If you struggle in the arena of your mind, you’re not alone. The journey you are on has been a well-worn path by many, including myself. If you find yourself hard-pressed on every side, feeling like there’s no way out, I stand as a testimony of the Lord’s goodness and am telling you that deliverance is in your reach and freedom is on the other side of your perseverance.
I’ve battled and won against the enemy’s lies–the heaviness of anxiety, fear, and depression. Intrusive thoughts were not unfamiliar to me and fear had a loud platform in my mind.
Freedom felt impossible and I wondered if I would ever overcome the heaviness that cascaded over my mind. Little did I know the Lord would graciously walk me through my journey of deliverance and He will do the same for you!
Deliverance Is Your Inheritance
The first important truth for us to build on is knowing that deliverance is included in your salvation. The Word of God says in Acts 28:28,
“Therefore let it be known to you that the salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles, and they will hear it!”
If you look up the word “salvation” in the Strong’s Concordance or the Blue Letter Bible (my favorite study tool) you’ll find a definition that sounds something like this: “deliverance, preservation, safety, salvation; deliverance from the molestation of enemies; in an ethical sense, that which concludes to the soul’s safety or salvation”.
My favorite part of that definition is “deliverance from the molestation of enemies.”
What does deliverance mean?
Let’s break it down a bit further. When you accept Jesus Christ as your savior, you receive His salvation into your life, which includes being rescued and set free from the enemy pestering and harassing you in any type of aggressive or persistent manner.
The Word of God is our ultimate truth and authority. If we don’t see something unfolding or being lived out the way the Bible says it should, that does not mean the Bible is not true—it simply means we need to pray, repent, claim, and have faith in what He has declared for us. The Bible is not broken, but sometimes, our thinking is.
Repentance is Good
This is what repentance is all about. If you look up repentance in the same resources as above it sounds something like this “to change one’s mind; to think differently”. Repentance is not just saying sorry and feeling bad for what we did. Repentance is to be walked out with intention and the Holy Spirit.
True repentance takes place in the heart AND mind. When we sin and repent, we repent not just because we did something wrong, we repent because we have grieved the heart of our Father by acting contrary to His character and image—the character and image we are to bear.
We, as the Body of Christ, need to switch the narrative on what repentance really means. Repentance is God’s gift of mercy and grace to us. It’s a means of drawing closer to the Father. If the Lord ever corrects you, convicts you, etc., that is a joyous thing—not a sad thing.
Correction and protection
The Bible says His correction proves our legitimacy of being His children. His correction is to keep us on the right track of being with Him and it’s His protection of us. So as we walk out the deliverance in our minds by practicing repentance, never let the enemy shame you or put you down. Always remember repentance is a good thing and it keeps you close to the Father’s heart. It is a reverence for Him and His holiness. It’s admiration for who He is. Its respect, it’s never a shameful thing—it declares the goodness of God because it glorifies the sacrifice of Jesus.
Access Denied
So let’s put it into practice. One revelation the Lord gave me during my journey of deliverance was this: the enemy is incapable of creating anything new, he can only pervert what the Lord has already created.
For example, the Lord says you are His masterpiece; you were formed and created by Him. God determines our identities; nothing else should determine our identity. The devil knows this: he cannot rewrite what God has declared over us, but he can try to pervert the truth to make you believe otherwise.
So, to combat the enemy’s lies and twisted truths in our minds, we must replace the thoughts the enemy tries to plant, and we never entertain them. The enemy’s only power over us is the power we give him.
What does his power restriction mean?
Have you ever gotten an ad on your phone that piqued your interest, so you engaged with the ad by either clicking on it, watching it, liking it, or maybe even commenting on it? After that one single interaction with the ad, it keeps popping up and seems to be the only ad you see for a while.
But, if you dismiss or hide the ad, you never really see it again. It’s the same strategy with the enemy. He plants a thought in our heads and will wait to see whether or not we take the bait. If we engage with that thought by allowing it to live in our head, by imagining how that thought plays out, or by entertaining it in any form or fashion, it will stick and plant itself.
We open doors to allow ungodly thoughts to live inside our heads. However, if we refuse that thought, it has no access to our lives.
Strategy for the Arena of the Mind
If the enemy can only:
- pervert and cannot create
- needs me to agree with his thoughts in order to give him have access to my life
Then, I will use the following strategy:
I’ll take his twistedness and return the truth of God’s word to the matter, denying him access and keeping my mind fixed on heavenly things.
For example, if the enemy says, “You are worthless and God wants nothing to do with you.” I would combat that with the statement, “ACTUALLY, my worth comes from Jesus Christ and I am a new creation in Christ. By the blood of Jesus, I come to the throne of God in boldness with full access to the Father, where He longs to be with me because when He sees me, He sees the blood of Jesus. I am forgiven of the Lamb, and God has no remembrance of my past sins. I deny you access to my thoughts regarding my identity, my thoughts are reserved for God the Father and His Word.”
Keep Fighting
The devil is a trespasser and has no right to your life. Your life belongs to Jesus when you are a born-again Christian. Do not allow him any access to what belongs to Jesus. The strategy I learned from the Father was a process.
My deliverance didn’t happen overnight. I walked with the Father to come to a wide-open place of freedom. The same may be said for you as well. I have experienced instant deliverance, and I have experienced the journey as well—either way that it happens, just keep your eyes on Him.
The Journey
I didn’t want my deliverance to be a journey, but I’m glad that it was. Had it not been a journey I would have walked right back into slavery because I wouldn’t have known how to steward my deliverance. I would have been like the Israelites in the wilderness.
God delivered them from Pharaoh, but they still had a slavery mentality; they thought it would have been better to be back in Egypt at one point because although their physical bodies were delivered, they had to learn mental deliverance as they roamed around in the wilderness.
The Lord didn’t intend for them to be there for 40 years, but because their minds had not caught up to their physical deliverance, they remained in mental bondage—they had to learn deliverance, and sometimes the same is true for us. God can deliver us in an instant but we get in our own way. However, we have a faithful Father who stays by our sides the entire time, and that just goes to show His goodness and His love for His children.
The End Goal
Never forget this while you are on your journey. Know that deliverance is not the end goal; it is simply a means to reach the end goal: to be with Jesus. Jesus is the goal, and He is the reason we walk out of our deliverance. Remember to seek Him and not only deliverance. You’ll find the journey will be a little smoother when He is the focus and not yourself. Be encouraged, friend, and know that deliverance is yours to be had, and the only thing in between you and freedom is your perseverance.
