Recently I have been pondering more on tripwires. The Lord has been showing me how they work in my life, and I believe it is a common thing. a tripwire, in the spiritual sense, can be anything that triggers an old way of thinking that used to get you and keep you in a hole of some kind, or cause a mental disturbance that set off an emotional storm. Anything like that. It’s probably different for each person, but the same principal. Like me, for example (since I know my own experience best), I saw on the cover of the ‘believers voice of victory’ the headline for an article called ‘living the dream’. It became a tripwire for me. It set off a rash of thoughts about how I always miss out, how I always fail to achieve or obtain how everyone else gets the prize but I miss it. It isn’t a rational line of thinking, but because of a series of events earlier in life a foundation for such a belief was laid, and then later built upon because I had accepted it as my lot, it became a stronghold in my mind. After becoming a Christian, I set about to pull it down because it opposes the knowledge of God. Remnants still remain, or else there could be no effective tripwires. Thing about them is, you never know when, where, or in what form they are going to be. You know them when you hit one. Avoiding them is impossible. Dismantling the traps they set off, by casting out imaginations and renewing the mind, is the only way to render them useless. What effect is a tripwire if there is nothing for them to set off? It’s nothing but silly string then.
So, identifying the tripwires is not important. Dealing with the thoughts they trigger is. If something gets triggered, and it brings despair or causes you to feel downcast, identify the belief that is the basis for those thoughts, and see if they match what the Word of God says about you. Then start casting out the old belief and replacing it with the Word of God, which is living and active and able to discern between bone and marrow, spirit and soul. The soul must always yield to the spirit, because the spirit is already in the image of God. The soul – the mind and the emotions – is what we renew to make it match the Word.
Easy peasy, right? Well … not always so easy. But that quality decision to do it makes all the difference.
More on Tripwires
17 Tuesday Apr 2012
Posted faith
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