Have you ever stopped to take note of the thoughts running through your head and the words you are speaking to yourself?

It is said that we have approximately 50,000 – 70,000 thoughts per day, so it’s obviously impossible to keep track of them all.  But if the majority of your thoughts are negative, how do you expect you will feel?  Defeated?  Depressed?  Stressed?  All of the above?

Our thoughts and emotions follow a very simple pattern:

THOUGHT —> EMOTION —> BELIEF/ACTION

Simply put, the thoughts we think cause us to feel a certain way – happy, sad, angry, afraid, etc.  The more we think these same trains of thought, the more we will start to believe them as truths.  And the more we will start to act accordingly.

For example, if I think “I am always running late” over and over again, I will most likely start to feel bad.  I might feel guilty, ashamed or even angry at myself.  Then these emotions may lead me to believe that I am an unreliable person and cause me to start getting down on myself in the future before I’m even actually running late!

That is the power of our words.

We’ve all heard that before – words have power – but even when we hear this warning, we probably think of it in terms of other people.  That we need to be careful how we speak to others because our words have power over them.  But that is not only true with others.  Our words also have power over ourselves.

The things we repeatedly say to ourselves can cause us to not only feel a certain way, but to believe certain things about ourselves too.  Many of which aren’t even true!

I have actually caught myself feeling badly before – with a sense of sadness or even “doom” without any idea of why I was feeling that way.  I would have to stop and think to myself, “What was I just thinking about that made me feel this way?”  If that’s not proof of your thoughts leading to emotions, I don’t know what is!

So what do we do about it?

We need to be more aware of the words we are speaking to ourselves.  And if they are mostly negative, we need to change them.  God does not want us to live a life of misery, full of self-doubt and condemnation.  He wants us to see ourselves as He does – fearfully and wonderfully made.

No matter what we have been through or what we may struggle with – it doesn’t change the fact that God loves us.  Because who we are and what we struggle with are not the same thing (thank you for this, Jennifer Rothschild!).

We are made in His image.

We are forgiven.

We are loved.

And those are the things we should be saying to ourselves.  Over and over again!