 Welcome back to Steps to Freedom. We are week number four on the Miracle List is negative thoughts. We're gonna be talking about negative thoughts. So last week, we talked about the things that you, oh, last week, we missed last week together actually. It was about dysfunctional parents. I sent you an email. Hopefully you guys worked on that. This week we're talking about negative thoughts. Now of course, your negative thoughts could be about your dysfunctional parents, but it could be about other things also. All right, so just like the first three items on the list, this one too, you're gonna make a list, a literal numbered list. The top 10 negative thoughts that you have every day or on a regular basis, okay? It may take some time for some of you who are mostly on the positive side of things. It may take you some time to really catch your negative thoughts. It takes effort to slow yourself down to really capture those thoughts. What am I thinking about? If it's very difficult for you, pay attention to how you feel. When you start to feel sad, angry, you start to feel maybe a little sick to your stomach. Think about what you're thinking about. That might give you a clue, but you wanna make a numbered list, all right? Some negative thoughts are this, I am worthless. I'm fat, I'm ugly, I'm gross, I'm whatever, fill in the blank. I am different from everyone else. I am in too deep, I can never get out. These are hopeless thoughts, right? I am doomed, I am hopeless, I am ruined. Those are negative thoughts. And it may take some time for you to really catch what is it you're thinking negatively about yourself, about your situation. Now, I wanna talk a little bit about how negative thoughts can turn into mental illness. So Brother Mike wrote a book called Plano Spirits. And I asked you to grab this book when we first started the class. It's an excellent book that talks about mental illness. And the part that is talking about negative thoughts specifically is seducing spirits. And this is on page nine. If you have it great, if you don't, no problem. I'm just gonna read a little bit of what he wrote in the book about seducing spirits. So in 1 Timothy 4-1, the apostle Paul first mentions seducing spirits. The Greek word for seducing is planos, which means deceiving. My experience has shown these spirits attack humans by entering the frontal lobe of the brain, affecting the control and judgment center of the mind. When a person has been infected with seducing spirits over a lengthy period, it is difficult to affect a complete deliverance because the spirits have not been properly identified, rejected and renounced. Spirits enter the brain in childhood and they blend into the individual's personality becoming and become a normal part of their daily thought processes and are difficult to isolate and identify. And that's why I told you to kind of slow your thoughts down, slow yourself down to catch those thoughts. The person usually does not recognize them. And in most cases, people do not know that they have them. Over a period of years, a spiritual dementia slowly takes hold of the person's mind, which prevents recovery. And if unchecked, it can lead to a documented mental illness, severe memory and brain deficiencies and even total disability. And that leads us to at the end of the chapter, Mike talks about a term that he created called autonomic processing. It's on page 37. Autonomic processing, he writes, Mike writes, during my secular counseling career, I noticed the condition I did not understand. Some clients, relatives, friends, et cetera, develop thinking patterns that could not change regardless of the assistance received psychologically or medically. They seem to be programmed for failure in chronic negative thinking. Mike goes on to say, I received a revelation from the Lord that like things in the natural world, gravity, world pulls cause and effect, sowing and reaping the seasons, the universe, that these things in the natural world that operate on their own, the human mind could be programmed to do the same, to run automatically. God showed me that a person's dominant negative thoughts could be programmed to run on their own, uncontrollably escaping the person's free will. Now I wanna pause there. God has control, let's say God has command over everything in all the universe, in the heavens and on the earth. But the one thing he does not have command over and it's on purpose is your mind, your free will. He will not control that. He will not take command of that. You have to freely give it to him, all right? So if you lose your ability to think clearly, seems pretty hopeless. So he goes on in this part of the book, he goes on to explain these terms that he created, negative thought disorder, obsessive negative thought disorder, and autonomic processing. I encourage you to read about it in this book. No one in here is in autonomic processing. I can guarantee you, that's the end game. All spirits, these seducing spirits, excuse me, their end game is to cause a total loss, a disability in the mind, all right? And no one is in there. That would be your schizophrenics. That would be people that are seriously mentally ill. And it's typical that it'll take something very tragic, a trauma of some sort to happen for that person to kind of wake up and to come back to reality. And they can cry out to God and get help. But apart from that, there's no hope. So the Plano Spirits by Mike Smith is where it talks about seducing spirits, the negative thought disorder, the obsessive compulsive negative thought disorder, and autonomic processing. Tonight though, we're just talking about negative thoughts where everyone on the planet can relate to that. And the next step in this process of receiving healing is to repent for receiving and believing those negative thoughts, all right? Now, I wanna just take a moment to say, receiving them. You might say, well, how can I control what these spirits are telling me? True, you can't. You have to capture your thoughts. In 2 Corinthians chapter 10, it says, take every thought captive. Now that's hard to do, admittedly, but it's important, especially if you're having trouble with your thinking. So the thought comes, you recognize, you observe it. If you receive it as truth, like, oh, I'm dumb. Yeah, I am dumb. You just received it. That's what you gotta repent for, receiving it. Not for having the thought, you can reject the thought. No, that's not mine. That's not my thought, that I don't believe that. I'm not dumb. I'm not stupid. I'm not a failure. I have failed, but I'm not a failure. Okay, see the difference? So I'm gonna repent for receiving and believing those thoughts. And you gotta do it sincerely. Lord, I am so sorry. I am sorry. Rejecting the thought. No, I reject it. Speak it out. Life and death is in the power of the tongue. Use your tongue to speak English and reject that no. I reject that thought that I am a complete and utter failure. I reject it. I renounce that thought. If I've even said it about myself, I renounce it. And I rebuke you spirits and do it separately, each and every one of them. Take your time. Pay attention to what's going on here. It won't take as long as you think. If you really pay attention, maybe a negative thought about summing your bitter towards, they hurt you and the thought keeps coming back to you. Oh, that person wronged me. They kicked me out of the house, okay? I've been kicked out of the house. I know what that feels like, right? Comes back. I'm like, no, I'm not mad at that person anymore. No, that's a, I reject that thought. But if the thought comes, oh, that person, you know, I'm bitter towards them. They hurt me. They kicked me out of the house. And you go, yeah, I'm mad at them. Now you need to repent. It comes. You can reject it, but if you receive it, then you have to repent for that negative thought, okay? Doesn't mean it's not true. It could be true that that's an actual thing that happened, but why are you still thinking about it? Just let it go. Okay, you wanna cast them out forever. Everyone should have 2 Corinthians, chapter 10, three through five, memorized about capturing, you're taking every thought captive. Okay, and so once you recognize your negative thoughts, now what's the next step is to replace it. So I always used to say this, if you take something out of your hand, you gotta put something in it. People with addiction, you know, if you are a smoker, if you take the cigarette out of your hand, well, you better put something in your hand, okay? And what is that? Oh, like I grab a piece of gum or whatever, okay? It's just a technique to do, but here is with your thoughts. So you wanna replace the negative thoughts, find truth one, and find the scripture that contradicts that each negative thought. I love this, Isaiah 26. You keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on you because he trusts in you. You're gonna replace them. So first you have to observe the negative thought, write it down, you know, identify it, and then think, okay, how do I replace this? You can be creative, you can take part of a scripture and somehow replace it, replace them and write it down. Philippians 4-8, finally brothers, whatever is true. What does God say? That's the truth. We have the report of the doctor, and then we have the report of the Lord, right? That's what's true, the report of the Lord. That's what I like to think about. Whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, lovely, commendable, whatever is excellent, and if anything is worthy of praise, think about these things, not the negative thoughts that keep running around in your mind. I found this by Willie Nelson, I like it. Once you replace negative thoughts with positive ones, you will start having positive results. It really does work like that. So going back to the list, so top 10 negative thoughts. I wrote, I am less. A lot of times we don't see who we are in Christ. Our identity is all messed up. We think we are less than I am friendless. I am helpless, I am worthless, I am hopeless. So I found some scriptures to share with you that come against these lies, okay? And you can write them down. Here's the truth. So the first one was, I hope I can remember, I am friendless, Proverbs 1824 says, a man who has friends must himself be friendly, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. And that friend is Jesus. Psalms 46, one through two, I am helpless. But the truth is God is our refuge and strength and very present help and trouble. Therefore we will not fear. Psalms 46, Matthew 10, 29 to 31. I'm just gonna read a part of Matthew 10, 29. It is explaining about sparrows are sold for a copper coin and how not one of them that falls to the ground goes unnoticed by the father. It says, do not fear therefore, you are more valuable than many sparrows. Not to mention how valuable each and every single one of you are Jesus purchased your soul with his blood, the most valuable substance in all of creation. The last one is Romans 5,5. I believe it was hopeless, I think. Now hope does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given to us. The hope that God gives us never disappoints us. If we only look to man for hope and encouragement and value, we will be disappointed. We will be put to shame, but if we trust in the Lord, we'll never be put to shame. Never. So you need to apologize to God. This graphic I found, I really think it probably looks something like that. I don't see in the spirit world, so I don't know. But I just imagine it kind of looks like that. This demons hovers over us and tells us negative things all the time. Why would they care about you? You're a nobody, you're a nothing. You don't matter at all. And in our low times, we can believe that. We can be tricked. So we need to apologize to God for listening to a demon. These thoughts, these demonic thoughts in our mind and not his word. Corinthians 3.16 says, do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the spirit of God dwells in you? Just think that that little girl on the picture. She has this Holy Spirit living in her and she's believing this oppressive dark figure overshadowed and she's bad owing her. But she has the light of Christ in her. She's not paying attention to what's in her, who she is. She's only focused on what's around her and what's speaking in her mind. So I want to encourage you guys to take your thoughts captive, every thought captive, not just the negative ones, the grandiose ones, the ones that don't really make sense, you know, the ones that run on and on and on and on. Pay attention to what's going on here. Write down those negative ones. Replace them with scripture, replace them with positive, replace them with truth. And your healing will quickly appear. Yes. All right, are there any questions? Thank you.