I spend a lot of my work helping people to work through healing of the past and breaking through obstacles in their present that keep them from seeing through an empowered future.
Healing your perspective is the only way you can drive a foreboding mindset out of your life. Isaiah 61 outlines the transition from a fearful and broken perspective to a hope-filled and restored outlook:
To console those who mourn in Zion, To give them beauty for ashes, The oil of joy for mourning, The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; That they may be called trees of righteousness, The planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified.” Isaiah 61:3
1. Invite God into your disappointments and ask Him to lead you into new resolve.
You’ll continue to let painful experiences in the past dictate your present perspective unless those areas heal. Have you allowed God to truly console you on your past pain and disappointments? Or did you shove those issues deep into the depths of your heart?
When true healing happens, you are able to let go of last disappointment and sorrows. When you hold onto them, you’ll continue to look for future disappointments and forebode as a more of false protection.
The Need for Resolution
Many of your forebodings stem from past disappointments that need resolution. But resolution is not equal to getting all your questions answered. For many, if not most of our disappointments, there will be no complete explanations. Those who heal the best learn to find resolution by inviting God into the healing process, learning to let go and realize that not every single question will be answered in this life.
We won’t figure everything out. That’s not going to stop the foreboding.
The outcome of the healing process is that we can regain our trust muscles, so that we are not so easily wooed by the foreboding projections that come our way. When we find healing from our painful disappointments of the past, it’s often through inviting God’s compassion and grace into our pain, and allowing Him to heal our perspective. He gives us the ability to see our past through a redemptive lens.
Make the Exchange
Many have been in stages of grieving and it may be a point in time where your grieving is now unproductive. You are stuck. The unhealed pain is owning your inner narrative and its time to put on a new perspective.
When we heal our pain with God, we learn to make an exchange with Him. Isaiah 61 paints a picture of spiritual and emotional exchange. We give God our pain and receive His healing balm. He gives us beauty for ashes, but you need to actually give Him your ashes. Joy is available for those who mourn, but you have to mourn. And it’s important to invite God into the mourning process.
Maybe you’ve never grieved your pain in a healthy way. Proper mourning and grieving makes way for incredible growth and maturity.
Ungodly grief keeps us in bondage, stuck to the pain and never able to move forward. There is actually a grief that is ungodly. It never allows you to make the exchange with God so that you can develop movement into new stages of life.
Notice one of the great things God exchanges for the grief and pain is joy. That’s what foreboding wants to keep you from, a healed exchange into joy.
2. Break Agreement with Fear and Chronic Negativity
As you give your wounds over to God, it’s so imperative to be aware of your disempowering agreements. They can be so subtle, especially during seasons of great challenges.
The two biggest agreements can be with fear and heaviness. They empower foreboding and keep you downtrodden. I have not found anyone to break through foreboding without breaking out of fear and constant negativity.
And you must see the heaviness of negativity as more than just a psychological defect or a genetic bent. This is an all out spiritual war to keep you in bondage. The enemy seeks to keep his fangs holding on to you through agreements with fear and that heaviness of negativity.
Break agreement today. Establish your repentance by declaring, “I will no longer serve the mindset of fear, negativity and foreboding any longer. I repent and renounce of it today. I choose faith, hope and love as my trusted perspectives!”
To put the nail in the coffin over foreboding, you will have to build your spiritual muscles that do not allow fear to be the dominant voice in your perspectives and decisions. Fear can scream all it wants, but it doesn’t need to own what you chose to focus on and do.
You may need to admit that you’ve allowed foreboding to be a friend to you, a guiding voice and protective ally. Pull the veil off its devices and you’ll see a list of fear-based lies all throughout. A spirit of fear is not your friend.
The Bible never teaches that God will remove our fears before we step forward. We are called to face our fears and overcome them with God’s help. Living a life where you try to predict and anticipate any bad that could happen is a form of control. It’s time to stretch your trust muscles and live in the enjoyment of what’s available before you.
3. Allow God to do a renovation process.
And they shall rebuild the old ruins, They shall raise up the former desolations, And they shall repair the ruined cities, The desolations of many generations. Isaiah 61: 4
It doesn’t matter how much foreboding has run in your generations. This can stop with you.
The transformation often begins with inviting God to do His renovation work. Years ago, I asked God to help me with great desperation. But it wasn’t until I said, “God, you have full access to every area of my heart,” that I saw things move into a new direction.
I was seeking to be relieved from symptoms I was struggling with. He went down to my foundation and began a renovation process. So many are scared of it, but I didn’t care. I was tired of fear, foreboding and negativity owning my life.
4. Awaken to the blessings and favor of God over your life.
Those who forebode immediately reject that statement. “That is not for me. It is not what my life shows.”
This place is where we can really make a turn, but it’s also where the fight wages heavy. Those who forebode and live in fear have such a hard time believing God has good things in store for them. Their history is marked with disappointment. They can’t see the blessing and favor that is available to them.
But look at the perspective God wants you to receive as He heals you:
Strangers shall stand and feed your flocks, And the sons of the foreigner Shall be your plowmen and your vinedressers. Isaiah 6:5
God’s design involves taking your brokenness and showing His blessing, favor and glory over your life. The exchange involves taking your defeated and discouraged heart and giving you a heart that is filled with a mindset of favor.
The fruit of the exchange is usually not instant, but more of a process. I’ve had to first decide and learn what it means to say “yes” to His favor and embrace it. It takes some getting used to.
I’ve learned a couple mindsets have really helped me along the way:
- Practicing gratitude positions my heart best for all that God has for me. I don’t earn it or perform for it. I come into agreement with His goodness towards me. Thanksgiving aligns my heart to focus on who God is in every circumstance I face.
- Learn to embrace the small victories and blessings. It truly is the “little things that count.” Don’t overwhelm yourself with trying to have this massive, Mount Everest expectation. Rejoice in the smallest things. Don’t despise any of them, for each victory can build on top of each other.
- Learn to receive love from others. When love comes your way from another human, position your heart in gratitude to receive it. Don’t deflect it or minimize it. Express gratitude for the genuine exchange.
5. Learn to get acquainted with your new identity.
Foreboding keeps you locked in your past pain and your past identity. You have to realize, you don’t have to be that person anymore. You have a new identity available to you.
Everything changes when you see yourself as God sees you. One of the most powerful experiences that God provides in the healing process is He gives you a new identity. That newness does not align with foreboding. In fact, foreboding keeps you from seeing your new identity.
You are not a slave, a left-over or an after thought. You are God’s precious child, chosen to be a priest of the Lord; a representation of His nature in the land.
But you shall be named the priests of the Lord, They shall call you the servants of our God. You shall eat the riches of the Gentiles, And in their glory you shall boast. Isaiah 61:6
When I embrace the powerful identity over my life, it radically alters how I see my future.
6. Make a decision to embrace the good God has for you.
When you have been used to breathing smog-filled air, going up to the mountains and inhaling the fresh, rustic oxygen from nature can seem odd, almost weird. Eating quality food ingredients tastes awful to someone who is used to junk food. If your only language is English, then being dropped into China will take some major adjustments.
In the same way, the goodness of God and a hope-filled future seem like a foreign language to those used to foreboding. But when God invades your life with His love and goodness, He turns the tables on all the pain and heartache you have experienced.
Instead of your shame you shall have double honor, And instead of confusion they shall rejoice in their portion. Therefore in their land they shall possess double; Everlasting joy shall be theirs. Isaiah 61:7
I have to learn to welcome new blessing, favor and possibilities. I’ve also had to let go of using the phrase, “well I don’t want to be disappointed,” as a belief system. So what if I get disappointed! Everyone faces disappointments. But if I anticipate everything going wrong, I will align myself with that negativity and leave no room for hope. I want to prepare myself for standing strong in God’s goodness and power to meet me no matter what I face. I don’t need to self-protect, for He is my shield and protector.
7. Forgive and release justice into God’s hands.
Break free of foreboding, victim thinking and self-pity by forgiving yourself from past stuff you hold yourself to. Then forgive others. When you do that, you allow God to become the just judge; knowing that He will make things right in the end.
“For I, the Lord, love justice; I hate robbery for burnt offering; I will direct their work in truth, And will make with them an everlasting covenant.” Isaiah 61:8
8. Recover a big picture perspective.
Step back from your foreboding and get a picture of what your life could be like without fear, negativity and chronic foreboding. What possibilities could open up? What would your relationships look like?
Even more important, think about what future generations could receive from your personal breakthrough into faith, hope and love?
Here is the promise:
“Their descendants shall be known among the Gentiles, And their offspring among the people. All who see them shall acknowledge them, That they are the posterity whom the Lord has blessed.” Isaiah 61:9
9. Set your attention on joy.
I didn’t say, “wait for joy.” Instead, set your attention on joy.
One of the greatest signs of God’s work is the mark of pure joy. A chronic absence of joy can be a clear sign of the enemy’s work, whose mission is to steal the expression of joy from your life.
It’s time to take your joy back by putting on a new garment. For so many, they have worn the coat of heaviness, fear, negativity and foreboding. To make the turn, it’s time to put some new garments on:
I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, My soul shall be joyful in my God; For He has clothed me with the garments of salvation, He has covered me with the robe of righteousness, As a bridegroom decks himself with ornaments, And as a bride adorns herself with her jewels. Isaiah 61:10
Foreboding won’t allow joy. It keeps you from enjoyment; from being relationally connected. When you step back from foreboding, joy can become more real when you get into the hear and now and focus on enjoying the moment in front of you.
I am finding that we are all on a journey of learning to have joy in any circumstance. To have joy anywhere that does not get stolen, you need to go into many places where it could get stolen, until you learn to embrace joy and guard it.
But many of us don’t even know what joy looks like. We lack references for what it looks. In the healing process, set your attention on learning, “what does joy look like in this situation?”
10. Cultivate a new atmosphere in your life.
When people forebode all the time, they carry a cloud of negativity with them. It can even be hard for others to be around them.
I know you may not want to hear this, but you may have lost relationships because you were so negative and foreboding. It’s time to cultivate a new atmosphere in your life, where people can be drawn to the hope of Christ within you.
For as the earth brings forth its bud, As the garden causes the things that are sown in it to spring forth, So the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations. Isaiah 61:11
What do you want to be the dominant thoughts that own the atmosphere in your life? If you don’t decide, negativity and foreboding will want to stay around. The atmosphere of joy is what breaks the yoke of all that heaviness and doom.
Pure joy is meant to defy negative circumstances. It actually provides strength through challenges. And the quickest way to get into a is to engage thanksgiving and praise. Set a new environment in your home, car and work spaces where you invite God to be a part of every space.
What do you need to put into action today to drive foreboding out and welcome the presence of God in your environment?
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