by Lucy | Nov 3, 2016 | biblical counseling, emotions, thoughts
Have you believed the lie “I’m worthless”? Many women have! They feel like pond scum!
In this article, you’ll discover:
- Why you feel worthless.
- How to overcome the worthless trap.
Remember this: No woman is ‘pond scum’!
Click & Tweet!
‘Am I a Worthless Freak’?
Women who feel inferior often wonder if there’s something terribly wrong with them–and with God. Did you know that what you believe about God affects what you believe about yourself? If you have a twisted view of God, you’ll probably adopt a distorted view of yourself.
Click & Tweet!
So where do twisted views come from? Let’s look at three of them.
CHILDHOOD INFLUENCERS
Often the important people in your childhood told you in words and/or actions that you didn’t matter. Did your dad abandon you? Was your mom emotionally unavailable? Did a relative or family friend poke fun at you?
Perhaps you wore glasses or had carrot-colored hair or were super skinny or a bit chunky. When people who ought to build you up tear you down instead, you begin to believe their lies. Their lies say: You’re worthless.
People often asked, ‘Why do you live with your uncle and aunt? Your folks, brothers, and sister live close, why not live at home?’
‘I don’t know,’ I answered. Wondering, am I a freak? –KC
RECURRING HURTS
Later in life you may experience compounding hurts of a broken marriage, a teenage son or daughter who refuses Christian values, the pain of office gossip, or a tramautic event like bankrupcy, death of a loved one, even robbery or a rape.
Everytime I see a guy who looks the creep who held a gun to my head, I think, ‘Why did he pick me? Am I wearing an X or something?’ –MH
BAD CHOICES
People-pleasing, drugs use, longing for love from guys — these are a few of the bad choices some women make to counteract feelings of worthlessness.
Sadly and tragicly, says Nancy Leigh DeMoss, there’s a sick progression from deep hurts in childhood that lead to destructive beliefs and actions.
“First, as a child, [a] woman was told a terrible, destructive lie,” DeMoss says. “She listened to the lie; then rathering countering the lie with the Truth, she dwelt on the lie until she believed it was actually true.
Ultimately, she acted on the lie until she found herself in bondage to the lie: ‘[I] became very depressed, and wanted to go to sleep and never wake up.'”
What is a lie you believed? How did it color your thinking and your choices? Did you even want to just give up? Where did you find peace?
Getting Free of the Worthless Trap
Like mold in a shower, lies blacken your beliefs about yourself. Repeat: You are not pond scum! Every believer is a precious daughter of the Most High God! Your worth is rooted in Christ.
As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him. 1 Peter 2:4
Indeed, Jesus was rejected by men. More important, he was chosen by God.
When God
sent Jesus Christ to earth in order to pay the price for your sins and mine on the cross, he declared your precious worth. Will you continue believing the lie that you’re worthless when God has proven you have great worth? It’s a lot to wrap your mind around, isn’t it?
Here’s an another amazing truth:
Christ gave his life for you in order to give his life to you so that he could live his live through you.
Click & Tweet!
Three Actions to Take:
1. Recognize that God wants to bless you. He is for you. You belong to him, and he wants you to experience the abundant life.
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. John 10:10
2. Determine to want what God wants: a loving relationship with Jesus. Let go of lesser pleasures that entice. Seek the greatest pleasure and spend your life enjoying God.
So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness. Colossians 2:6-7
3. Embrace the truth that God uses the pain of trials, including feelings of worthlessness, to deepen your desire for the highest dream.
In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. 1 Peter 1:6-7
Isn’t it wonderful to know that you belong to God? That you can enjoy him? That your pain has a purpose: to become more and more like Jesus.
An Offer
Friends, we have one hope: Christ.
Click & Tweet!
In him we have everything we need to live a fruitful and godly life now. If you’re in a trial and would like biblical counsel to grow and change and find solutions, I invite you to consider biblical counseling. I’m a certified biblical counselor (ACBC, ABC, BCC) and a graduate of Western Seminary, Portland, OR, in Pastoral Care to Women.
I meet with women and families in person in greater Chicago and by Skype worldwide. Would you like a complimentary 20-minute consult. Please contact me.
Sharing Hope with Your Heart,
by Lucy | Apr 7, 2016 | biblical counseling, thoughts
You can escape temptation. Knowing this brings hope, doesn’t it? Here’s an escape plan.
If someone offered you houseboat a few yards above Niagara Falls, would you buy it? Of course not.
Would you let your teen attend a Prom with a known drug user? No again.
These are obvious risks. You wouldn’t feel tempted to “give in.” Temptation is an enticement to make an ungodly choice because you think that you will gain something: pleasure or another benefit. At times you have succumbed to temptation, haven’t you? We all have.
In this article, you’ll discover three ways to overcome temptation.
- Understand how temptation works.
- Know true change is possible.
- Draw near to God.
1. Understand How Temptation Works
Why do Christian women sometimes lose the temptation battle and–
The short answer: You have an enemy who wants to snooker you into believing the lie that giving in means more happiness for you. It doesn’t. Maybe for a very short while you experience fleeting happiness. Soon guilt weighs you down and you feel shame, fear, even depression.
When you understand how temptation works, you are more likely to escape it.
Click & Tweet!
Once a beautiful angel named Lucifer, Satan desired exaltation above God (Isaiah 14:12-14). God then kicked him out of heaven along with angels who sided with Satan. Satan now “prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8). He is strategic and intelligent but not all-powerful. He is a defeated foe with two basic plans.
Plan A: Interfere with your following Christ in the first place.
Plan B: Tempt you to be an ineffective Christian by doubting God’s goodness and power.
Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am tempted by God’: for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he himself tempt anyone (James 1:13).
2. Know True Change Is Possible
You can hope to overcome temptation. Hope isn’t wishful thinking. It is the confident expectation of good.
Click & Tweet!
This confidence depends on God’s nature and his Word, not circumstances. It assures you that sin no longer rules (Romans 6:14). It guarantees that God has the ultimate victory over sin and death (Romans 8:35-39). 14). It strengthens you in the midst of difficulties.
No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.
God knows when you’re tempted and he promises to provide a way of escape. Isn’t this comforting? You aren’t the first one to face trials like yours. Others have–successfully. You can choose a new, godly response. You need not fall back on old sinful responses.
As a well-known biblical counselor has said, “Paul makes it clear that to say ‘I can’t’ is not an option when God says one can.”
3. Draw Near to God
A while back, while loading groceries in my car, I noticed sunglasses in the corner of my cart. I had failed to the item on the check-out counter and didn’t pay for it.
My teenage son said, “Mom, let’s go back in and pay.” I was already running behind schedule and was tempted to zip away, rationalizing that the cashier should have seen the sunglasses so it was her fault, not mine. What would you have done? I returned to the store and paid.
Temptation itself is not sin. Jesus was tempted by Satan in the desert and didn’t give in to the temptation (Matthew 4:1-11). When temptation is resisted there is no sin.
Jesus told the devil, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written,
‘You shall worship the Lord your God
and him only shall you serve.’”
Jesus’ words remind me of this verse in James:
Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you (James 4:7)
What a comforting promise! Satan’s Plan B — to tempt you to be an ineffective Christian by doubting God’s goodness and power — doesn’t stand a chance against the Lord. You can be victorious in Christ when tempted to gossip, right? Or yell at your kids. Or get drunk. Or give in to fear.
When tempted, resist!
Click & Tweet!
This escape plan sounds to easy to work, doesn’t it? I challenge you to keep track of the times you’re tempted, what you did to resist the devil (or failed to do), and what was the result. God is able to keep you from stumbling.
Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. (Jude 24-25)
Sharing hope with your heart,
by Lucy | Jan 7, 2016 | biblical counseling, biblical counseling, identity in Christ, thoughts |
Can you guess the big lie Satan wants you to believe?
It’s NOT that you’re not good enough, though he tempts you to believe that one too. It’s NOT you’re unsuccessful or unattractive or a total mess-up or a waste of space, though you and I have fallen for some of these lesser lies, haven’t?
Can your believe I bought the lie that I was a defect?
This isn’t the big lie either. It destroyed my peace, though. God — through life-giving Bible truths and uplifting Christian music as well as counseling — showed me the truth: that I and every believer in Christ is his precious child and God also revealed the big lie at the core of my shame lie.
So what’s the big lie?
The Big Lie Is. .
The big lie Satan tempts you to believe is the same one Adam and Eve ate up in the Garden: God is holding back, that he couldn’t care less, that he’s not. . .good.
In this article, I’ll introduce you to the lying nature of Satan, then I’ll give you a strategy to overcome the big lie if you or someone you care about believes it. I learned much of this material while reading the Bible, Randy Alcorn’s book If God Is Good, and Billy Graham’s book Angels — all of which I highly recommend.
Genesis of the Big Lie
You probably know the fruit-chomping choice of Adam and Eve that caused sin to enter the world. You can read Genesis 3:1-6 (NIV) as dialogue here.
Satan: Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
Eve: We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’
[FYI: Eve adds words to God’s commands. He did not command them not to touch the tree.]
Satan: You will not certainly die, for God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God,knowing good and evil.
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.
God created Adam and Even without sin but they chose to rebel against him, just as the great archangel Lucifer (who became Satan) had chosen to rebel, and as you and I also choose the big lie over the beautiful truth of the gospel.
Lucifer’s Fall
Like all angels Lucifer was created good, for everything God created he called “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Yet at some point after the creation of the universe, some of the angels rebelled against God (Jude 6). Some scholars believe that Isaiah 14’s account of the demise of Babylon’s evil king may also describe Lucifer’s fate:
How you have fallen from heaven,
morning star, son of the dawn!…
You said in your heart,
“I will ascend to the heavens;
I will raise my throne
above the stars of God…
I will make myself like the Most High.”
But you are brought down to the realm of the dead,
to the depths of the pit.
This great, pride-filled, fallen angel is now called the devil, which means “slanderer,” and Satan (“the accuser”) as well as “a liar and the father of lies.” Jesus said in John 8:44:
You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.
Other revealing names of Satan’s true nature are described in Matthew 13:19, John 12:31, Revelation 12:10, among other Bible verses. The other fallen angels are now referred to as demons (Luke 8:30).
Strategy to Overcome the Big Lie
Now you know the lying nature of Satan, I want to the remind you of a crucial truth before revealing the strategy to overcome the big lie.
That is, God and Satan are NOT equals. This isn’t Batman versus the Joker.
Satan is a created being with limited power. He is not omniscient, omnipresent, or omnipotent, but he is intelligent and has been studying human behavior for thousands of years.
Here’s the strategy:
Tear down strongholds by recognizing them and replacing the lies with God’s truth.
Click & Tweet!
Easier said than done, I know. God can and will smash strongholds as use the weapons God has given you to overcome them.
Here’s the verse I shared in my last post and it’s worth re-sharing:
For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ. 2 Corinthians 10:4-5 (ESV)
Get This Truth Tool
To destroy the arguments and lofty opinions that are against God, you need to take every thought captive to obey Christ, just as the Apostle Paul said. I often share with my counselees — whom I meet with in person and by Skype all over the United States and the world — a valuable tool that helps them replace lies with truth. As counselees make this exchange, they experience a new way of thinking leading to peace-filled emotions and God-honoring behavior.
I want to give you this truth tool. See this post for the truth tool.
You can begin your path to the promise of the abundant life here and now.
This is the abundance of knowing God’s love for you and loving him and others. It’s better than the so-called abundance of a garage filled with BMWs, a house filled with flat screens, and a passport filled with stamps proving your worldwide travel.
If you want helping smashing the strongholds in your mind, please send me an email at Lucy@LucyAnnMoll.com and I’ll get you a downloadable version of the truth tool.
Sharing Hope with Your Heart,
by Lucy | Jul 16, 2015 | biblical counseling, emotions, identity in Christ |
Discover your true identity, and you can battle lies and live from the truth.
You know you have an enemy who lies, don’t you?
He is Satan, the father of lies. He and his demons tempt you to think rotten ideas about your worth. Have you heard thoughts like, “You aren’t good enough! You aren’t pretty enough! You aren’t strong enough!?”
The awesome news: You can replace the lies with the beautiful truth of your true identity. How does that sound? Knowing who you are matters!
Down, Down, Down
When you start to recognize lies, accept that noticing some of them may take time because they’ve become a habit. You’ve probably been repeating them to yourself for a long time. So no quick-fix expectation. Got it?
If you beat yourself up, you’re more likely to fall into temptations of all sorts. A lot of it looks good like the forbidden fruit on a certain tree in the Garden of Eden. When you’re feeling down and out, Satan and the world dangle treasures before your eyes, pretty things like new clothes, invites to parties, good health, a happy family, a big house or chic condo and stuff to fill them.
In hopes of feeling less afraid and more secure, you and I may feed our gods, hungry gods that help us feel special or important – like money and pleasure, others’ opinions of us, busyness, fame and privilege and honor.
But this is not who you are. Did you know this? You don’t have to get stuck in believing lies. Isn’t this refreshing? Did you know God will change your faulty thinking? That He’ll transform your thoughts?
Changing Faulty Thinking
God says you are beautiful and strong in Christ even when. . .
You lose your debit card.
A colleague steals your idea and gets the credit and a bonus.
Your daughter shoplifts a bottle of nail polish and is arrested.
Cancer strikes a good friend.
A bully harasses your son.
Your husband comes home late, again.
Here’s the truth. Every Christian is in Christ. This is a God-sized concept and reality that not one of us can fathom. Too tremendous for your mind.
According to the Bible, you die in Adam and are born again in Christ.
For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive.” 1 Corinthians 15:22
You aren’t what you do. That’s performance. Your true identity is who you are in Christ.
Click & Tweet!
You change your faulty thinking when you embrace your true identity and stop banking on performance.
Adam (who lived in the Garden of Eden and ate forbidden fruit) died as a sinner. Jesus died for sinners. In Adam we’re cursed. In Christ we’re blessed. In Adam there’s condemnation. In Christ there’s salvation.
What God Says About You!
An excellent place in the Bible to discover your true identity is Ephesians 1:3-7. I’ve colored your identity words in blue.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace.
In Christ you are blessed, chosen, holy, blameless, loves, predestined, adopted, redeemed, and forgiven. Which of these descriptors speak to your heart? Your radical new identity comes from putting off your old humanity and putting on the new you in Christ.
Make no mistake. This beautifully new and radical identity that you possess has nothing to do with anything you’ve done. It results from who Jesus is and what he has done. As one pastor wrote,
If you’re a Christian, here’s the good news: who you really are has nothing to do with you–how much you can accomplish, who you can become, your behavior, your strengths your weaknesses, your sordid past, for family background, your education, your looks and so on. Your identity is firmly anchored in Christ’s accomplishment, not yours; His strength, not yours; His performance, not yours; His victory, not yours.
What you and I do flows from who we are.
Click & Tweet!
Isn’t this amazing and comforting? It’s not about you. It’s all about God. Yes!
You live from your identity, not for your identity.
Click & Tweet!
As you embrace your true identity in Christ, you’ll rightly handle the issues of live that come your way. Pretty cool, huh?
Resource for YOU!
Do you want to get a better idea of who you are in Christ? Please subscribe to my Hope e-Hugs and you’ll get special reminders in your inbox.
Subscribe to my blog and get a complimentary e-Book.
photo credit: via photopin (license)
Sharing hope with your heart,
by Lucy | Jul 14, 2015 | biblical counseling, thoughts |
Bad thoughts are negative and untrue thoughts that we speak to our souls. They are nasty, they are loud, and they self-condemn. These words that we say to ourselves may be silent to others, but between our own pierced ears, they slice and dice.
These bad thoughts may sound like:
“I’m not good enough.”
“Ugly. . .that’s me.”
“I’m so stupid.”
“Nobody cares about me.”
“I’m a horrible mom.”
“Loser.”
We women condemn ourselves many times a day, don’t we? You. Me. Everyone. Where did verbal bashing begin? How can we stop these bad thoughts?
Genesis of Verbal Bashing
Verbal-bashing began in the Garden. At first, everything was perfect, as you know. Adam and Eve romped in their God-ordained nudist colony for two without a worry. Then Satan in the form of a serpent slithered on the scene in Genesis 3 and spoke a lie to Eve. She didn’t blink. I would have screamed. Maybe. I don’t know.
His lie: “You shall not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it [a tree that God had said was off-limits] your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
She believed her enemy. She died. Not immediately, but eventually. Shame filled her. She and Adam sewed fig leaves to cover up. When I lie to myself, I am believing my enemy. You too. We all do it.
Two decades ago, an oft-told lie of mine: “You’re defective, Lucy.”
Thankfully, I finally listened to God while in a pit of despair and agreed with him that I am precious. I am precious because he says so. He created me “fearfully and wonderfully.” His words! FYI: “Fearfully” means “with great respect” in this context.
What lie do you tell yourself about yourself?
2 Steps to Stop Bad Thoughts
Here’s a way to stop bad thoughts. Two (not so) simple steps! Easy to say, much more difficult to put into practice, right?
1. Ask God to help you recognize the lies that you say to yourself.
2. Replace the lies with God’s truth.
In my example of “You’re defective, Lucy,” I replaced this lie with the biblical truth, “God says you are precious.” Every time I was tempted to speak the “you’re defective” lie to my soul, I then spoke the truth. Over time I self-condemned less often. At least this lie. I’m a work in progress, like you.
How can you begin to replace self-condemning bad thoughts with God’s truth?
