I have been on a quest to defeat the enemy in the attack that he has been putting in my head for some time now. It is an attack that I am sure many have gone threw or are going threw at the moment. The attack of sin and our righteousness. The lies that God is mad at us, no longer accepts us, is upset with us, ashamed of us, or has turned His back on us because of our disobedience. The feelings of shame and guilt. And in extreme cases he has made us dislike ourselves very much. This is something that I have struggled with for a couple of years but God has started giving me clarity and I am fighting back with all of my might.

If you are like me you love the Lord and you want to please Him everyday of your life. You are very grateful for life and the blessings that He has given you. You want to honor and please Him with the way that you live your life to show Him the love and respect that you have for Him. You do not want to show any kind of disrespect or dishonor to such a wonderful and loving God that has done so much for you. You want to make Him proud of you and not disappoint Him in any way.

You have all the right and good intentions but you seem to fall short most of the time. Your heart is right but yet you fall into the temptations all too quickly. You say that you are going to do this or that because you know that it would please God but you forget. You know that God wants you to stop doing something but you give into the desire and do it anyway. You want to kick that bad habit that the Lord has spoken to you about but you just can not seem to withstand the temptations. You want to do what is right but you end up doing what is wrong. You want to act good but end up acting bad. You begin to ask yourself what is wrong with yourself and begin to question your own love and loyalty to God. Then you begin to condemn yourself and beat yourself up because you just can’t seem to get it together. And as if your own condemnation isn’t enough, the enemy is right there putting those nagging thoughts of your just not good enough, you will never get it right, and you might as well just give up on trying.

Just because we have given our lives to the Lord does not mean that we suddenly perfect and He does not expect us to be. He knows that we have the sinful nature in us and that it will take our lifetime to overcome it. He knows our hearts and our desire to do right and that is what He looks at. He does not see us for what we do. He sees us as He has made us through Jesus. Romans 8:1 says that there is no longer any condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus, so we need to stop condemning ourselves. If God is for us then we should not be against ourselves. If He does not condemn us then we shouldn’t condemn ourselves. If He is patient with us then we need to be patient with ourselves.

The enemy does not want us to live in victory and have the new life that is available to us through Christ. Romans 12:2 states to let God transform you into a new person by changing the way that you think. So we are able to become who we were created to be by changing the way that we think about things. And since our mind is the battle ground where the enemy attacks the most we are going to have to fight hard for our new lives. Aligning our thoughts with the truth of God’s word and staying focused on who we are in Christ is how we will win that battle. We start every change with changing the way that we think about it. We have better behavior and actions by believing that we are righteous. And we believe it by telling ourselves that we are the righteousness of God through Christ over and over again until it gets rooted in our hearts.

We must not beat ourselves up because we are not where we feel that we should be in our walk with God or for our weaknesses and fall backs. The righteous man falls seven times and gets back up again. God has not given up on us so we can not give up on ourselves.