Sunday night was SMAC (Something More At Church) and I had been talking to the Lord all week about what to bring to talk about to the youth group. Every time I thought I had something it crumbled. It didn’t set right and the Lord didn’t give his YES approval. On Sunday morning I woke up from a dream where I had been strapped to a chair and I heard a voice say to me :

You think I am going to hurt you, but it is just not true!

Right after I heard those words I woke up …I wrote the words down. Later in the day those word came to me again in my mind and as I was thinking about them the Spirit of God brought this verse to my mind:

Proverbs 23:7a

For as he thinks in his heart, so is he.

And I thought to myself :

What we believe is powerful! It can change the course of things and can deceive us into thinking WE KNOW!

So armed with only what the Lord brought to my attention I talked to the teens about what we believe can rule us.

Some connections made in youth group:

* We can make up stories in our minds that someone doesn’t like us based on a look on their face. We can think ourselves into conflict.

*It is easy to doubt ourselves when someone has an expression that we perceive as negative. We are prone to self shaming without a healthy identity in Christ.

* We can only know what we see, not what we think we see! What we think we see can be based and rooted in our insecurity and past hurts.

* It is better to ask people what they mean or what they said than to assume you know the truth and be deceived.

1 Samuel 16:7 But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look at his appearance or at his physical stature, because I have refused him. For the Lord does not see as man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”

*and all truth and thinking right in the heart comes from Christ dwelling within!!

Starla