Breaking Sticks

I've recently been working on a children's book about beavers. I'm definitely not Dr. Seuss, but I love creative writing. It sets me free in a world of my own where I get to create and tell stories.

In my spiritual life, I've been working on developing better disciplines for my thoughts.  As I have continued on this journey of disciplining my thoughts, I have discovered that we play a huge role in maintaining the things we entertain in our minds.

We cannot always stop certain thoughts from entering our minds, but we can catch them as they enter and break them under command and authority of Jesus.

I love it when I get an image to help me fully understand something that is going on in the spirit realm. As I have been going through the process of developing greater discipline in my thought life, I have seen the image of a stick breaking.

For instance, when a thought enters my mind, I address it immediately. (Now, not every single thought needs to be addressed, but the Holy Spirit will help you monitor what needs to be zeroed in on).

I want you to picture a stick that looks like a primitive arrow being shot in through your left ear. As it enters your mind I want you to picture it stopping mid air. Pausing for classification and if it doesn't fall into any kind of healthy or life-giving category, then there is no room for it. If it's not going to build life, its going to dam it up.

I am an analyzer at heart. I love to pick apart something and determine its greater meaning. This can be helpful in many different circumstances. However, when it comes to daily thought life, it can lead to a lot of confusion, clutter, and unnecessary time spent on thoughts that aren't as significant as I'd like to make them.

I don't think I'm the only one who suffers from a place of being a thought hoarder.

It's like I got into the habit of keeping everything. I couldn't throw out anything out of my mind. When you think of shows that feature people who deal with this in the physical realm it is easy to understand how it connects to a mental state.

When you have unnecessary junk everywhere, it's simply hard to walk around.

Peace is hard to come by because you are smothered by so much stuff that you don't even know where to begin to organize.

You don't want to throw certain thoughts out because you believe they might serve a greater purpose in helping you one day. You might find a certain thought or idea useful. But soon you have so much in one space that you can't even organize. Your workspace  is covered with half baked ideas and half of the materials needed to bring something significant about.

The enemy loves to help encourage the clutter by sending in unnecessary thoughts that distract us from our cluttered projects and remind us how inefficient and insufficient we are as human beings.

So, as I started to monitor my thoughts more one on one, I began to see the image of a stick breaking as I captured a thought and brought it under the authority of Jesus.

This may sound crazy to you, but I figured that living in a mental state of clutter was much crazier than seeing images of breaking sticks. Sometimes the tactics to achieve and keep freedom are more unusual than we'd like them to be. I will risk being seen as weird for the sake of living in freedom.

So, a thought sits before me, and I would say, "I break this thought in the name of Jesus".

I see a stick break in my mind. And I pick the two pieces up and toss them out the door.

After a few days of this practice, it becomes a little more natural and a little less necessary to envision the sticks breaking every single time. But I try to do a clean sweep at least once or twice a day to make sure there aren't any hanging out that don't really need to be there.

The peace I am currently experiencing in my mind is incredible.

As I began to experience this peace, I asked God to show me what the sticks were doing as I let them pile up.

I suddenly saw the image of a huge dam.

I asked God what the dam was holding. I then saw the image of huge amounts of water stirring behind the dam. These waters were new things the Holy Spirit wanted to do. New things God wanted to do in and through me. All of the thought clutter was damming up the flow of God's creative work.

It was cluttering up my mental workspace and holding me back.

What happens when the sticks quit coming in? The dam quits being built up.

Better question: What does God want to do with the dams in our minds?

He wants to literally obliterate them. He wants to explode them. He wants to lace them with dynamite and BLOW THEM UP.

He wants you to experience a crashing wave of water that will literally flow in you, through you, and out of you into every single thing you touch.

Enlist the help of the One who wants to break everything in your heart and mind that keeps the current of his love from flowing freely.

Don't forget that as God frees you from something, or takes you into a greater level of freedom and healing, you automatically receive the power through the Holy Spirit to free others from what He has freed you from.

This is vindication through the power and authority of God. A new level of freedom becomes a new level of testimony and a new level of God's punishment on the enemy.

We spend a lot of time running from the enemy when really, the enemy should be running from the power of God in us and the power of what God is doing through us.

Dear Lord,

I pray that those who read this post would begin to be freed from the thought clutter they experience. I pray that You would teach them specific and individualized ways to break the destructive thoughts that enter into their minds. Give them supernatural discipline to overcome thought strongholds that were either developed or inherited. I pray that you would break patterns of scattered thoughts and provide focus and insight that is so strong that even people who are taking medicine for things like ADD or ADHD would no longer have to take this medicine. I pray your supernatural healing on thought lives.

In Your Holy Name, Amen.