Doubts and Defense Stand No Chance

 God means what he says. What he says goes. His powerful Word is sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel, cutting through everything, whether doubt or defense, laying us open to listen and obey. Nothing and no one can resist God’s Word. We can’t get away from it—no matter what. (Hebrews 4:12)

Doubt or defense - God's Word cuts through it like a hot knife on cool butter! Think about doubt for a moment - it 'creeps in', doesn't it? Doubt may be instantaneous, but the really nagging and crippling kind of doubt may be the kind that 'creeps in', unnoticed at first, but settling into our minds and hearts like a wicked virus. We don't usually wake up one day and determine to doubt everything we are thinking - doubt comes bit by bit, failure by failure, mistake by mistake. I remember trying to learn to make cookies like my mom made. I would put in all the ingredients, but they didn't turn out quite the same. My impatience, lack of desire to spend hour upon hour in the kitchen, and desire to eat rather than create those cookies made it all the harder! Did my doubt come all at once? No, as one cookie disaster resulted in another, I began to doubt my ability to be a good cookie maker! In time, I began to doubt I could ever 're-create' her luscious baking. We sometimes allow doubt to keep us from trusting we will ever accomplish what we know we are called to accomplish.

Little things creep in to cause us to doubt, yet these 'little things' all add up. The 'addition factor' actually is what God's Word is excellent at REDUCING and ELIMINATING. Our doubts 'add up' - one upon another - until they are gigantic. God's Word comes into our lives and in rather short order, those words begin to tackle the biggest piles of doubt, reducing them to rubble that can finally be discarded. How? The Word of God actually has this way of helping us to listen and then to obey. We begin to listen to reason rather than chance. We begin to obey the 'directions' laid out and begin to see change. When I finally buckled down and followed the directions mom had taken such pain-staking time to write out on those recipe cards, those cookies began to turn out a little better each time! God's Word REDUCES doubt into bite-sized pieces - the size we can begin to challenge and overcome. His Word ELIMINATES what remains once we begin to obey what he tells us to do.

His Word is also useful for cutting through our huge defenses. Don't have any of those, you say? Let me assure you - we ALL have some 'defenses' we mount to ward off some form of 'invasion' we don't want to face. It might be our tendency to avoid certain topics in discussion, or our reluctance to address a problem because we see it as too far out of our league. Defenses go up to keep us from 'getting too close', or getting roped into involvement. God's Word cuts through those defenses - even the ones we don't know exist right now. If you have no real knowledge of the defenses you mount from time to time, ask him to show you where they exist. When he does, don't deny they exist - embrace his willingness to expose them so he can finally reduce them so we can begin to no longer hide behind them. God isn't afraid to cut open those walls so we can finally see the light they kept us from seeing all along. In fact, he relishes bringing light where dimness or darkness once existed. Just sayin!