Faith or Doubt?

The other night, I had the following dream: A woman had to enter rehabilitation for a broken leg. The biggest problem she faced was the negative thoughts that made her doubt whether she could do it. She had to overcome these negative thoughts or she would never walk again. That was the content of the dream.

I think God revealed something through this dream that might prove helpful.

If you’re a regular visitor to this website, you know I’m keenly interested in the supernatural. That realm is available to all of us when we exercise faith. But this dream isn’t about the supernatural. It isn’t about faith and healing. It’s about faith and survival.

The woman in this dream wasn’t contemplating how she could be supernaturally healed—if only she had enough faith. She was contemplating how she would make it through the course of several months of rehab without giving up hope. If she failed to put the doubts and negative thoughts out of her mind, she knew she would never walk again. The situation from her perspective, looked so hopeless that she doubted she had what it would take to get through something most of us would not find terribly challenging.

I’m amazed at how difficult people can find something that to me, seems very simple. Of course, there are those who look at the things I struggle with and wonder why I find them hard. We all have different areas of strength and weakness. There are things for which we have incredible faith and others that cause enormous doubt.

In the same way that faith is required to succeed in the supernatural—if we live with enough doubt concerning our less than supernatural affairs—whatever we aim to do is guaranteed to fail. Hope deferred doesn’t just make the heart sick. It sickens the entire body and it robs us of life.

Whatever you aim to do—be sure to remove nagging doubts and negative thoughts from your mind. Take every negative or doubtful thought captive. Present it to Jesus and ask what He thinks of it. If it’s negative, you can be assured He’s going to tell you to get rid of it and replace it with a thought that’s positive and full of hope.

Thinking rightly is of paramount importance if we want to live the kind of life God wants us to live. Right thinking is a matter of developing the right thought habits. Before we can think rightly about anything, we must first learn to think rightly about God.