Perfect Peace

You will keep in perfect peace all who trust in you, whose thoughts are fixed on You!

Isaiah 26:3 NLT

 
My friend Donna is a threat to the kingdom of darkness. The light of Christ shines so brightly from her big blue eyes that it’s sometimes hard to pull your gaze away.
 
I met her 7 years ago when she began attending Divine Design’s Tuesday morning study. I couldn’t help but notice the way she leaned forward in her chair as she listened, brows furrowed in concentration. Donna Nathan was paying attention. This observation was confirmed as fact when, several weeks into the class, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She began employing the spiritual tools we were studying and God began showing up in miraculous ways. It was amazing to see the guidance and healing that was Donna’s experience during that time.
 
On a Tuesday morning just this October, Donna received a phone call from her oncologist. After 7 years of being cancer-free, tests showed that cancer had returned. What is a natural response when you get news like that? I’m not sure what most folks would do, but this woman made a beeline to the church to attend her regular prayer group meeting. Her actions demonstrate what she believes – God is still God and prayer changes things.
 
In the weeks since the diagnosis, Donna keeps living out her beliefs by drawing near to God to receive grace for each new day. And each day brings new demonstrations of how God is working all things for Donna’s good. She wrote me an email recently, sharing a powerful testimony of how God used one of my blog entries. “Just Desserts” is a story demonstrating how our emotions follow our thinking. My understanding of that principle has been greatly expanded from what Donna shared with me. I know her example of tracing feelings back to thoughts will be an amazing blessing to you as well:

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Yesterday before I started really laying out before the Lord my stuff from the past few days, I read my personalized scripture card: “In the morning the Lord will hear you, Donna. Lay your requests before Him and wait in expectation” (Psalm 5:3).
 
I began journaling to Jesus about some negative feelings I’ve been having – went through the process of forgiving and giving thanks and bagging up my worries in a Spartan green bag and placing it at the foot of the cross.
 
So then he leads me to your “Just Desserts” blog and I’m telling you, I haven’t been the same since. It’s like that feeling you get in your spirit where you see new light shining in an old place—one that’s received glimmers in the past, but still lives in the shadows—and you almost want to say—“Stop! I can’t handle any more light right now in that place Lord!”  It’s almost too much to handle!!
 
My vision all last year was to experience Isaiah 26:3 – “You will keep in perfect peace all who trust in you, all whose thoughts are fixed on you.” And I’ve experienced some degree of victory there. I’ve prayed for years to take my thoughts captive unto obedience to God. I thought I understood the danger of living a life ruled by my mind.
 
Somehow in this new season, I’m seeing it in a whole new way.  All these negative emotions I’ve experienced this past week just opened up a new way to understand how letting my thoughts lead me around will tie me up in chains of bondage—and rob me of my joy!
 
God revealed some of the triggers from this past week: my fatigue; being surrounded by so much sickness at my radiation treatments; spirit of oppression and death… From those trigger points, I started the steep mind-twisting descent you described—rationalizing, reasoning, speculating, assuming, predicting—and immediately came all these negative emotions—discouragement, sadness, heaviness, anger, resentment, irritation, worry, fear, and of course the familiar shame that I could be feeling like this in light of all God’s blessings…At the time, all I was conscious of were the unwelcome FEELINGS—totally unaware of the preceding THOUGHTS. Until yesterday…
 
And then this morning, God reminded me: “It is for freedom that Christ has set you free, Donna. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourself be burdened again by a yoke of slavery” (Gal 5:1).  I believe He wants me to live in the freedom that is already mine—freedom from the control of my thoughts/mind. That in doing that, I’ll also be freeing my emotions to fall into agreement with my spirit.  I’ve been renouncing spirits of sickness, death, oppression and man’s approval; announcing my birthright and spirits of life, freedom, and acceptance all through the blood of Jesus.  I don’t know about you, but this smells like a Breakthrough to me!!

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The Lord has broken through my enemies before me, like the bursting out of great waters. So he called the name of that place Baal-perazim [Lord of breaking through].

2 Samuel 5:20 Amplified