Hello beautiful brides, I am Adina in South Africa and today I want to share what I’ve learned in Finding the Abundant Life Chapter 8 “Who Are You Listening To?”
This was another lesson that really helped me a lot. When I was in Primary School we went on a camp where we had to do several obstacle courses. I am not tall, and as a child I was shorter than most of my peers. There was one particular obstacle I struggled with because it was too high for me to reach, but one of my taller classmates got up and helped me to get up and I could continue the course. But afterwards the teacher yelled at me and told me how clumsy I am and that I cannot do anything. That stuck with me for many years and I always dreaded doing things like that. And there are many more insults that were hurled at me during my life that I started to believe and it prevented me from doing certain things for the fear of failure. And there may be many opinions or insults we receive about our appearance that we start to believe, or even from ourselves when we compare ourselves to unrealistic social media standards.
But this lesson was a beautiful reminder that we do not have to take anybody’s opinions to heart, it taught me that we can immediately take it to our Heavenly Husband and ask Him what He thinks about us and how He feels about us, or we can go to the Bible and read until we are at peace. During an attack or when insults are hurled at us, we can remove ourselves emotionally and ask His opinion, instead of listening to the insults and allowing it to steal our peace and joy, we can hide behind our Beloved and be at peace listening to what He has to say.
We also shouldn’t replay all the insults in our minds for days on end, we must let it go and meditate on His goodness and all the blessings we receive every day, we shouldn’t allow it to sink into our hearts to ultimately believing it and allowing it to steal our peace and joy. The same with all the insults that were hurled at us during our lifetimes, we should take it all to Him and get His opinion. His opinion is all that matters and the only opinion we should take to heart and it will give us peace.
Another thing I learned from this lesson is to remain quiet and to not share our lives or situations with others because if we listen to the opinions or even well-meaning advice of others, it can lead to confusion and even opposition. We should only talk to our Heavenly Husband and wait for Him to lead us in whatever we are facing.
So take everything anybody ever said about you and that you struggled with to your Heavenly Husband, ask Him what He thinks about it, how He sees you and how He feels about you and let Him set you free from things you believed and struggled with. He wants to help you and He wants to carry it for you!
WOW, I am ALWAYS AMAZED by His timing! I just posted a comment about how I wanted to be a guest on an HGM podcast to talk to our girls specifically about what you talked about here—citing the chapter “Who Said?” and then saw “Who Are You Listening To” which is another good one that we could EASILY convert so it’s written to our girls and young women.
I’d failed to mention that it didn’t have to be just me as a guest, which you confirmed because LOOK how you have this fantastic testimony that would be perfect to share in the podcast or a follow up podcast or as a fellowship topic to record so our young women can hear the same thing said by many older women.
O yes Erin, it is such a HUGE problem. Just the other day my daughter told me that her friends made a comment about her “thin” arms during an athletics event at school, and now she has this thing about her arms. From childhood there are so many comments and things we have to listen to about our appearance, and later on in life about many other things as well. He just reminded me of a podcast I just after my daughter shared all this with me: https://loveatlast.org/how-he-sees-us/