God has been speaking to me lately on the trap of making agreements. It is one of Satan’s many traps, and it is a deception so subtle that you don’t even recognize it. Think about it. There is a struggle in your life. You pray for God to take it away. Nothing changes. You think, God doesn’t hear my prayers or does not care. You begin to believe that your prayers are ineffective and that God does not have His hand in your life. Bam! You have made an agreement in your heart. You have been fed a lie directly from Satan, and you agreed with him. Makes it sound pretty scary when you put it like that, doesn’t it? And the even scarier part is, you barely even recognize you’re doing it.
How do you know that the agreement you make in your heart is a lie? Because it goes against scripture.
The lie: God doesn’t care about my heart, because he isn’t answering my prayers. (And we have to be careful how we claim that prayers are ‘answered.’)
The truth: God never leaves us or fails to listen to us.
“The Lord is righteous in all his ways
and loving toward all he has made.
The Lord is near to all who call on him,
to all who call on him in truth.”
PSALM 145:18
Or how about this? You see someone suffering – this is HUGE on the World Race. We’re working with girls who have been brought out of horrors too dark to even want to think about. We think, God must not care as much about them as He does me, because look at their life. Woa.
The truth?
“For the Lord your God is
God of gods and Lord of lords,
the great God, mighty and awesome,
who shows no partiality
and accepts no bribes.
He defends the cause of the
fatherless and the widow,
and loves the alien,
giving him food and clothing.
. . .Fear the Lord your God and serve him.”
DEUTERONOMY 10:18
Eeesh. Ephesians 4 tells us to “not give the devil a foothold.” Well, in making agreements with the Enemy, you are not only giving him a foothold; you are giving him an invitation. It only begins with an agreement, and soon, you are so far removed from God’s truth that nothing in you wants to believe it. It stops becoming a one-time agreement and begins to be something that you actually believe.
Have you made any agreements lately?
God doesn’t use me.
My gifts do not compare with ______________ (fill in the blank with any number of people).
I am not worthy of the love and mercy of Christ.
God doesn’t have great plans for me.
Life is up to me.
The desires of my heart are not worth bringing to the Lord or fighting for.
Life is just a series of pain and struggling. God is just seeing how far I can be pushed.
We talk a lot in WR culture of “speaking life” over people and situations. I’m learning to identify those agreements that so easily and unnoticeably creep in throughout the day, threaten to push me further from God’s heart, and to speak HIS truth over them before they become MY version of truth, because that’s no truth I want to live by.
Agreement is a choice. You can choose to agree, or choose truth. One will push God farther away, and one will defeat the Enemy. You only have room for one.
