“Dreamers are always dreaming, believers keep on believing”. God has given each of us a dream – a giant-sized purpose to make a difference in this world, for the good of people, to God’s glory. Achieving it requires dependency upon the Spirit to do all things. To deter us from achieving progress in our dreams, Satan likes to use the father’s wound to create self-limiting beliefs in us.
To overcome our doubts and fears that arise from these beliefs, we must first build a confident relationship with God despite our rejection mindset, and trust in our identity, and through such a relationship, abiding in the Vine naturally happens more consistently, leading to increasing experiences of experiencing Christ’s power in our lives. Secondly, we must habitually renew our minds with biblical arguments that contradict our self-limiting beliefs and, through biblical meditation, rewire our brains with neuroscience. Finally, through faith and persistence, we must take intentional action to prove our self-limiting beliefs false. If we do all this successfully, our self-trust grows despite our self-limiting beliefs, and, by fulfilling our God-given dreams, we can leave a lasting legacy in this world.
“Even though the world is large, one person can still make a world of difference.” (Frank Sonnenberg).
This world has been repeatedly revolutionized by dreamers who kept believing despite their perceived self-limiting beliefs, who, through self-trust strengthened by faith in God, overcame their doubts and fears, and ultimately made the world better through their realized dreams. God has given each of us a giant-sized purpose: to make a difference in this world by achieving our God-given dreams. To enable us to complete our mission, God has also given us the Holy Spirit, who lives in the heart of every Christian, whose purpose is to lead and empower us.
Those who firmly trust in and rely upon the Spirit to do all things, have unlimited potential within them, “being capable to do infinitely more than what we imagine or think” (Ephesians 3:20). The Holy Spirit has the power of Christ, and when we receive that power, “we can do all things through Christ who strengthened us” (Philippians 4:13). In essence, “we are more than conquerors through Christ” (Romans 8:37), who has “overcome the world” (John 16:33). And that power lives within us as we abide in the Vine (John 15). We must firmly trust in it and rely on it, giving us the potential to do all things according to the purpose God has given us. With the Spirit leading and empowering us daily, our trust in our Spirit-led, Spirit-empowered abilities should grow to the point that we trust in and depend on the Spirit in and for everything.
Through the Spirit within us, we have unlimited potential, more than enough to achieve our God-given dreams. And depending upon our purpose, we can potentially change the world for the better, through God’s power and through principles of the ripple effect:
“A single individual, acting with purpose and intention, can initiate a chain reaction of consequences extending far beyond their immediate environment. In this world, the impact of one person’s purpose often follows a non-linear trajectory, where small initial actions lead to disproportionately large outcomes.”
“Learning too soon our limitations, we never learn our powers.” (Mignon McLaughlin)
Satan uses our self-limiting beliefs to deter us from “becoming the person God wants us to be and from accomplishing all the goals He has set for our lives”. Self-limiting beliefs are “deeply ingrained perceptions about oneself, others, and the world that hinder personal potential and prevent individuals from pursuing their goals and living authentically.” Stemming from our past experiences, for many of us, being the ones with our earthly fathers who failed to properly love and equip us, Satan has entrenched self-limiting beliefs in us, manifesting in self-doubt, fears of failure, and perceptions of inadequacy. By attacking our identity through the father’s wound, Satan has produced self-limiting beliefs in many of us, limiting our effectiveness as a light for Jesus through our God-given dreams. Common limiting beliefs, we learned from our father’s wound, include:
- “I am not good enough”. “I am unlovable/unworthy of love.”
- “God doesn’t love me / care about me.” “I cannot trust others, especially God.”
- “I am alone/unsupported”. “I must be self-sufficient / I don’t need anyone”.
- “I am a failure / I will never succeed.” “It’s too hard/impossible”.
- “I am responsible for others’ happiness/problems”.
Self-limiting beliefs like these become internal barriers to success, “creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, of inaction leading to unfulfilled potential” in our lives, as Satan plants seeds of doubt and fear in our minds, until they “become deeply entrenched convictions that prevent individuals from stepping into their divine calling.” Through our father’s wound, resulting from relational brokenness, Satan’s strategy is to prevent us from embracing our identity in Christ, from trusting in God’s love and plans, and ultimately, to prevent us from chasing our God-given dreams.
We often believe “we are not good enough”, “we have nothing valuable to offer this world”, and that “God cannot be trusted because He is the same as our earthly father” (rejection mindset, father’s wound). Therefore, we choose either not to pursue our God-given dreams or to fail trying, as we don’t believe in ourselves. Again, influenced by our father’s wound and a rejection mindset, we often struggle to abide in the Spirit; we believe “we are unloved by God”, which makes it harder to consistently receive power, strength, and nourishment from the Vine, because abiding thrives on intimacy in relationships. This leaves us in periods of greater weakness and vulnerability, making it harder to overcome our self-limiting beliefs.
When we don’t believe that God truly loves us, we often fail to have a bold relationship with Him. When we don’t have a bold relationship with God, our trust in Him usually suffers. When our trust in God wanes, we may subsequently feel alone in our struggles, possibly believing God is angry with us and won’t help us. Therefore, our self-trust suffers even more because we don’t trust that God is on our side (a rejection mindset). Subsequently, we may also lack faith in our efforts of receiving direction and empowerment from the Spirit to help us in our work, and because we don’t fully trust in our abilities and capabilities, we fear more that we will fail, and that God, like our earthly father did, would be displeased with us for our failures, and possibly condemning and rejecting to us. Satan uses the combination of the father’s wound, rejection mindset, and self-limiting beliefs, hoping to deter God’s children from being a light for Jesus and reaching our potential by making us believe we cannot and that God will treat us harshly when we don’t.
The truth is, according to our identity in Christ, we are “fearfully and wonderfully made”, perfectly designed by our Creator and fully equipped by the Spirit, to fulfill our purpose. God is perfect and Love; unlike our imperfect earthly father, He is a perfect father who always loves all His children perfectly. Because of justification, every child of God will always be eternally loved, completely forgiven, and therefore totally accepted and never condemned. God is never the rejecting kind; He never will reject us as our earthly fathers did. God’s love and grace are freely given; they can never be, nor can they be, earned.
We received grace when we became justified by faith, which happened when we believed in Christ and that He died for our sins, becoming a Christian, a child of God, after we accepted God’s gift of grace while we were hopeless sinners. And because of our faith, we receive grace, justification, and adoption. Through all of these, we daily experience God’s perfect love and acceptance, not rejection and condemnation, because God’s perfect love chose to pardon all our sins and to declare us righteous, giving us the righteousness of Christ in our lives. Because we have received the righteousness of Christ, every time we sin, the Judge chooses to see only that righteousness in us. Consequently, we experience daily the same acceptance and validation of our identity that Christ received from His Father (“This is my dearly beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased”, Matthew 3:17), even though we still live in a habitual state of sin. All of this “we received by grace, not by works, lest any man should boast”.)
“One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love” (Sophocles).
When we truly believe that God is a perfect father who perfectly loves and accepts, we have a perfect reason not to believe in the lies of our father’s wound, which has injured us, starting in our childhoods. God is not only a perfect father but also a perfect healer of rejection wounds caused by relational brokenness. Part of the healing process is to believe in the truths of our identity in Christ. All things, including the healing of our father’s wounds, are possible with God, but you must take the first step: you must come humbly, come as a child to Him and ask Him to heal you. Healing can be a long process, but in His perfect timing, it will eventually happen. I know, because He has healed me from my father’s wound.
Conclusion:
We don’t have to fear rejection or condemnation when we fail or sin because of justification. When we realize that God is perfect love, we can strive to have a bold relationship with Him. Abiding in the Spirit naturally happens through a confident, intimate, bold relationship with the Father, and it is through abiding in Him that we can receive the leading and empowerment of the Spirit, the power of Christ, to do all things. The first step in developing the self-trust to overcome our self-limiting beliefs is to build a bold relationship with the Father, so you can trust Him more fully and build more consistent habits of naturally abiding in the Spirit. As we (the branch) connect to the Vine, we not only draw strength and power, but also grow in confidence and self-trust in our Spirit-empowered abilities, as we will later put them into action.
Chasing Dreams While Battling Self-Limiting Beliefs, Part 2
Chasing Dreams While Battling Self-Limiting Beliefs, Part 3