When feelings lie

Twenty-nine years ago this month in a hospital room I had a thought that became my undoing. Thought or feeling, it is hard to say which, but the point is that I entertained it when I should have rebuked it. At the time, I did not know that one could rebuke such a thing. It did not occur to me, for I had not yet learned that we must do warfare to take captive all our thoughts to Christ. Worse than that, I did not even realize that a thought that seemed my own could be a demonic whisper.

Now I am older and a little beat up, and I have read Scripture more carefully, where it says that there is such a thing as "demonic thinking" (James 3:15). That thought or feeling I had in the hospital, which I in my ignorance of the supernatural realm took to be a mystical premonition or insight, was actually a messenger of Satan that needed to be spoken against in the name of Jesus. I needed to say, like my friend Ferg's mom says whenever she has a bad thought, "You get outahere, Satan! That ain't me talkin'. I belong to Christ!"

But I hadn't met Ferg's mom yet, and I didn't know the Bible yet. So I couldn't yet tell the difference between my thinking and the devil thinking through me. Nor had I been equipped by any teaching, nor seen any example to imitate.

And so I did nothing.

Well, not exactly nothing: I kept repeating the thought to myself for the next two decades or so, until it became a self-fulfilling prophecy that reaped much harm.

I wish I could tell you more. But unfortunately, the things from my life that I think might be the most spiritually helpful to share with you are also the things that propriety keeps me from sharing.

Nevertheless, the moral is clear enough: Examine your thoughts to see if you are in the faith. Faith talks like hope and faith talks like love, and faith never ever leaves out of the equation the impossibilities-bending power of God.