Author’s Note: This article was originally written in 2013.

There was a time when I felt I could no longer endure the painful trial going on in my life for so long. In frustration, I cried out to God. “What are You doing to me?” He said, “I’m making a man of God out of you!” He continued, “I did not cause your pain, but I’m using it.”

The orthopedic doctor calls it a frozen shoulder. Jesus calls it healed. It’s a muscle beneath the shoulder that becomes locked up and is painful. The orthopedic doctor said, “You must stretch your arm to loosen that muscle. Here are six exercises twice a day for six weeks including hanging on a bar. You must stretch your arm until it hurts. Then lean into the hurt and count for 20 seconds with excruciating pain and then repeat.”

After a few exercises I thought about the doctor, “He’s got to be kidding me! It feels like I’m tearing my muscle apart. Like I’m ripping it out of my arm.”

Is It a Good Pain or a Bad Pain?

He also advised me to visit a massage therapist. As she was working on my arm muscle, I had to let her know something. “It hurts! That’s painful!”

She asked, “But is it a good pain or a bad pain?”

I said, “I am a no-pain person.”

I was told if you want to recover faster, you can have someone else stretch your arm because they will pull it farther than you would. I thought to myself, How stupid is that? But in desperation to end this ordeal, I chose a physical therapist to stretch my arm. The pain was so great, I laughed.

I said to him, “Am I going crazy? Why did I laugh when I felt the worse pain of my life?”

He said, “That’s your release! That laughter is your release!” I now believe pain can be an ingredient of laughter. I promise if you are now in pain that is beyond words, there will be a time when you will laugh again, and even drown in God’s laughter.

“Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh” (Luke 6:21, NLT).

There was a time when my pain almost stopped my ministry. On a ministry trip, I became powerless to the pain that justified me not going to the next meeting. My wife and I prayed, but no relief. I phoned home to our intercessors for prayer. One intercessor, after praying, said, “Bill, you are on a mission. God has sent you there. You can trust Him.” Something clicked in my spirit. I dragged my body to that meeting. The moment I stood up to minister the pain left me.

After the meeting, it returned with a vengeance. It fought me to the next meeting two days later. When I got up to minister, it left again and then followed me home. As this took place with many of my meetings, something dawned on me. I am stretching my spiritual muscles!

I want to encourage you. Sometimes you must walk through some stuff to get to where God is. But remember, you are on a mission and the great I AM has sent you!

Spiritual Frozen Muscles in the Body of Christ

Many times what I experience in my physical body is what is going on in the body of Christ. I sense the Lord showing there are some spiritual frozen muscles in His Body.

And I hear the Lord saying, “You need to stretch those muscles. Stretch until it hurts! Many of your healings will come while you are being stretched by others. I am stretching you this season out of your frozenness. I am stretching your arms further than you would like, so they can reach around a world full of pain, sin and brokenness. Those frozen muscles will thaw from the fire of My Spirit as you allow Me to stretch you.”

Being Stretched Against the Odds

A woman kept standing for the healing of her husband who suffered a stroke, leaving a third of his brain dead. The doctor said to her, “He will never fully recover and will be a vegetable the rest of his life.”

The woman said, “No, by the stripes of Jesus he is healed.”

The doctor got upset with her and said, “I don’t think you are taking me seriously. I have been doctoring these cases for 30 years.”

The woman responded, “Jesus has been healing longer than that!”

Nine days later, her husband walked out of the hospital whole.

“In that day his burden shall be taken away from off your shoulder, and his yoke from off your neck; and the yoke shall be destroyed because of the anointing oil” (Isa. 10:27).

After several months of pain, prayers of many, stretching exercises and some laser treatment, my frozen shoulder is finally loosed. The pain is gone. God has intervened again in my life.

Lord, help us to keep stretching and allowing You to stretch us beyond our pain. {eoa}

Bill Yount has been a member of Bridge of Life Church in Hagerstown, Maryland, for the past 40 years and is in leadership. He faithfully served in prison ministry at Mount Hope Inc. for 23 years and now travels full time, ministering in churches and Aglow circles. He is currently an adviser at large for Aglow International. Bill has authored several prophetic books. His latest book is Handfuls of Purpose. His prophetic email list is: @. Visit Bill’s website at .

Edward Byrd and Joshua Buchanan emanate light and joy. They laugh easily, encourage freely and share what God has done for them without hesitation.

They’re friends now, bonded over how Christ set them free from homosexuality.

In the last episode of Overcomers: Leaving LGBT, the duo joined Charisma News to share their testimonies.

“From the time I was 13, I got physically abused by a close family member,” Byrd says. “And I will always wonder, like, why was I the target of his anger, like, he would lash out on me? … All those things just created this, like sadness, this brokenness, this emptiness, this abandonment. And so I totally started to create a whole other person. I changed my name, I lost a lot of weight, I started dressing more feminine or becoming more gender fluid. My name was Remy at the time. I started wearing makeup, my hair was long eyelashes, I was doing the whole thing. And I was just out here having this whole persona, being very promiscuous in the clubs, like going to the club like Sunday to Sunday, like partying.”

But God has a way of shining High light into the darkest places.

“While I was in this club, and this lady had comes in the club and she touched me, prophesies to me while I’m in the club. And she says, ‘You know that there’s a light inside of you. And God has a purpose and a plan for you,'” Byrd recalls.

Buchanan’s story started out a little bit differently.

“When I was 10 years old, my parents ended up splitting up and getting a divorce,” Buchanan says. “And coming from a broken home, it really takes a toll on you, even at a young age. Because I felt like I couldn’t do anything. There was nothing that I could do, and was just a part of life. And it kind of hit me really quick. And so in the process of all of this, not growing up in church, and not having a relationship with God, and not really knowing who He was, I turned to so many things to try to find love.

“So my journey kind of started out with experimenting with drugs,” he continues. “At that point in time in my house. I grew up with my dad and I was exposed to marijuana at a young age. And so I kind of saw that, and there was something inside of me that wanted to try it. And so I ended up starting with, you know, smoking marijuana and taking pills and snorting pills. And just getting into this whole place of trying to fill these voids in my life.”

Buchanan was diagnosed with HIV in his early 20s, which led him to the altar and an incredible experience with the One who made him.

Listen to the podcast to hear what God did next for each of these men.

Khalil Gibran said, “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls the most massive characters are seared with scars.”

Come on, let’s be very honest, at times, life can downright hurt, I mean big-time ouch! As much as we wish it weren’t so, being a believer in Jesus does not insulate us from the pain and wounding that this world can throw our way. There’s the emotionally tattered marriage, the son or daughter who’s strung out on opioids and is not only breaking your heart but also your savings account, and then the depression and anxiety you face nearly every day but are ashamed to talk about lest you’re labeled as not being a strong Christian. And then there’s the sexual addiction issue you may be facing that has taken you to a dark place of perpetual self-condemnation, guilt and shame and maybe even the affair that has left you confused, heartbroken and emotionally devastated. These aren’t manufactured optics to dramatize an article, but rather real-life circumstances of Jesus followers that my colleagues and I face every day in our counseling practice. Sad, yes, but real nonetheless.

So what do we do in situations like this? Who can really understand what you’re going through without them heaping more condemnation on you than you’ve already heaped on yourself? Where do the hurting, the beat-up and the emotionally disabled go to look for “oil and wine” to be poured into their wounds?

The struggling soul of man is as old as Adam and as recent as each morning when you wake up to face your day. Job rightly said in Job 7:1, “Is not all human life a struggle?” Now, brother, ain’t that the truth!

I think there’s something that we as followers of Jesus need to reckon with and that is that man took a very hard fall in Genesis 3:7, and we’ve been trying to crawl back into favor with God ever since.

“Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked” (Gen. 3:7). At that very moment in history, man literally fell apart in six areas: the physical, physiological, emotional, psychological, neurological and spiritual. The terrible ramifications of that fall produced human cataclysmic devastation the likes of which only God, through Christ, is capable of repairing. So to lay it out plainly, we are all messed up!

As you can see, the struggle is real, the pain is genuine but God refuses to leave us there. Because of His vast agape, unconditional love for us, Jesus journeyed through the darkness of human misery to connect with each and every one of us so as to feel our pain, identify with our human weakness and experience our tears.

“For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who was in every sense tempted like we are, yet without sin” (Heb. 4:15).

Jesus gets it! He gets our sadness, our questioning, our temptation, our pain. He empathizes with our feelings of abandonment, rejection, depression, anxiety and trauma. He’s a intimately relatable Savior who is so intensely in love with us that He gave up His place of divine, omnipotent power to come to fallen earth and rescue the souls of His corrupted depraved human creation. And He did this not because of some required obligation but because of love. Brennen Manning expressing God’s heart said, “Come now, wounded, frightened, angry, lonely, empty, and I’ll meet you where you live. And I’ll love you as you are, not as you should be, because you’re never going to be as you should be.” It is in this kind of struggle where each of us live at times that God wants to show up and prove Himself an empathetic champion advocate in our lives.

We need to understand that through the struggle, God’s beautiful grace provided for us in Christ, is like a hand that that lifts us up, not beating us to righteousness but leading us. Not pounding us to righteousness but pardoning us as we walk this human condition out while on this journey called life. It is the great attempt of balancing holiness with our humanity. The battling contradiction that all believers in Jesus face. Even the Apostle Paul struggled with this in Romans 7 where he says, “I’m not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate” (vs 16). Then in verse 21 Paul hits the “human condition” issue; “I find the principle that evil is present in me.” Then in verse 24 he gets down and dirty with the truth; (paraphrasing), “Wretched [messed up, miserable, depressed] man that I am! Who’s going to set me free from the body of this death?”

Here’s the ultimate answer to the struggle: “Thank you God for Jesus, He’s my answer!”

When we read this, we’re actually seeing the autobiography of Paul’s own personal faith walk as a broken struggling follower of Messiah. It is a clear picture of the apostle’s actual experience of trying to walk out his day-to-day battle between holiness and his humanity, his faith and his failures. We have to get it. Paul is us and we are him! The felony and wickedness of Genesis 3:7 has no less transgression in it then it has today. The same force of sin that Paul came up against is the same force of sin that we experience. Stuff happens and stuff hurts, and sometimes the pain can be substantial. But here’s the beauty of all of this: In the end, as it was with Paul it is with us—Jesus! It may take some pastoral counseling or even some clinical Christian therapy, but His grace and endless agape love will inevitably thrust us through the curtain of darkness into a place of, help for today and hope for tomorrow. The antidote for struggling well. {eoa}

Fred Antonelli, Ph.D, LPC, is a licensed Mental Health therapist specializing in crises marriage, a former senior pastor of 23 years, author and speaker. He is founder/director of Life Counseling Center and has four offices on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Delaware.

As we near the end of an unusually—but much needed—wet winter in the Holy Land, the water level of the Sea of Galilee, Israel’s main freshwater reservoir, had risen meters (74 inches) putting it slightly out of the “danger zone” as of last week.

This comes after last winter brought the worst drought in 100 years leaving the country’s water tables at a dangerous deficit and prompting Israeli officials to enforce water preservation measures.

“The Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) has risen beautifully in the past few days and we are very heartened, although we still have to consider the deficit that remains,” Uri Schorr, head of the Water Authority, said last week.

Even with the rains this year, the water supply is still 4 meters (13 feet) under full capacity.

The surface of the Sea of Galilee is now above the “lower red line” (213 meters below sea level), the marker at which the lake could suffer long-term ecological damage. Full capacity is considered 208.8 meters (685 feet) below sea level.

While a blessing for the depleted water supply, the heavy rains last week also brought floods across the country. Some 1,200 trapped were students in a Jerusalem school. They were evacuated after an access road flooded. Also in Jerusalem, two drivers were trapped in their vehicles and had to be pulled to safety by rescuers after water gushed through the road.

Of course, “rains” and “floods” can also be seen as spiritual blessings. Often God acts in the natural to prophetically show what He wants to do in the spirit. We need a spiritual downpour! We need a flood of revival. The country is blinded. I was listening to my friend Don Finto, now approaching 90, share that the day is coming where God is going to visit whole Orthodox Jewish families in dreams and visions about Yeshua.

The prophet Hosea prophesied that “the Israelites will return and seek the Lord their God and David their king. They will come trembling to the Lord and to his blessings in the last days” (Hos. 3:5, NIV). That day is now!

In early 2017, Nancy Alcorn began hearing about a new Netflix series called 13 Reasons Why, and a friend of hers who was familiar with the issues Alcorn and her team deal with at Mercy Multiplied encouraged her to watch the first season. Alcorn was deeply impacted by this series, as she quickly realized how many young women who walk through the doors of Mercy’s residential homes have similar struggles as the girl featured in the series.

Alcorn was inspired to share 13 stories of young women who experienced a very different outcome than the girl featured in 13 Reasons Why because they chose to reach out for help. This was the motivation behind Alcorn latest book, Treatment or Transformation: 13 Real Stories Why You Can’t Argue with a Changed Life.

In Treatment or Transformation, you can read about young women like Matilda. When Matilda was young, her mom worked a lot and her father drank heavily.

When she was 5 years old, Matilda began to be sexually abused by her uncle, along with an older female friend and a friend of Matilda’s brother. Sexual activity became a weekly part of her life over the next six years. As an early teen, Matilda started self-harming, drinking and smoking as a way to cope with the pain and trauma of the sexual abuse. To gain some sense of control, she started to restrict her food intake and took laxatives to make herself thinner.

Matilda ended up getting raped at a high school party, which led to night terrors and panic attacks that would often result in seizures. She eventually turned to marijuana, prescription pills and cocaine. She started dealing drugs and living out of her car. Here is a portion of Matilda’s story from Treatment or Transformation:

“You know what?” she thought one afternoon when the flashbacks of her past abuse were especially bad. “Pills didn’t work. I’m going to jump off a bridge.”

She found an overpass over a busy highway and sat on the edge, legs dangling in the air. The sun faded into the horizon. Cars, trucks and big rigs swooshed below at highway speeds.

“If I sneeze, I’m going over,” she thought.

Across the overpass, people jogged by with little more than a glance, even though Matilda was openly cutting herself in a final defiance of the world. Then a familiar voice came.

“Hey, what are you doing? What’s going on? Matilda?”

It was her high school music teacher. Rapidly, the woman pulled Matilda off the ledge, as Matilda struggled.

“You’re not stopping me,” Matilda said. “I have to get it over with.”

“No!” said the woman, and grabbed her arm and wouldn’t let go. “You’re coming with me.”

Matilda wasn’t strong enough to resist, though she tried. Back at the teacher’s car, the police soon arrived.

“She’s coming to my house,” the teacher said. “I’ll take care of her tonight.”

While waiting, Matilda had opened up about the haunting flashbacks. The teacher took Matilda’s cigarettes, pocket knife and anything else vaguely harmful. At her house, they watched a Disney movie until Matilda fell asleep on the couch.

The incident led to several weeks of outpatient rehabilitation, which didn’t do anything to help. After a particularly discouraging counseling session, in which Matilda felt the counselor had violated trust by telling others about her problems, she stormed out to her Jeep. In the center console she kept multiple pill bottles, just in case one day proved too rough.

“This is it, she told herself. “It ends here. God won’t be able to torture me anymore.”

She poured the pills into her hands and prepared to swallow them. Suddenly, a presence filled the car. Matilda looked around her, in the back seat, and under the seats. She saw nothing, but the peace was so strong it seemed tangible.

“I’m freaking out,” Matilda thought. “I know there’s someone in here.”

Then a voice came, not audibly, though it may as well have been: “Just give Me one month,” it said.

The voice filled her with such hope. Somehow, she knew it was Jesus.

“Okay,” she responded to Him. “I’ll give You a month. But that’s all. If You don’t do anything for me, I’m done with life.”

She put the pills back in the center console and drove home.

A local pastor recommended that Matilda apply to the Mercy Multiplied residential program, and with a newfound hope, she applied and entered the program. While at Mercy, Matilda felt saturated in unconditional love from the staff. She committed her life to Christ, received freedom from the anxiety attacks, chose to renew her mind to the truth of God’s Word and chose to forgive those who had hurt her. God radically transformed her life.

Matilda is now married, and she and her husband are on the leadership team of a church plant in their city. She has shared her testimony of healing and freedom with more than a thousand people, and each time it has prompted someone to apply to the Mercy Multiplied program. She continues to help walk young women through eating disorders, anger, pain from sexual abuse, anxiety and more.

It’s heartbreaking to read about how the pain in Matilda’s life led her to consider taking her own life. Suicide is a significant issue today. Countless people are affected by it every year, and many of the women who have entered the program at Mercy Multiplied have attempted to take their own life one, if not many, times. However, when they experience the love and life-transforming power of Jesus Christ, they have a renewed passion and purpose for their lives. They realize that God created them for life and not death.

But freedom and healing are not just available to those who are residents in one of the Mercy homes. It’s available to you as well. God can, and will, move powerfully if you choose to allow Him to work in your heart and life. No matter who you are or what you have done, the same radical life-transformation that thousands of young women have experienced in the Mercy program is possible for you. Through the power of Christ, you can overcome whatever issues or hurts you may be struggling with.

If you are a young woman between the ages of 13-32 and are hurting or struggling, you can get information about Mercy’s residential program and apply to the program at .

For more stories of radical life transformation, check out Nancy Alcorn’s book, Treatment or Transformation: 13 Real Stories Why You Can’t Argue With a Changed Life.

Evangelist Morris Cerullo recently exhorted believers to remember their God-given calling and anointing to share the gospel.

In this video, Cerullo tells viewers, “If ever there was a day for the church to manifest the faith of God to meet the desperate needs of the lost and dying world we live in, it is now. Today. if you believe that, you are an incredible candidate to understand you’re a full time minister. To understand you’re not just a housewife. You’re not a doctor. You’re not a lawyer. First, you are called, you are anointed by God, to bring healing and deliverance to your neighbors, your cities, your nation. The only way that we’ll be able to meet these desperate needs is by having this supernatural manifestation operating in our life.”

Watch it here.

Since launching their 24/7 Christian satellite TV station THE KINGDOM SAT in 2009 to the Middle East and North Africa, Leading The Way continues to impact some of the most unreachable lives in the Arabic world including recently a notorious “Prince of ISIS.”

When Mohammad* first planned to meet with one of Leading The Way’s follow-up coordinators in the Middle East called Peter* his initial plan to was kill him. But through a dream about Jesus his life was dramatically turned around.

“The second time they met, Mohammad told Peter he had a dream and saw an envelope dripping blood with great fragrance,” explains Maged Atalla, Leading The Way’s senior director of ministry outreach.

“Peter told him Jesus is sending you a message and you need to give your life to Him. At that moment he surrendered his life to Jesus. Mohammed then told Peter that the first time they met he had a knife in his back pocket and wanted to kill him on the spot, but something prevented him from doing this. The miracle was he discovered that Mohammad was in fact a prince of ISIS who other people would pledge allegiance to die for.”

Watch Prince of ISIS video testimony here

As a result of these broadcasts over the past 10 years, countless viewers are responding like Mohammad, with many accepting Christ through the help of Leading The Way’s on-the-ground field teams.

These teams are ready around the clock to answer questions, share the Gospel message, lead Bible studies and discipleship programs, pray with viewers, and connect them with local churches—or even serve as the church body for those viewers without access to a local church.

As part of Leading The Way’s Vision 2025 strategy to win a million souls for Christ, Maged explains how they are planning to significantly grow this ministry to the Arabic world to impact many more lives like Mohammad’s:

“Over the next seven years we plan to double the audience of THE KINGDOM SAT and we plan to create more programming and air more LIVE broadcasts. And as our audience increases, we want to significantly increase our field teams, create more resources, and foster a support network for underground churches.”

Maged concluded: “It’s amazing to see over 10 years how this channel has reached out to so many non-believers in Muslim countries around the globe. The Lord has truly blessed this ministry as the word of God is spreading like fire in the hearts and minds of people in some of the hardest to reach parts of the Arabic world.”

*Names changed for security reasons

Listen to the podcast below to hear what God is doing in the Middle East.

There seems to be no end to the business books—even Christian ones—flooding the market. But how many marketplace Christians can actually connect with the authors of those books to get specific insight and mentorship? David Yarnes says that’s the exact need Kingdom Business Association (KBA) fills. The networking group offers practical and spiritual support for Christian business professionals from around the world. And Yarnes, co-founder of KBA, tells me in an exclusive interview that the network has grown increasingly prophetic. (Click here or scroll down to the end of this article to listen to my interview with Yarnes.)

“[KBA has] evolved a little bit, but now we’re highly prophetic,” Yarnes tells me. “We really build around relationship in that … we’re really trying to connect people. And we’ve seen marketplace ministry and extraordinary things happen through that network. It’s amazing.”

Being a prophetic business networking group allows Spirit-filled professionals—many of whom are entrepreneurs at KBA—to gain unique insight into God’s heart for their businesses.

“We’re uniquely prophetic, and we’ve seen people’s lives changed by a prophetic word,” Yarnes says. “So we encourage that, we talk to people about it, and we do training on it.”

While KBA ministers to a wide range of Christians in different professions, including art and media, the group mostly consists of business professionals who want make an impact for Jesus in the marketplace.

“[Businesspeople] need that kind of prophetic, charismatic relationship with each other,” Yarnes explains. “A lot of these guys are in places where there’s no one else around like them.”

Yarnes co-founded the association 10 years ago. At that time, he was pastoring while a number of his businesses were growing. But Yarnes noticed that there wasn’t a lot of material available to teach Christians how to minister in the marketplace.

“There was this huge sense of the secular-sacred divide—’If you want to minister, you have to give up these secular pursuits,'” he says. “And nothing could be further from the truth.”

So with the help of about 10 people, KBA began to offer support to Christians in the marketplace, and little by little the networking group began to grow.

“It was getting together and encouraging each other that ‘Your business is your front line,'” Yarnes says. “‘Whatever you’re doing, you’re doing unto the kingdom.’ And it really birthed out of that.”

KBA eventually transferred to MorningStar Ministries in Forth Mill, South Carolina, and the two ministries have been working together for 10 years. Since then, KBA has grown to offer more than basic networking. They provide weekly coaching calls featuring top speakers who give insight on a wide variety of subjects. The great thing about those calls is that those listening in can interact with the speaker and get the specific help they need.

KBA also does weekly prayer calls, where callers can share prayer requests and build each other up in the Spirit. KBA members can meet face to face during the association’s annual meeting and their smaller quarterly meetings around the country. The group’s website, , also offers a variety of free resources that some say have changed their lives.

Because of this, Yarnes says, KBA chapters grow organically, and often members who live near each other get together more regularly for mutual support. This is the heart of KBA’s focus on relationships.

“I hear time and time again that people found their best friends through KBA,” Yarnes says. “And I don’t say that lightly. They really do find commonality because I think all friendship is based on having a lot of things in common, and KBA has really been able to do that.”

If you want to connect with Yarnes or KBA, visit . Yarnes says that for just under $20 a month, you can become a KBA member and gain access to many in-depth resources in addition to the free videos and recorded calls I mentioned earlier. Be sure to listen to my entire conversation with Yarnes by clicking on the podcast below!

Marriage paradigms you may have collected and created throughout your life are often at the core of how you operate in a marriage. These paradigms or ideas may be very biblical or very unbiblical. These paradigms may be very healthy or unhealthy, self-serving or giving. Whatever the paradigm, the paradigm has power. In Proverbs 23:7, it says, “For as he thinks in his heart, so is he.”

I can tell you as a Christian psychologist that this Scripture is so true. The paradigm you collected and created will be how you behave in your marriage. These paradigms create the framework or worldview you have of marriage, your role in marriage, and your expectations of your spouse in marriage. Your paradigm affects how you wake up and greet your spouse (in tolerance or celebration). Your paradigm determines who gets the other a cup of coffee, cooks meals, cleans up, creates wealth, pays bills, initiates sex and creates romance and so on. You can see how powerful paradigms can be in the way you believe and behave in your life.

However, rarely has anyone sat you and your spouse down and said, “Let’s go through your paradigm about your marriage.” It’s my experience that the paradigms are the roots that create the fruits in your marriage. For better or worse, you’ll cling to a known paradigm regardless if it’s healthy or unhealthy if that paradigm isn’t exposed and thought through differently.

In my thirty years of experience, I’ve learned that if a person’s paradigm of marriage is more functional than relational, this in and of itself can create havoc in 10 to 20 years of marriage. The lover-spouse paradigm is a relational paradigm that keeps both of you continuing to aim at staying a lover.

In a strong marriage one, two or three paradigms can exist that you need to expose, challenge or even change to accommodate your marriage. Your marriage has bonded two beings from different paradigms, some of which might not be the best for your marriage.

Our paradigms come from what we have seen or heard over the course of our life up to our wedding day. I think that is why Proverbs 4:23 tells us that above all else to “keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life.”

When someone creates a paradigm and questions it, that’s one thing. However, when someone creates a paradigm and believes it with their heart, that becomes a whole other matter. As I said earlier, Proverbs 23: 7 states, “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.”

The heart is where we believe. The Bible says, “If you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom. 10:9). The heart is actually the most powerful thing we possess. When we believe something in our hearts, then our minds, wills and emotions fully support this belief.

For example, if for whatever reason someone really believes they’re worthless, they’ll behave in worthless ways regardless of God’s love, or their parent’s and spouse’s love. If someone believes they’re worthy of love, they won’t accept disrespect or behavior toward them in a less than worthy way. More than anything, what we truly believe in our heart influences our behavior.

Our beliefs are the fuel for every paradigm we currently believe in all areas of our lives. When we believe our paradigm, it grows and grows whether it’s true or not. However, when we stop believing a paradigm, it dies, often instantly. I remember clearly as if it was yesterday when Lisa rolled over in bed years after we were married and said, “I really love you.”

I can’t explain it, but at that moment I really “believed” her. Once I believed her, all the previous paradigms instantly vanished. I can’t tell you how many thousands of times I’ve seen that when someone believes a new paradigm, all the old ideas almost instantly disappear.

It’s like when we really believe we are forgiven of all sin (past, present and future) by Christ and we fully let that in our hearts, we are changed. The past is gone, grace is real, and we become different.

I’ve counseled beautiful, smart women who believed they were unattractive and unlovable. I’ve also counseled men who were millionaires and billionaires and believed they’re unlovable and worthless. Facts are not necessarily when someone believes something in their heart.

Remember from history there was a time around the Christopher Columbus era that everyone thought the world was flat. They not only thought it, they believed it with their heart (paradigm). The church and political leaders of that day would persecute those who thought the world was round. Today we think this is ridiculous.

However, as a Christian psychologist, I can tell you that many a husband and wife fully think and believe in their paradigm of marriage or the role of the husband or wife with all their heart—regardless of facts or futility. {eoa}

Doug Weiss, Ph.D., is a nationally known author, speaker and licensed psychologist. He is the executive director of Heart to Heart Counseling Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and the author of several books including, his newest title “Lover Spouse”. You may contact Dr. Weiss via his website, or on his Facebook, by phone at 719-278-3708 or through email at heart2heart@.

A Tennessee pastor has spoken out after he and 17 of his congregation survived a terrifying bus crash at the weekend. The group was returning home from a conference in Chattanooga when the accident occurred Saturday along Interstate 840 south of Nashville, which resulted in the bus leaving the carriageway and overturning. Though eight kids were sent to the hospital for treatment, no one was seriously injured.

“We were spared. Could’ve been a lot worse. Could’ve been a lot worse,” Pastor Joshua Clark from Parrans Chapel Baptist in Bolivar told WSMV-TV. “We’re all here. We’re all safe. So, praise the Lord.”

Clark recalled how the group was headed along the freeway when a sudden gust of wind and a dousing of heavy rain blew them off track and caused the bus to lose traction. {eoa}

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