Toggles Connection Newsletter
Trophies of His Grace
“Duuuuhhhhhhh!!!”
—by Alaine
(From the Toggles Connection Newsletter)
If you said that here in our office, you would owe me $1.25! (Prices started out at twenty-five cents and have been increasing ever since!)
Why would $1.25 go into our “Duh jar”? Because one of the things that doesn’t fly around here is the disrespect and self-mockery that the word carries when spoken against yourself.
So, why am I starting this Toggles Connection with a big “Duuuuhhhhhhh”? Because I want to talk about a truth that is so obvious that we all know it, but it may be helpful to remind ourselves about it.
That truth is that true, lasting healing cannot happen apart from the God of Truth as well as His Word of Truth, the Bible. (Go ahead, all together now… “Duuuuhhhhhhh”… this is a freebie!)
Maybe that’s why our three enemies—the world, the enemy, and our own flesh—work so hard at making it seem that either His Word is totally irrelevant to where we are at; or, there are so many obstacles to our getting to it, that we often give up spending time absorbing the truth of His Word.
Early on in my own healing, I learned that I had to crash head-on into Satan’s attempts to blackmail me so that I wouldn’t be able to read the Word. At one time I wasn’t even able to hold a Bible without throwing it at the opposite wall!
How did the enemy try to blackmail me? He intimated that if I didn’t try so hard to get truth into my head, maybe then he would let up on hassling me a little. NOT!!! The only problem with blackmail is that you can’t trust the blackmailer!
So, I decided that, “come hell or high water” so to speak, I wasn’t going to let anyone keep me from trying to absorb the truth of God’s Word.
I had to start small. I couldn’t approach the Bible with the black cover—I had seen that used in the rituals. I put important verses on 3x5 cards and then memorized them by reading them over and over again.
Sometimes, especially during the night, these verses were very powerful at keeping back the fear and terror that continually haunted me when I awoke during the night. Waking up in a cold sweat was no time for me to “load my weapon” by trying to hunt up some appropriate ammo to use against the spiritual attack I was under.
Sometimes all I was able to get out was quoting the verse: “Do not fear,” to which I would add, “I choose to do that!”
At less desperate times, the truths of the Word acted like tea steeping in a glass jar, as the places the lies once held were gradually replaced with truth. One of the biggest areas that this happened was in my view of God the Father. I’m living proof, as are many of you, that God can remake our thinking, and that His Word plays a major part in that.
There were times when opposition to absorbing the Word took the form of an unusual sleepiness that seemed to come over me every time I sat down to read the Bible. I learned to pray, “If this sleepiness is not from God (leaving the door open in case it was an actual tiredness), I refuse it, and in the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ I command whoever is causing it to let go of my mind and body.”
This sleepiness didn’t stop right away, but eventually it did. One of the things I did was try to recognize what the enemy wanted to accomplish by continuing this. I felt he wanted to discourage me and try to make me think that my opposing him and the sleepiness was useless. After all, it didn’t “work” when I prayed against it, did it?
At the beginning of my healing process, when I was finally able to hold a Bible, I found that my mind got all foggy when I was reading, and I couldn’t remember at the end of a sentence what it had said at the beginning! Again, as I persevered, this got better and better until I could stay focused all the way through a sentence.
One of the things that helped was to learn how to summarize what the sentence or passage said before I would go on to the next part. That seemed to help.
At different times, I realized that I needed to see a change in my attitude about the Word itself. I just didn’t sense any hunger to even get into it at all, much less aggressively absorb the truths I read in it. It helped to read Psalm 119 slowly over and over again. This Psalm is basically David talking to God about how he views God’s Word. I picked out several of his prayer requests like, “Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity; and quicken Thou me in thy way” –verse 37, and prayed them for myself.
Sometimes after reading the Word, it didn’t seem like I came away with anything really “WOW” that I could “use” in my life. Then I heard somebody say that reading the Word is “sometimes like rain, sometimes like snow.” He then went on to explain that there are times when we go to the Word and it becomes a “rhema” or powerful word especially for us. That’s like rain. It provides needed moisture instantly.
Other times, he said, reading the Word is like snow. That is, just like snow piles up on the mountains and then melts just at the right time to provide needed moisture to the new growth of spring, the truth we “pile up” as we read will provide, sometimes later, just when we need it, the living water that will feed our spirit and defeat the enemies of our soul.
So… “Duuuuhhhhhhh”…don’t give up trying to absorb God’s truth from His Word. It won’t always be so difficult. It will get easier. Don’t let yourself be robbed of the cosmic drinking fountain of clear water that God intends for us to drink from daily.I
