There are a few things that happen before we take action.
If you think about it there are only four steps, they are:
- Ideas
- Thoughts
- Speaking
- The Action
What we want to tackle in this section is negative action, these actions that give us headaches in life.
Staying Out Of Debt
The first example we have is debt, how does this four step process get us into debt.
For example: You see a beautiful car your neighbor just bought. The IDEA comes to mind how nice it would be to have a new car. You start THINKING about it and talk to your spouse about the idea. You really can’t afford it, but you keep SPEAKING about it and you build up an emotional desire. Well, as you probably guess the next step is you take ACTION and buy the car you can’t afford.
This is a generic example, but you get the idea about how this works.
Negative Four Step Pattern
Lets look at what happens when Sin gets in the middle of this.
First, I want to say that I associate sin with a negative force, so even though we don’t see sin as a person we identify it with a negative spiritual influence.
Lets look at the typical office setting. Someone tells you that someone else said something derogatory about you, this provokes the IDEA. Your start THINKING about it and get angry. You start saying (SPEAKING) things to other people in the office and pretty soon it turns into a confrontation (ACTION).
What you find out (when the dust settles) is that the person your originally thought said something derogatory about you never really said it at all. The whole thing turned out to be a misunderstanding.
Sin is the master of confusion and once it injects the first step into us it lets us do the rest. The key word here is LETS, we voluntarily take over and let emotions and actions make a mess of things.
The Choice Is Yours
How many times do we make a mountain out of a mole hill?
Here’s the catch – the ideas and thoughts you have can be kept secret, no one really knows what you think, but speaking and finally actions can’t be kept hidden and this is the problem.
The point to all these examples is to get you to think about making sure your ideas and thoughts are valid before you speak and act on them. If you and I are friends and I call you an SOB, you can forgive me, but you don’t have to forget. If I only thought it and never said anything, then you would have nothing to forget – can you see how damaging it is when you cross the line between though and speaking?
Do you think when men hit there wives the wives can ever forget the action? You can forgive, but it’s really hard to forget an action.
You can’t control a lot of the things that go on around you, but you can control your thoughts. This is where sin plants the seed and lets you take it from there.
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