Letting Love In: How God Crushes Your Inner Critic Sample

The Lie of Discouragement 

“Self-pity is the doorway to discouragement,” my friend said. “And discouragement leads to sadness and sorrow—and left unchecked can take us right into depression.”

That was a lot of information for an afternoon phone call. But you know what? He was right. 

Self-pity. 

It was an old lie poking up to see if I might agree with it again: Poor, poor me, no one understands. 

The truth is, someone does understand. His name is Jesus and He is Love. The enemy would love for us to feel sorry for ourselves, trust me I did for years. It got me nowhere. 

We are instead powerful sons and daughters of The King and we get to make powerful decisions in our thought process. We can stand and believe the God who literally spoke the universe into existence—or not. 

We get to choose what we believe. 

We can allow ourselves to sit in discouragement or we can fight with HOPE. We can hope against all else that those thoughts in our head that want us to feel sorry for ourselves are not helpful to our overcoming Spirit. 

We can tell self pity what God says about hope. 

We can tell discouragement who are Daddy is and that although we may not see the future or how it will unfold, we know our Papa God is on our side.

And we know that all good and perfect gifts come from Him (John 1:17). He has good and perfect gifts for all us even if we can't see them right now. 

We get to speak life or death over ourselves. Our words and thoughts have power. We must watch what comes out of our mouths or into our minds.

Discouragement loves to help us sit around and feel sorry for ourselves but that leads to more discouragement. So let's rise up and tell discouragement that we instead will choose hope. Not hope in a situation turning out the way we want it to, but rather hope that there is good in this world for us. Step by step we must just stay close to our Daddy in Heaven to allow Him to show us just what He has.

Pay attention and watch what He shows you!