Planting for a good harvest

"Instead of the thorn bush will grow the juniper, and instead of briers the myrtle will grow. This will be for the LORD's renown, for an everlasting sign, that will endure forever." Isaiah 55:13

We only need to confess sin once but Truth should be confessed regularly!! I cannot emphasize this enough. I am a firm believer in having declarative statements birthed from the word of God for every area of life, but even more so when you are trying to live in the reality of a freshly won victory. This is one of the ways you occupy and hold the ground you have gained. Otherwise when you least expect it the enemy will move back in, using the same old lie with a slightly different spin.
 
I have witnessed more times than I can count this one particular action making or breaking someone. Far too many stop after confessing their sins and never move onto declaring the Truth. Nine out of ten times when someone doesn’t implement this step they will find themselves returning to the old familiar lies. 

Our dog Pepper, who in my opinion is the cutest little Party-Pom you will ever lay eyes upon, had been kept in a cage in someone’s backyard until we found him and brought him home. At that time, he was about a year old and looked fairly neglected. Unfortunately, due to his lack of care he developed some bad habits. One of which was eating snails. Yuck!  I can only assume that being kept in a yard and deprived of regular meal times, he resorted to snacking on snails to curb his appetite. Of course, coming home with us radically changed his lifestyle. This included going from being an outside dog to an inside dog and eating at regular times. Yet in spite of this change he would still on a daily basis peruse the backyard for snails.  To break him of this nasty and unhealthy habit we decided to do our best and clear out the backyard of whatever snails we could find. But even with our most earnest attempts, sometime in the middle of the afternoon, he would hunt until he found one that we had somehow missed.  Hoping to break this disgusting habit by keep him from getting overly hungry, I decide to break his meals into three portions: breakfast, lunch and dinner. Thankfully it worked! That is until a few months later when one afternoon no one was home to feed him lunch. When I arrived a couple hours late I saw the remains of a half-eaten snail on the Living-room floor. All it took was one day of a missed meal and he resorted to the same old nasty habit to fill his grumbling tummy.
 
Moral of the story: If all we do is clear out the bad without replacing it with something good, it is only a matter of time before we return to a nasty habit to fill the void.
 
Confession of sin weeds the garden, but if you don’t plant something new the old weeds will grow back in.
 
This excerpt was taken from "Releasing Captives. 7 Steps to Breaking Free From Self-Defeating Destructive Habits." Get it on Kindle today for only $2.99!

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