Month: October 2022

Stop the Bleeding…

On By Papa TonyIn ThoughtLeave a comment

First aid training

As you are trekking along in your experience of life, have you ever gotten to the place where it feels like everything is going wrong? Try as you might, things just seem to keep moving from bad to worse. Bad news follows bad news and you’re desperate to stop the flow of wrong things; indeed to stop the bleeding. When you are in this fateful space it can seem like there is nothing you can do except to sit back and try to survive the ride. You wonder what you could have done to prevent this from happening to you. You comb through the decisions you have made trying your best to uncover your secret mistakes, your secret sins that led to your dilemma. You begin to question how God could have allowed this to happen to you. You need some answers and you need them now. The things that are happening to you are common to man but God will, with the temptation, always make a way to escape that you may be able to bear it. You can stop the bleeding if you are willing to change your mind!

The circumstances of life are no guarantee for the truth. However, the circumstances you find yourself in do provide clues concerning what has been going on in your head. Those things that affect you negatively came to life through the things you have been considering in your heart. It isn’t your destiny, as some foolishly proclaim nor is it God’s will for your life. Instead it is error that has, unbeknownst to you, been allowed to have access to you in your mind. What you think about day by day eventually filters down into your heart, from where it forms the circumstances of your life. Wrong thoughts produce wrong results. Thinking left unchecked and unchallenged leads to false ideas and concepts lodging themselves into your thinking and eventually your heart. However benign it appears to have fear based thinking as your primary way to think, the result will always reveal itself in the manifestation of your life. The outward reveals the inward no matter how unfair we feel it to be. When bad things happen to us, as they happen to all people, we are not victims of an unfair balance or an unjust scale. Instead we find ourselves victimized by powers working outside of our awareness and knowledge. God said, “My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge.” It is what you are ignorant of that hurts you. Many people today deny the existence of evil and discount it as a construct from the mind of man. Yet those same people suffer at the hands of it, unable to discern it much less fight against it.

When the sh*t is hitting the fan, as the saying goes, there’s no time to reflect back on what may have caused it as the urgency of the situation requires an immediate change of mind. You fight back against evil, the only true cause of your problems, by changing what it is you are feeding on and subsequently thinking about. What have you been feeding your mind? What have you been listening to, considering and incubating in your mind? Your mind and heart go where you go and not the other way around. It doesn’t matter how good or bad you are, but rather what you have been doing with your mind. When things go south, folks are so quick to evaluate themselves and blame themselves because of some decision they made, some error, some temptation that overcame them. When the more likely culprit is the thoughts they have been holding onto in their minds. None of us are perfect and if making mistakes represents the scale, some doing more and some doing less, then all of us would live amidst perpetual calamity. Yet, not everyone suffers calamity while making some of the same mistakes you have made. You are going to make blunders in this life and you will be deceived at times. But, when you become aware of it, you must immediately take steps to move your mind in a different direction. Just as the professional athlete learns to quickly let the former bad play go, you must learn to let your bad plays go as well. Otherwise the accuser, that led you into the error to begin with, will find a way for the mistake to live on in your mind robbing you of not only the bad day today but all your future days as well.

When you find yourself besieged by negative circumstances, it is not because there is something inherently wrong with you, though you will be tempted to consider it. It is because something is always after you and I whether we like it or not. We live amidst a spiritual competition that takes place in our minds. One side seeks to envelope us in darkness while the other side seeks to flood us with light. One side wants our lives to be filled with love and peace while the other side engenders chaos and confusion. You do not have to guess which side is at work. The circumstances will reveal it. When things are going from bad to worse it is an indicator, a clear indicator, that something is amiss in your thinking patterns. You are holding onto and embracing things that are not true. You have error in your heart. And the only way to get that error out of your heart is to change the thoughts you have been thinking. You have to learn things are true from a source that is true. You cannot rely on people or the world or the experts or your heartfelt Google search, you have got to come back to God’s Word. You have got to seek peace from the Author of peace. You have to humble yourself to the reality that things have not been going well for you and that there is a reason why, though you cannot see it yet. You don’t have to get all religious or pure or anything else that makes you the central subject. Instead you must be willing to seek something higher than yourself. God didn’t make the negative circumstances to humble you, but He will work in those circumstances to help you find a way to prevail. Whatever is happening to you God already saw coming and as such has already made a way for you to escape. Don’t try to be so smart. Instead seek outside of yourself for the answers you need. Darkness is always an illusion and is always based on a lie. Shatter the illusion by finding out the truth.

You don’t have to live very long before you experience this sort of thing happening to you. You are not an anomaly. You are not weird or strange or reserved for bad things in your life. Instead you are simply unaware and need to learn. In the words of James Allen, “Tempest-tossed souls, wherever ye may be, under whatsoever conditions ye may live, know this, in the ocean of life the isles of Blessedness are smiling, and the sunny shore of your ideal awaits your coming. Keep your hand firmly upon the helm of thought. In the bark of your soul reclines the commanding Master; He does but sleep: wake Him. Self-control is strength; Right Thought is mastery; Calmness is power. Say unto your heart, “Peace, be still!”

Do you want to stop the bleeding in your life? Take control of your thoughts…

Just some good thoughts…

Advertisement

Hacked!

On By Papa TonyIn Thought3 Comments

hackedLast week I had the rather unpleasant experience of getting hacked. Basically, someone reached out to me on Instagram asking for support for their upcoming clothing line and I made the fateful mistake of responding to them. I didn’t click on any links or provide my cell number for a text as requested, yet still they got in. Once they got in, they changed my password, changed the contact cell phone number and email and added two factor authentication which made it almost impossible to recover my own account. They followed hundreds of new people and badgered all of my friends with the exact same scheme, leaving folks thinking they were talking with me. The experience was distracting and concerning to say the least. Besides learning that Instagram literally has no actual customer support, I understood how difficult it is to extricate yourself from deception once it gets its grip on you. How it got to you doesn’t matter. When it got to you doesn’t matter. What matters is how you can recover and get your mind (and account) back. Have your thought processes been hacked by a deception?

In life, we all have a mind and a heart and we are responsible to guard it from intruders. Intruders get in when we fail to control our thinking and as such allow deceptions access to our minds. Just as my downfall was engaging in a conversation with the hackers, your downfall comes from consideration of things that are not true. When Eve was deceived in the beginning, it wasn’t the existence of evil that defeated her, it was her consideration of the things evil said to her. (It was a heck of a lot bigger than eating a silly apple, but I digress). Eve’s downfall and eventually Adam’s downfall came as a result of considering and trying to figure out what the enemy of mankind was proposing. The same holds true today. The way that evil gets inside our minds and hacks us is by our consideration of what is being presented to us. Being human we think we can figure it out and as such give it space in our minds. We mull it over. We worry about it. We give it audience and the next thing you know we are all screwed up inside and confused. Have you ever noticed that no matter how much worry you give a thing you can never quite get to a solution? You analyze, you evaluate, you process it and it just leads to more and more distress. It is a trick and a trap from which eventually it will be hard to escape. The solution to fear producing thoughts is to refuse their entrance. Don’t scratch that itch! Do not try to take it on with your finite human knowledge. Instead you have to replace those thoughts with things that are true. God’s Word is true and has the remedy to everything that has ever bothered you or imprisoned you. You can avoid being mentally hacked by knowing what is true.

All of us at one time or another have been hacked in our minds and hearts. We have lived in fear and doubt and uncertainty for so long that we think it is a normal way to live. We dismiss it as being part of the human condition. We do all sorts of shenanigans to assuage our fears such as trying to be a good person or do good works or whatever it is we can think of that might help offset the bad things that are surely coming our way. It never dawned on us that someone or something has been lying to us. Our starting premise has been wrong. We have been communicating with a hacker. Fear is man’s only enemy. Fear has ruined more people’s lives than all the other things combined. It is our fears that allow our enemy access to us and it is our fear that brings bad things to pass in our lives. Fear is a believing expectation for something negative to happen and believing equals receiving. The things we so desperately fear end up coming into fruition in our lives. And then we exclaim, “I knew it” when in reality we helped bring it to pass. There is a reason the number one admonition in the Bible is fear not! Fear is a hacker attempting to gain access to your life and then infect the lives of others also. You get your mental account and your heart back by gaining control of your thinking.

So, what can you do once you realize you’ve been hacked? Unlike Instagram, you have access to something greater than any problem that has ever come your way. The first step involves terminating communications with the hacker. Stop giving those lies access to your mind. Stop trying to figure it all out. The basis of your troubles are spiritual and no amount of reasoning will make that clear. Instead steer your heart towards something that is true. Make the decision to stop trying to figure out your troubles and hand them over to God who is especially adept at problem solving. Just give them to Him and don’t take them back. Rehearsing your troubles hasn’t been successful thus far, has it? Quit beating that dead horse and try something different. Cast all your care upon Him for He careth for you! In other words, let it go. Pray about it and then let it go. Just the act of refusal sets on course the answers you need in order to prevail. God wants to solve every problem that has ever come your way and He has the power and ability to do so. Find someone that can teach you the truth. Don’t go to the world as it’s the world that screwed you up in the first place. Don’t rely on religion or philosophy or science. Rely instead on the truth of God’s Word which is the only thing that sets you free. God sent His Word and healed them and delivered them from their destructions. Learn to shut down the hackers and get your heart and mind back!

Have you been having a tough time lately and wondering what is the point? Do you find yourself distracted with cares? Have things become increasingly difficult for you? Does happiness and peace of mind seem to evade you? If so, you have probably been hacked. But, not to worry. With God there are always solutions and answers greater than the skill and cunning of any hacker. You can get your heart and mind back if you will only go about it the way God says to do it. Humble yourself and get your needs met. I finally was able to recover my account using the deeply hidden and obscured video selfie method which worked after 9 tries. Thankfully God makes it a lot easier than that.

Just some good thoughts…

Discouraged?

On By Papa TonyIn ThoughtLeave a comment

discouragedAre you dealing with a situation right now that calls aloud for remedy, yet you have no solution? Is there something that you really, really need and thus far have been unable to get it? Are you dealing with a health challenge that you can’t quite seem to get on top of? Are you having trouble in your relationship and as much as you’ve tried, you cannot seem to get it right? And, if you are single, are you looking for love in apparently all the wrong places? Or, has your life as a whole gone in a direction that you never intended, much less expected? As painful as these things are, they are all part of the human experience. No one gets very far in life without experiencing at least a portion of these challenges. While you are in the midst of them it is very easy to lose hope. You pray and pray yet nothing seems to happen. You put forth your best efforts and nothing seems to change. The more you fixate on the problem, the less answers you find. Are you discouraged my friend?

It may surprise you to know this, but God is never behind any of the difficulties you experience. God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. As such, He does not bring you pain and suffering. He doesn’t bring you to it in order to take you through it as the religious pundits proclaim. He isn’t teaching you an arduous lesson. He is never the cause of any delays nor a hinderance in you getting the things that you need. He does not cause sickness and He does not bring about an early death for mysterious reasons we are unable to comprehend. He isn’t punishing you for your sins or punishing you for any reason. He does not withhold blessings in order to force you to get right with Him. All of these cleverly devised lies are simply a cloak of deception for the one really behind our troubles; all of our troubles. As the famous movie, “The Usual Suspects” explained, the greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world that he did not exist! Being ignorant of Satan’s devices is the number one reason that people suffer which leads to assigning negatives and evil to God. I can assure you that if God was behind any of your troubles, there would be no remedy. But God is not the cause, ever. In the great drama of life there is an ever present contest going on between good and evil. God seeks to do good for people, bless them, prosper them, deliver them and heal them, while the adversary seeks only to steal and to kill and to destroy. Every problem, every trouble, every pain, every loss you have ever experienced came directly or indirectly as a result of evil that is in the world today. In a perfect world where there was no evil, everything you ever needed would come to pass quickly and easily. But, we do not live in a perfect world and the world we live in is ruled by evil. As such, we are all going to be faced with challenges and we are all going to get knocked down at times. The first step in the recovery of everything you have ever lost or been unable to receive thus far is to understand that your difficulty does not ever come from God. Don’t be discouraged my friend, for better days are ahead.

Once you are clear that your troubles have not originated with God who is love, you are now in a position to believe God to get the results that you need. You need God’s love and God’s power in your life. Without God life is a cruelty doled out in perpetual lumps leading eventually to your own demise. A great man used to say, “Discouragement is a sin, it’s trick of the adversary.” The reason discouragement is a sin is because it foolishly concludes God cannot do anything to alleviate the suffering. It falsely proclaims the power of evil is greater than the power of good. Every time you and I have felt discouraged, we have been deceived. We have believed a lie from the father of lies. Years ago, while trying to deal with a very difficult situation, I found myself angry with God for moving so slowly to alleviate my sufferings. I told Him I was no longer going to be His representative and some other choice things that His grace and mercy overlooked. You see, I wasn’t clear concerning the reality of my situation. I failed to recognize that the suffering I endured was not due to a failing on the part of God, but rather a failing in understanding the spiritual competition and my personal adversary at work to make my life miserable. Things certainly did not improve overnight, but eventually I was able to overcome with God’s help and kindness and love. The same holds true for you. You can find the answers you need, the deliverance you seek, the healing you need and anything else that is important for your own happiness and success. But sadly and unfortunately sometimes you have to fight. You aren’t fighting the devil himself, you are fighting the falsehoods he has been able to lodge inside your head. You are fighting the appearance of things that seem to contradict the promises of God. You are fighting against lies that position themselves as truth. My friend, stand against discouragement for God is on your side.

It is not God’s will for us to have to live this way but it is a byproduct of evil that has been allowed to infiltrate our world. Until that great day in the future, we have to learn how to compete in the spiritual competition. We have to learn how to believe God and claim our rightful authority He has given us in Christ. We have to fight for what is ours! God will do all that He has promised us and more if we will remain faithful to His Word and His precious promises to us. Don’t allow yourself to feel angry with God as He is incapable of evil. If you are going to be angry with anyone be angry with the evil that is behind your every trouble. Rise up in your mind and in your heart and become determined to see the results you desire. Get serious about it! When you have a need, the reason God says to keep knocking and keep seeking is not because He didn’t hear you the first time, but rather because you are standing against an opponent placing obstacles in your path. You are never being tempted by God, you are being tempted by evil to surrender; to give up on your hopes and dreams. Don’t you let them win! God will do what He said He would do. “If you do not fold, you will not lose.” Are you discouraged my friend? Well, tomorrow is a new day to get back in the fight. God will not let you lose.

Just some good thoughts…