Week seven devotional
Lie #7: PART TWO: I’ll always struggle with my weight, relationship with food… insert your biggest struggle here
You’ve just spent the last week sharing your struggles with the Lord and handing them over to him, but there’s another key component here to finding freedom from our struggles.
“Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” Proverbs 4:23. Some versions of this verse tell us to carefully guard our thoughts or to protect our minds.
Our thoughts have such a huge impact on our progress. When you allow negative thoughts to creep into your mind, it will send you into a downward spiral. You’ll start to view the gym as punishment and eating healthy as restrictive, instead of viewing them as ways to care for the amazing, healthy body that the Lord has given you. It gets even worse when we say those negative thoughts out loud. When we aren’t guarding our thoughts, we let some of the most destructive words press onto our hearts. You develop a negative dialogue with yourself without even realizing that you went there, and it just spirals. So what does it look like to guard our hearts and our minds?
The best way that I have found to combat this negative, internal dialogue, is to turn your anxieties and your struggles into prayers. It’s more productive, and it takes the same amount of effort to think those negative thoughts as it does to lift them up in prayer. When you start to think negative thoughts, you literally have to will yourself to stop thinking them and turn them into prayers. The other part of this is to NOT state them out loud. Don’t utter a negative word about yourself. When you say it out loud, it makes it feel more real, and you’re hurting yourself.
Even if you’re still believing certain lies about your appearance or your worth, I want you to fake it till you make it. I want you to try to only speak positive thoughts about yourself, both internally and out loud. Because you know what will happen when you start to do that? In the same way that those negative thoughts forced you into believing lies about yourself, you’ll start to believe those positive thoughts instead. Keep passing those struggles up to the Lord and speaking truth to yourself. I promise, after a while you’ll start to believe it and your heart will transform.
Y’all, as you have progressed through this journey and if the Lord has started changing your heart and breaking you down to bring you closer to him, know that this is the enemy’s favorite time to attack. When we feel closest to God, the enemy is prowling around, waiting to pounce on any area of vulnerability that we have.
James 4:7 and the beginning of verse 8 says “Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you…”
Don’t get wrapped up in the negative thoughts floating around in your mind. Submit them to God. Resist the enemy trying to tear you down. Come near to your savior, and he will save you.
Y’all, we are in the home stretch. I’m starting to get sad that this is coming to an end. I hope that you’ve been encouraged each and every week of this journey, and I hope that by this point you’re feeling stronger, physically, mentally and spiritually. I hope that you’ll hang on to His promises, and lean on them to help you persevere through these next two weeks. I don’t know about you, but I’m getting sad that this is coming to an end. Remember, though, you can (and I hope you will!) go back through and repeat these workouts! You will be amazed at how much stronger you are the second and third time around, and what your body can do. It will only make you feel even better when you look back and see how far you’ve come. These workouts are scalable, so you can up your weights and lower your reps as you progress. When they start to get easy, it’s time to challenge yourself and go to new heights.
WEEK 7!! I’m so excited for you to see what you can do this week. Let’s do this!