Welcome back to Wilderness to Wisdom.
As we walk,
We'll continue to question things we've been taught and conditioned to believe,
And we'll address the gap between what Jesus said we should expect as his followers and what we're actually experiencing.
When breaking free from what we've believed for years,
Especially in the early stages,
Our first response can be emotional because we're experiencing cognitive dissonance.
This is the mental discomfort we feel when new information contradicts what we already believe.
In those moments,
We have a choice.
Either we let our emotions control our response and shut out what we're hearing,
Or we recognize what's happening and let the Holy Spirit lead us instead.
In this episode,
We're going to examine the root of our emotions and how they can become strongholds the devil uses to keep us from receiving what God is trying to show us.
This episode is preparation for everything ahead.
If we truly want to seek God's kingdom and his righteousness,
We will have to question everything.
And with that comes information that may be uncomfortable.
If we can't recognize when emotions are controlling our response,
We may interpret that discomfort as a signal that what we're hearing is wrong.
Instead,
We need to measure what we're hearing against the Word of God before shutting down the voice delivering it,
Whether that's me or anyone else.
We know that everything has a spiritual root,
Either from God or the devil,
So it's important that we understand where our emotions come from.
Every emotion we experience is either rooted in the Holy Spirit within us or in the flesh and the influences of the world around us.
Those roots can go deep into our subconscious and what we've knowingly or unknowingly allowed to take root over the years is often what our responses come from.
When an emotion rises in us,
We tend to just accept it.
Someone cuts us off in traffic and anger rises.
Someone says something that touches an emotional wound and offense rises.
This is how many of us have been living,
Reacting to whatever surfaces without asking where it came from.
It's worth questioning why our default response often leans toward the negative and why choosing a different response requires a deliberate decision.
When we look at what's been allowed in,
It covers more than we realize.
The words spoken over us growing up,
What we saw modeled in our homes,
What we've watched,
Listened to,
And read,
What our teachers,
Pastors,
Friends,
And family said and demonstrated.
Much of it settled without us ever consciously deciding whether to accept it.
And it now influences how we think,
Feel,
And react.
This is why we can react to something in a way that surprises even us.
Where did that come from?
The emotion didn't create itself.
We're seeing the fruit of what was planted.
Many emotions that flow from the flesh are driven by fear.
We often see ego and pride as the root problem,
But they are forms of self-protection.
We fear being wronged,
Exposed,
Embarrassed,
Or rejected,
So they rise to defend what we're afraid of losing.
We can experience two opposing emotions at the same time.
For example,
We can have faith and still feel fear.
Some of us have believed that that if fear is present,
It means we don't have faith.
2nd Timothy 1 7 tells us God has not given us the spirit of fear but of power and of love and of a sound mind.
When fear arises,
We know that it came from the devil.
It shows us an area where our body and soul have not yet fully aligned with the Holy Spirit within.
We shouldn't feel condemned but we also shouldn't dismiss it.
That fear needs to be brought into submission to what God's word says.
Hebrews 11 6 tells us that without faith it is impossible to please God.
Fear left alone will weaken our faith,
And that will cost us what we have access to through Christ.
Emotions rooted in the Spirit come from what God says is true.
Where the Word has taken root in us,
Our peace doesn't move when we're challenged in that area,
Because we're standing firmly on what God says.
And that peace holds because it isn't being generated by what's happening around us,
It's being generated by the Holy Spirit living inside us.
Guide us.
Our walk can look uneven at times.
We may be settled in one area and easily shaken in another.
It shows us where the word has taken root and where it hasn't yet.
Ephesians 4 17-18 says,
Now this I say and testify in the Lord,
That you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do,
In the futility of their minds.
They are darkened in their understanding,
Alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them,
Due to the hardness of their hearts.
What we understand shapes what we feel.
When our understanding is darkened,
Our emotions follow.
This is why the answer isn't managing emotions after they rise.
It's letting the Word of God renew our minds so that what rises reflects the nature of Christ.
Emotions from the flesh pull us away from God's Word.
Emotions from the Spirit align us with it.
Romans 8,
5-6 says,
For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh but those who live according to the spirit set their minds on the things of the spirit for to set the mind on the flesh is death but to set the mind on the spirit is life and peace so when we're trying to figure out whether what we're feeling is godly or not one question we can ask is is this emotion moving me toward the word or away from it.
When we start examining our emotions,
We're not trying to suppress them or pretend we don't feel them.
We're asking a deeper question.
What root is producing this?
That question is the beginning of learning to walk in godly emotions that are led by the Holy Spirit and not the world.
Some emotions pass through us.
Others take up residence.
A fleeting emotion that rises and passes is one thing.
An emotion that stays with us and drives our response is something else.
But we shouldn't dismiss the fleeting ones because that's where it starts.
When what rises isn't godly,
It's the devil knocking to see what we'll accept.
When what rises is godly,
It's the Holy Spirit guiding us toward the nature of Christ.
Either way,
Something is being offered in that moment,
And what we do with it determines what takes root.
This is why we have to know the word and the will of God.
Without that,
We can't always tell which one is knocking,
Because not everything from the devil looks evil.
Some of it looks reasonable,
Justified,
Or even spiritual.
When we keep answering the same knock,
It stops being a moment and becomes a strong hold.
We tend to use the word stronghold only in the negative,
But a stronghold is simply anything that has a hold on us strong enough to control our responses.
That means we can have strongholds rooted in the Word of God as well,
Which is the goal.
Either the nature of Christ has a hold on us in any given area,
Or the world does.
I talked about this in Step 10,
Know Your Enemy.
Our spirit is sealed and cannot be possessed,
But our mind,
Will,
And emotions can be oppressed.
I described it as evil spirits setting up shop in the corner of our minds.
This is why followers of Christ still have moments where the flesh leads us.
The same emotion.
This is where a lot of us stop.
We name it as trauma and that becomes the end of it.
The behavior gets explained rather than dealt with and we carry it as part of who we are.
Recognizing where something came from is only useful if we take it somewhere.
Growing up,
We saw others respond to situations,
So those responses may become ours without us ever choosing them.
We are conditioned by what we consume.
So if we spend hours watching people argue,
Insult each other,
And stay in conflict,
We're being influenced.
Then when our moment comes,
What rises up is whatever took root.
On the negative side,
This is what the hamster wheel looks like.
The same reaction,
The same aftermath,
The same regret,
The same promise to do better next time,
And then it happens all over again.
The devil doesn't need to create new attacks when the old ones still work.
He knows exactly what produces the reaction,
And he keeps returning to it using different people and circumstances,
Or sometimes the same people and circumstances with just enough variations to keep pulling us in over and over,
Thinking that the outcome will be different.
As long as he can keep us from seeing the root,
He can keep us repeating the same dysfunction for the rest of our lives.
2 Corinthians 10 verses 3 through 5 says,
For though we walk in the flesh,
We are not waging war according to the flesh.
For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh,
But have divine power to destroy strongholds.
We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey Christ.
That scripture locates the fight at the level of thought.
Before the emotion becomes a reaction,
It was a thought that we agreed with.
Pulling down a demonic stronghold means catching it there at the thought before it becomes something we act on.
Galatians 5 verses 22 through 23 tells us,
The fruit of the Spirit is love,
Joy,
Peace,
Patience,
Kindness,
Goodness,
Faithfulness,
Gentleness,
And self-control.
That's what the Spirit produces in us when the Word has taken root.
Neither grief nor anger is on that list.
Grief gets treated as something to push past,
And anger gets justified in ways it shouldn't be.
They can arise without condemnation,
But they do need to be addressed.
Because we're navigating the flesh,
We're going to feel grief and that isn't the problem.
People throughout scripture grieved.
The trap isn't getting stuck there.
The devil can take a real loss and use it to keep us so trapped in that emotion that we can't fully function in what God put us here to do.
The emotion itself wasn't the stronghold,
What the devil built on top of it was.
Ephesians 4 26-27 says,
It can also rise in us and open the door to sin.
The term righteous anger isn't in the Bible but it gets used often and the example people point to is John chapter 2 verses 13 through 16 when Jesus drove out those who had turned the temple into a marketplace.
John 2 17 says his disciples remembered that it was written zeal for your house will consume me.
That was a reference to Psalm 69 where David wrote about being consumed with zeal for God's house while being insulted for it.
What the disciples recognized in Jesus was zeal,
Not a loss of temper.
The difference is what the anger is serving.
When it serves God,
We're responding to what grieves Him and moving toward what He wants done.
When it serves us,
We're responding to what threatens our comfort,
Ego,
Or pride and moving to protect ourselves.
Matters because we can be harsh with someone,
Justify religious behavior that isn't scriptural,
Or lash out and call it righteous because we were defending something we believe.
But if we examine the root and find that what was actually threatened was our own ego,
Reputation,
Or need to be right,
Then it wasn't the zeal that Jesus had.
It was flesh wearing a spiritual label.
One of the places this shows up most is when we get offended.
Offense may be the most effective tool the devil has,
And many of us don't recognize it when it's operating in us.
We said that what comes from the usually traces back to fear.
Offense is a fear response.
Something gets said or done and it exposes something we were protecting.
Our reputation,
Our sense of being right,
An old wound that never healed.
The offense is the reaction.
Fear of what was exposed or threatened is the root.
The word offense in Greek is skandalon.
It's where we get our word scandal and it referred to the trigger of a trap and to a stumbling block placed in the path to make someone fall.
That's what offense does.
It's put in our path so that we stumble.
Psalm 119 verse 165 says,
Great peace have they which love thy law and nothing shall offend them.
That verse connects peace to loving God's law.
How easily we're offended shows us where we're vulnerable.
Having the Holy Spirit means we have access to the Word,
But what has taken root is what responds when we're provoked.
And if it isn't the Word,
It's whatever else was allowed in from the world.
Offense is useful to the devil because it doesn't always stay contained in the moment.
We may take it into the next conversation,
The next relationship,
The next church,
The next job,
We can end up believing we are always the victim when what's actually happening is that we're carrying a wound and every touch to it feels like a new injury.
That's how someone can leave one situation after another and never see the pattern.
New people,
New environment,
Same result.
The devil doesn't have to set a new trap when we're carrying the trigger with us.
Anyone can set it off.
There's an example of this I've watched play out.
Someone can be teaching solid truth about the lies we've been conditioned to believe,
Doing real work exposing deception,
But then become offended when people say God and Jesus instead of Yahuwah and Yahushua.
It gets framed as reverence.
How dare you disrespect our father now that you know his name.
It gets called righteous anger,
But again,
It's not the zeal demonstrated.
What's actually being protected is ego and that's what offense does to us while we're defending something we believe is right.
The devil doesn't need to stop someone from teaching truth.
He only needs to get them offended when they're challenged or when someone doesn't do things their way.
The offense does the rest by causing division.
Some will stay and disregard the offense and still receive what was true.
For others,
What was true may get dismissed along with what caused the offense.
Then others stay and take on the same behavior,
Accepting the offense itself as righteous and end up being led away from the nature of Christ.
When something challenges us,
We want to protect ourselves,
And it often turns into a debate.
But if what we're protecting is our comfort with what we've already accepted,
That's offense,
Not discernment.
I had this happen recently.
A video came across my path about a scripture I thought I already understood.
Before I watched it,
I paused and went to the comments to decide whether it was worth my time.
Most of the comments agreed with what I already believed,
And I could have stopped right there.
Then I saw one comment that agreed with the person in the video,
And that's what made me watch it.
I ended up watching a few more on the same topic,
And with each one I had to disregard the parts that were pushing religious ideas about staying under a pastor or prosperity teaching to get to what was actually in the word.
When I was done,
I learned that my understanding of binding and loosing was incorrect.
Nobody challenged me on it,
God put it in my path,
And I could have dismissed it because of the that agreed with my position.
Being offended would have protected what I already believed and kept me from what was true.
Knowing where offense comes from is one thing,
Not being ruled by it or any of our emotions is another.
Most of us have tried using willpower to attain peace.
We tell ourselves we'll be more patient,
That we won't react again,
And that commitment holds until something pushes us out of peace.
And that's not a failure of effort.
It's evidence that willpower operates on the surface while the root stays untouched.
What takes root in us is what comes up under pressure.
If we spend our time on content that feeds conflict,
Suspicion,
And offense,
That's what will be available when our moment comes.
If we spend our time in the Word,
That's what will be available instead.
This is worth noticing in any situation,
But the car is a good place to start.
The next time someone cuts you off or wants to get over into your lane,
Pay attention to what emotion rises in you.
That will tell you what's there.
And notice whether the response changes depending on your mood or who's in the car with you.
If you react one way alone and another way with someone you respect,
Or one way on a good day and another on a hard one,
It shows that you're making a choice.
Colossians 3 verses 15 and 16 says,
The word.
Something provokes us and we respond from what was rooted.
If our response isn't godly,
We go back to the word.
That's the process.
Walking in correction,
Not perfection.
Correction means we're actually changing.
If we recognize the same thing over and over and nothing changes,
That isn't correction.
That's a stronghold we've made peace with.
When we see these things in ourselves,
Guilt may come with it.
Romans 8 one tells us there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ.
Seeing where we've been operating from the flesh is information we need in order to put off the old nature and to put on the nature of Christ.
When an emotion rises and tries to take us somewhere,
We don't have to go.
Catching it at the moment it rises is where we can choose before we ever react.
The goal was never to try and stop feeling things.
Emotions come with navigating this human experience.
The goal is that what comes forth from us reflects the nature of Christ,
And that happens as the word takes root in the places the devil has been operating.
So here's what we've walked through.
Every emotion we experience is being sourced from somewhere.
What rises from the flesh usually traces back to fear.
What rises from the Spirit gives us power,
Love,
And a sound mind.
We looked at how strongholds form and how the word can hold ground just as the devil can.
We looked at the spirit of offense and how it functions as a trigger.
It doesn't always stay contained in the moment and we often carry it without recognizing what's actually controlling us.
And then we looked at what actually gives us peace,
Not willpower,
But the word of God dwelling in us and a life led by the Holy Spirit.
Jesus said in Luke 17 1 that offenses will come what we do with them is ours to decide Going forward,
We'll keep questioning everything.
That's what seeking God's kingdom and his righteousness requires of us.
All of it points to the same thing,
Putting on the nature of Christ and walking as he walked.
Thank you for joining me for this episode of Wilderness to Wisdom.
