In Security – Ems HancockSample

Being Secure In Your Self-Talk

There was once a professor who asked his students to look at a screen and tell him what they could see. Every eye in the room intently studied the display. There was nothing on the screen, except for a small black dot.

Every hand shot up and voice after voice said, “I can see a small, black mark.”

“You are all right,” he said. “But I can also see a lot of white space. The black dot is very small in comparison to all the white.”

We can be very negative sometimes. We home in on the thing that is going wrong or focus on the problems in our lives, rather than celebrating what is great. Even if life is going well, we seem to be able to find the one black spot and concentrate on that. We tune into the imperfections, don’t we?

We do this with ourselves too. The truth is that many of us are terrible bullies – not out loud to other people, but inside to ourselves. We call ourselves every name under the sun! We shout at ourselves internally that we are ugly, stupid, fat or useless.

We would be so shocked if anyone else said those things to us, and of course, we would never DREAM of saying them to our closest friends. But, we wander through life, content to say these dreadful things over and over again to ourselves. We speak to ourselves in a way we were not designed to be spoken to. Some of us speak lies, the language of hell, over our hearts on a daily basis. This is incredibly dangerous for the soul. It makes us feel miserable and as though we have failed before we have even started the day and properly opened our eyes.

It hurts God when we bruise ourselves in this way. He knows it is a form of self-harm that makes us believe we are less than we are. It is also fills our minds with negativity, trash talk and nay-saying. It reminds us of the problems and the pain. It does not look for words of power, purpose or praise.

Psalm 141:3 says, “Set a guard over my mouth, Lord; keep watch over the door of my lips.”

Maybe we need to make this our prayer today.