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If you control your thoughts, you control your fruit

Matthew 12:33 states, "Make a tree good and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognized by its fruit."

Our thoughts roll off our tongue.  The things we've been thinking about, eventually come flying out of our mouths whether we like it or not.  And it's definitely challenging to stop thinking wrong thoughts or to start thinking right thoughts.  Many authors have declared the importance of right thinking and getting our thought life pure.  Joyce Meyer's book, Battlefield of the Mind, is one of my personal favorites, as it highlights the weapons of praise, prayer and the Word to fortify our minds.

Why do we have such a hard time controlling our thoughts?  
Because we leave them on automatic playback.

I have such a hard time with this because the enemy has already created strongholds in my life from my past that still plague me today.  I consider myself a "strong" person, but I struggle with trust in my relationship.  Years before I met my husband, I was involved in an abusive and demeaning relationship.  I was lied to constantly, cheated on openly, and even slapped in the face.  He would get home right before the sun came up, smelling of liquor and boasting about how great his night went.  When I finally broke free of that toxic situation, I didn't realize the strongholds the enemy had been building throughout that time.  These thought patterns sound like this, "Even though this is what he's saying, he's probably lying or leaving something out." "If he's out late at night, he's probably cheating on me." "He says he loves me, but how could he, look how he treats me."

Unfortunately, these strongholds rear their ugly heads in my life from time to time, and I feel like that helpless woman who stayed in an abusive relationship for far too long and I get angry.  I want to fight back and stand up for myself.  I want to declare that I will not be treated like this!  That I will be respected.  When I let these old tapes (I hope you guys remember tapes) play back in my head over and over, they cause me to lash out at really strange times.  If my husband falls asleep on the couch and comes to bed late in the night, I wake up with an eerie feeling that makes my stomach turn.  Even though I know he's been sleeping on the couch for the past few hours.  My mind wanders, where has he been, what has he been up to?  And it's just crazy because I know where he's been.

Listen, everyone has different tapes that playback in their lives.  Thought patterns that keep you in bondage from things you've experienced in your past.  Lifestyle patterns that you continue in though you know they're not healthy that you'd like to break free from and you wonder, why do I keep doing that?  Why am I here again? Why can't I break free from this?

I don't know what you're dealing with.  I can say that the more I realize what the enemy is trying to do in my life, the more I focus on what is happening in my mind subconsciously, the more I can grab a hold of the thought and examine it.  Corinthians 10:3, "For though we live in this world, we do not wage war as the world does.  The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world.  On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.  We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ."

It's time to pull those old tapes out and trash them.  Stop the automatic playback. You can control your thoughts, and you can control your fruit.  It's not easy and it's not going to happen overnight, but with the help of the Lord, it will happen.  

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