If you’re like me, and I hope you’re not, you talk to yourself a lot. No - I don’t mean that under-your- breath kind of mutter – the kind where people can hear you and might think you’re a little touched. I’m talking about that little, persistent, pestering voice – the one that continuously condemns every little thing you do, and how you did it. It’s the voice of the past replaying itself minute after minute, hour after hour, and day after day.
Whose voice is it that haunts you? Is it the voice of a teacher who said you’d never succeed at anything so you might as well give up, the voice of a parent who said you’d never measure up, or the voice of someone saying you weren’t good enough, thin enough, smart enough, talented enough?
I’ve had plenty of those voices in my past. Unfortunately, I listened to and believed every single word. That being said, there is no voice that speaks louder than the one inside my own head. No one has ever done a better job of being as hard on me as I have on myself.
You would think that the solution is easy enough, especially if you know and believe what the Bible says about who we are. Head knowledge, like an onion, has layers. It is only when God reveals a mystery to us that knowledge becomes understanding and together they become power. He is strongest in our weakness. We have first to learn to embrace the stratum; we cannot have a breakthrough if there is nothing to break through.
When everything feels as if we’ve hit a wall or fallen to rock bottom we can rely on what we know and cling to it, no matter what we experience. What we know is “that for those who loves God all things work together for good, for those he has called according to his purpose,” (Rom. 8:28). Though it may not seem that any good can come from our situation, it can and it will.
The problem, in my case at least, is that I try to figure things out myself; I try to fix things in my own strength. I talk to myself and end up replaying all the old messages of days gone by. When I depend on what His Word says, and forget about everything else, I am more apt to listen to His voice. Jesus truly abides in me therefore I must abide in Him. He said, “apart from me you can do nothing,” (John 15:5). Before He left, He promised that His Father would send us a Helper, a Comforter, a Teacher. The Spirit of God is the Voice of Truth. He is the voice of conviction not condemnation. God is for us, not against us.
It matters not how far we are in our walks, if the voice we listen to is not the Voice of Truth then it’s not good enough for us. The Voice of Truth must be the voice that speaks volumes into our lives.
