A devotional about the gap between knowing what you should do and actually doing it. The speaker describes how talking to yourself, rather than listening to your feelings, creates discipline and productivity. A Bible Belt sermon uses Elijah, Ahab, and Jezebel to show how intentional self-directed dialogue overcomes emotional inertia.
Chapters
So listening to a sermon this morning from the Bible Network. It's a church in the southern states, Bible Belt somewhere, Georgia I think. And he's talking about Elijah and Ahab and Jezebel. And it's interesting to see as he's giving this lesson, he just drops this tiny little statement. But it really struck me as really profound. And he said this, he said, Too often we get preoccupied with listening to ourselves, and what we should be doing more often than not is talking to ourselves. We know what we're supposed to do. We know what we're supposed to be doing. We know we're supposed to eat up— or we're supposed to wake up early. We're supposed to eat healthy. We're supposed to do the right things. We know those things, but we're so busy listening to our body, listening to our flesh, and saying, okay, well, yeah, but I don't want to do that. I'm tired, or I really want to eat that thing I'm not supposed to eat, or I want to go do that thing I'm not supposed to do. And that urge and desire is constantly there, But if we spent more time talking to ourselves and telling ourselves, this is the thing you're gonna go do because this is the thing you're supposed to do, so much more could get accomplished. It really just, it rocked me when I heard it. I had to stop the sermon and just process it of, it's so true. When I look back over the days where I was being productive in the past couple months, where things were happening, where things were moving, those days are the days that you just flat out tell yourself, I'm going to go do these things, whatever it may be, one thing, 3 things, 10 things, whatever it is, I'm gonna get this done today. And you tell yourself that, it gets done. On the days when you wallow in your feelings of, oh, I feel this, I feel tired, I feel sad, I feel low, I feel— when all of those days where you just get absorbed in those feelings, nothing gets accomplished. They're days where almost nothing can be shown for it. And there's just not enough days out there to wallow like that. It's amazing to see what happens when you do that talk to yourself, tell yourself the thing that you've got to get done.
