Failure, Deflation, and the Power of Encouragement

It’s about feeling defeated and how the enemy wants to magnify and intensify negative feelings so as to deflate us and make us impotent for the Kingdom.

Perhaps this is not you, but likely you may know someone that it applies to. Then go to last week’s blog and see ideas about how to minister the Truth of God to them.

So here is the Enemy’s strategy: To undermine and attack our hope in order to  keep us in that bondage of hopelessness…that things are never going to get better; that we’re too far gone…to make us feel powerless and useless. If our identity and self-image are already damaged from past trauma and failure, then we are all the more susceptible to this.

What is the way out?

1 ~ Trust God’s plans:

Jeremiah 29:11 “I know the plans I have for you. Plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.”

2 ~ Believe His Word:

2 Corinthians 10:5 “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”

We have to believe that He has good plans for us, and to “arrest every thought that exalts itself above the Truth,”…to paraphrase 2 Cor 10:5.

3 ~ See yourself as God sees you:

Eph 2:10 “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”

4 ~ Fret not:

‭‭I Samuel‬ ‭30‬:‭6‬ ‭NKJV‬‬ “Now David was greatly distressed, for the people spoke of stoning him, because the soul of all the people was grieved, every man for his sons and his daughters. But David strengthened himself in the Lord his God.”

”David built himself up in the Lord,” I believe, means, among other things, that it while God was reminding him of his role in the kingdom, because he was destined to be king of Israel, but this was also David bolstering his sense of personal identity by connecting with God himself. 

This is something we can do.: Spend time with the Lord. Halt negative thoughts in their tracks. And to go to the Word of God for encouragement. And let that encouragement bring you Hope - hope in God, and not in yourself, your church, or other people.

So let’s pray again now, then go over the scriptures above once more….I pray God‘s best for you. He is there for you.

Scripture credit: https://bible.com