Thoughts
on Michael Wells’ teachings in Sidetracked In The Wilderness - # 31
Michael’s book is
available through:
Abiding Life
Ministries International
Littleton, Colorado
Notice: this email is part of a BLOG, called Getting Out of the
Wilderness. Why a blog? So that many can receive the weekly thoughts
I express on Michael’s writings in an easy manner.
It’s
almost funny how life teaches us so much.
Of course it is sad when we don’t see what it is teaching! Folks have said for generations: “learn from
history (the past) and don’t make the same
mistakes.” What do most do? Never learn from history, make the same
mistakes as someone (or self) did in the past.
Well, amen.
THE MOLDING
OF SELF-LIFE
excerpt
from pages 88-90 of SIW (5th printing,
March 1998)
excerpt
from pages 84-86 of SIW (14th printing,
March 2012)
(used with permission from
ALMI):
Past
events affect most areas of life…We draw upon the past continually, and it will
help us to understand the self that must be denied to realize identity messages
of the past do have great significance today.
We
all have received a variety of identity messages….the enemy will take every
message and distort it in order that you might receive it as having the worst
possible intent.
Many
parents have been accused of giving their children negative identity messages
that were never intended. The enemy has
merely seized the opportunity and, in the voice that sounds like the parents,
told them something other than what was meant…
There
is also a person’s peculiar grid of emotions to contend with…something is
said…causing the person to hear what might not have been said at all…
…Once
an identity is developed, we will begin to look for signals that verify it…
A
child who receives the idea that he is not valuable may test this hypothesis by
rebelling and staying out all night. Under
these circumstances, if the parents say nothing, or worse yet, say it would be
better had the child not been born, this one will believe what he always
suspected was true. This can result in
further defiance and even open doors for the enemy to tempt in the area of
suicide, for the child is convinced that he has no worth.
In
one of my first years of ministry I led the church to have a “garbage and
baggage service.” The whole idea was to
come and dump all that everyone had been carrying around for a long time: the
things, persons, “identities” (although we didn’t call them that at that time),
bad memories, etc…onto the Cross of Christ.
Many did. Some wanted to still
hang on to those things. Getting Past
the Past is a big deal for so many.
But
Michael gives us the start of “the past” that causes such difficulty: those identity messages given to us every which way we turn, by almost every
person we come into contact with. Take
special note that so often they start at early childhood!
Oh
how we should give due diligence to see that each and every person we know
comes to discover this problem of identity messages given to them, and how to live
in the present without the past dictating messages that defeat and be
destructive…what could be worse than the temptation to commit suicide?
Note:
if you don’t have one of Michael’s Sidetracked In The Wilderness books,
please contact ALMI
(www.abidinglife.com) and get one today!
To access ALL past weekly
blogs, go to Getting
Out of the Wilderness by logging onto www.leemcchristianministries.blogspot.com
Lee McDowell Christian Ministries
leemccm@gmail.com
1737 CR
2051 Nacogdoches, Tx 75965 936-559-5696
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