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PROGRAM D-8409
Are you facing some tough times in your life right now? As a child of God, you have his power to see you through and keep you from making bad decisions when times are tough.
Have you noticed how easy it is to preach doom and gloom, to listen to others talking about how tough times are and, before you know it, you’re just waiting for the worst to happen, expecting the worst, and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Here’s another don’t for tough times:
Don’t get sucked into the doom and gloom attitudes. Refuse to focus only on the negatives and fail to see the good things around you.
Ephesians 4:29 exhorts us not to let any unwholesome talk come out of our mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs. Talking about how bad everything is won’t build anyone up, will it? Including yourself!
When we become fixated on how bad things are, we aren’t thinking about moving forward. We aren’t casting all our care on the Lord. Instead we’re carrying it all ourselves and becoming overwhelmed by it. I shared about avoiding the ostrich tendency—to stick our head in the sand and live in denial. But the opposite of that is to think and talk about the tough times so much that we discourage ourselves and we tear others down by our negative talk.
Our thought life controls our words, our attitudes, and our actions. If you allow your thoughts to dwell on the problems, without taking constructive action to make some needed changes, then you are driving yourself right into a give-up attitude which steals your joy and causes depression.
Also, much of that kind of thinking is imagining what is going to happen. For example, you hear rumors about layoffs—so you imagine that you will be laid off. That is untrue thinking—dwelling on something that you do not know to be true. We are taught in Philippians 4:8 to think about things that are true, not things we imagine or speculate could be true. So, when your mind starts to be bombarded with untrue thoughts and imaginations, you must drive out those wrong thoughts by replacing them with right thoughts.