God is building in His people an ability to live as overcomers; those who are presented with impossible odds, yet still experience personal breakthrough. We love reading books and watching movies about people who had incredible disadvantages but overcame with relentlessness.
Every single one of us faces a resistance, assigned to wear us down and take us out. We are in the midst of a spiritual war, designed to overthrow the warrior in us and steal our destiny to overcome. Rejection wants to keep us stuck in never breaking free.
Life is tough. No one gets a clean pass in life; this includes Christians. Yet somehow, we can tend to think that following Jesus should make us immune to pain and struggle. Every person has to face their own set of obstacles that can potentially suck the life out of them. At the same time, those areas of challenge can become powerful incubators for our greatest growth.
The resistance that comes against you will seek to keep you living as a victim, rather than an overcomer. It will lead you to a place where you manifest one or more of the following thoughts:
- I am powerless.
- My situation is hopeless.
- I have no options.
- I have no choices.
Unfortunately, heart break and woundedness is a part of life. Everyone has experiences where someone should have loved you but did not. It may have even been abusive situations. I’ve personally worked with people whose list of significant traumas are too many to even count.
Maybe someone observed that were you in pain or experiencing abuse but did nothing to help. It may have been a father who never spoke love and left you in your pain. Maybe it was a family that always ignored you and left you alone in your thoughts all the time.
In moments of trauma and drama, we can become wounded under the power of someone else, leaving us to believe that we are powerless. Many people are passive when it comes to responding to our pain. They often don’t know what to do, so they do nothing. This can program us to believe that we are helpless. Not only are we left with damage in our hearts, we also have to reckon with a victim mindset that wants to follow us in life.
The victim mindset takes the negative experiences of our life and projects them onto our future. Therefore, we see the rest of our lives not as victorious, but as prisoners. Negative perceptions start to dominate our thinking. Life just happens to us and we lose the will to overcome.
In order to make the shift from victim thinking to overcoming thinking, we have to break the agreements with have with victim thinking and be willing to step into the overcoming available for us.
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