Christianity Oasis Forum

[Leaps4Joy]

Believing in yourself!!
I hope everyone had a blessed week.
Is everyone ready to begin?
Before i get started I would like to open up in a word of prayer.
Heavenly Father, We thank you for the many blessings that you give has and the ones you
will countinue to give us. We thank you for the opportunity for us to be here tonight.
Lord, Please guide us and give us the wisdom and the knowledge taht we need to do the
will that you have planned for our lives. We thank you for each and everyone here tonight
and hope everyone has a great time tonight also. In Jesus name we pray, AMEN

When we start out life we are very much dependent on whomever it is that is supporting us.
Our belief system is conditioned from a very early age. We eventually believe they will
fulfill all our needs and take care of us forever. This does not happen. We also love
ourselves and feel we can do anything. Eventually, for some of us, through our life
experiences, we learn to be skeptical in our ability to take care of ourselves or do the
things we need to do to get on with life. And we lose some of that love of self. Our
personal belief in self has been damaged by someone or something..
Often we lose the ability to defend ourselves because we may not trust our sense of what
is going on around us or within us. We do not pay attention to the warning signs of danger
that we learned in earlier life. Our self awareness and awareness of our surroundings has
become less important to us and we have lost our sense of intuition that would normally
identify a strange or dangerous situation. Sometimes we have been beaten down so hard that
we will not stand up for our rights anymore, because we may feel that we do not have any.
We feel that our rights have been taken away and therefore, loosen our personal boundaries
and emotional boundaries and do not take heed to situations that may harm us. We lose the
belief in our ability to verbally and physically defend ourselves when anyone starts
intruding in our personal life. We do not care! We do not have any self-respect anymore
and mostly do not respect anyone else. We do not take care of ourselves do not care about
our personal safety and do not care about our security in life. They have no meaning all
because we have lost belief in ourselves and our abilities.
Learning to bring that positive self belief back is not always an easy task. You have
to learn how to trust yourself again and know that you can make right decisions about
yourself and your life. As much as a negative belief in yourself can be harmful, a
positive belief in yourself can be extremely rewarding and powerful. You can start to
develop positive things in your life and re-build your self-worth. You can create a
positive life cycle for yourself.
When you start believing in yourself again, you start feeling you have rights again;
and you are far more likely to defend yourself and do whatever it takes to stay safe,
emotionally and physically. You learn the difference between truth and fact. You can
believe that you can truly take care of yourself and still understand the fact that
you may not always be in the safest situations to defend yourself adequately.
You learn that your beliefs have been developed by your sense of the world, both real
and imagined. You actually develop a model of life that will keep you safe, emotionally
and physically. Beliefs are changeable. What we believed in at age 10 is certainly not
what we believe in at age 30.
You can take charge of your life and bring back three major beliefs:
1. My self-respect is worth standing up for.
2. I deserve to live and be safe.
3. I have the ability to keep myself safe.
When you fully believe in yourself and have reset your boundaries, you have strengthened
your self-worth and a personal or physical attack becomes, once again, unacceptable to
you. You will become a determined, strong, responsible person and know what you want
that will keep you safe. You are much less likely to let any emotional or physical abuse
control your life and understand that these things happen and are a fact of life. You do
not have to put up with that anymore. You can transform your life.


Believing in Jesus Christ!!


Are you the type of person who believes that God can't use you? Do you feel like you have
been through so much or done so much that you have become unwanted by God? Let me assure
you this is not the case and I will prove it to you with some examples.
There are so many people in our society today who have been broken and battered and been
through things like divorce, drug addiction, and alcohol that feel like they could never
be used by God. Maybe it is their own conscience making them think this, maybe it is from
being raised in a household that focused on the judgment of God. Whatever the reason, I am
here to tell you that there is almost nothing you can do to get yourself thrown out of the
arms of God. If it is His purpose to use you for something He wills, it doesn't matter where
you have been or what you have done, as a matter of fact in many cases that is exactly why He
chooses such people. What makes a better example of the power of God, the incredible transformation
of a drug dealer into an evangelist or missionary or someone who was raised in the church being a pastor?
There are numerous examples of this in the bible, and to keep it simple I am only going to
use examples that you will readily recognize so that you don't have to go look them up. If
you think that God won't use you because you are vain and self indulgent you are wrong.
Samson was dedicated to God at birth, he squandered his gift and told Delilah the secret
of his strength and had it stripped of him. But, what happened in the end, God gave it back
to him and used him to kill his enemies.
If you are in prison and you think God can't use you because you are a murderer, again you
are wrong. If you repent and take God into your heart believing in Jesus as your Lord and
savior you will be forgiven and you can be used. Want an example of a murderer? How about
Moses? Moses murdered an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew when he was with the Egyptians
being raised as royalty. Afterwards he fled into the wilderness, it was there that God
began shaping him and he eventually was used to deliver the people of Israel from the
bondage of the very people who had raised him.
You think you can't be used because you've lusted after your neighbor; you have been an
adulterer, you've lied over and over, stolen things? David did all of these things
and more and yet he was considered the highest of all the kings of Israel, and called
"A man after God's own heart".
Have you always talked bad about God and Christianity, possibly even done a little persecution
of your own on a small scale? Paul was one of the biggest persecutors of the early church and even ordered
and watched people being stoned to death. He became perhaps the most outspoken evangelist in the history of
Christianity and wrote over two thirds of the bible. Still think you can't be used? If this is the case you can PM me at any point and I will talk to you on why this is not the case he will use us all if it is his purpose.

[kimberly]

Thank you Mysweetsavior!

I appreciate the way God uses you and your faithfulness to Him. Love, Kim