“You’ll never amount to anything.” “How can you be so stupid?!” “You’re a loser just like your father.” “What the hell is wrong with you??” “I’m so ugly, no one would ever want someone like me.” “I’m such a failure…” “It’s hopeless…I will never kick my addiction.” “I’ve gone too far now…God will never forgive me.” From our earliest childhood, our souls are bombarded with hurtful, destructive and crushing words and thoughts like these from within and without.
Then as we believe them, these cognitive seeds of dysfunction take deep root in our psyches and begin bringing forth a bumper crop of raging insecurity, habitual wrong thinking and self-defeating behavior. Worse still, if we are unfortunate enough to come from backgrounds that include physical violence or sexual abuse, this added trauma has degraded our bodies and compounded our emotional misery and despair exponentially. Worst of all, we become convinced over time that these negative things and all of the other pain and rejection we experience in our lives happen to us because we somehow deserve them.
The point is made in other posts that we are born separated from God in our spirits. From the beginning, without God’s love, light, life and truth in our hearts to help us filter and interpret our experiences, we are at the mercy of all the angry, negative voices in the world screaming for our attention and heaping destructive messages upon us whether these be the voices of our dysfunctional parents, our toxic and misguided peers, or even our own corrupt hearts.
Apart from God, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked,” Jeremiah 17:9—not just one’s own heart, but the hearts of everyone walking the planet, with all of them constantly striving, deceiving and being deceived in an endless battle for God-like control over their circumstances and one another. In the universe in which we live, what we believe is everything, and as we received and believed a torrent of unfiltered, evil reports about ourselves during our formative years, we were profoundly deceived and this self-defeating narrative of deception was written almost indelibly upon our lives.
At all times, the unregenerated, corrupt and incurably sick human heart will do absolutely anything to gain and maintain selfish control over an individual even if that control ultimately ends in utter self-destruction. It will rationalize every evil choice by lying to itself. It will shamelessly lie to manipulate others. It will grossly exaggerate negative inputs with words like “always” and “never,” and it will falsely accuse, condemn and enslave a deceived individual. This defining characteristic of the broken human condition is what the Bible calls “sin,” and before we come to faith in Jesus Christ, it is ingrained in every fiber of our beings and dominates us in every way.
As long as you continue to believe the lies you were told from the beginning about who and what you are—stupid, ugly, worthless, hopeless, addicted, loser and all the rest—this is how you will see yourself. In this way, your own lying, sinful heart will continue to enslave you, and this image of yourself is what you will increasingly become. Starting with faith in Jesus, however, as you begin to assimilate the truth about Who He is and who you are in relation to Him, He will help you to write a fresh, new narrative for your life that will completely heal all of the old inner wounds and help you to see yourself in a bold new way. He will also infuse your life with love, hope and joy like you’ve never known before.
Your wicked heart may condemn you for your past, but God’s Word says that “…[I]f our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and knows all things,” I John 3:19-20. Your sinful heart may tell you that you are a worthless loser, but God’s Word says that “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new,” II Corinthians 5:17.
The key to overcoming sin and the extremely evil narrative of deception it has written in your life is being born again through faith in Jesus and then growing in faith and understanding and rewriting the narrative of your life by replacing the lies of your own heart with the truth of God’s Word. As Jesus promised, “If you abide in My Word, you are My disciples indeed, and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” John 8:31-32.
Do You Want to Be Made Well? 