a REALLY bad day. How about a REALLY good day? What differentiated between the two? Circumstances? Or how you responded to them? A mentor friend of mine says “Life is 10% circumstance, 90% how you respond to it.” But WHY do I respond the way I do?
The Lord challenged me this morning that He has come to give me LIFE and give it to me abundantly. I need to constantly be discerning my thoughts and what “voices” I am listening to in the midst of my daily circumstances. If on a given day I realize that I am not experiencing life and feel like my peace and joy are being stolen away it’s time to recognize whose voice I am listening to. If I wake up today believing that my spouse is the enemy…I need to evaluate why. Any voices I am consciously or subconsciously listening to that do not lead to the truth and life Jesus came to give me are from the “thief” – the father of lies!
So what do I do when I recognize that the voice I am following is not Jesus’? I RUN AWAY (Jn 10:5). It’s not enough to just recognize that the voice is not my Father’s…I must run away by running back to my Father’s voice, the voice of truth. I must renounce the lie for what it is…a LIE and ask Jesus to rebuke it and make it flee…and I must do this every single time the thief’s voice tries to speak into my life!
