What if I told you that some of the most transformative truths in Christianity are hiding in plain sight? Not because they’re secret, but because they’re rarely explained in a way that reveals what is really required in order to achieve them.
Today, we’re diving into five powerful realities that can radically shift your walk with God. We’re going to move beyond the surface-level concepts and dive into the deeper truths that, when you really understand them, can unlock breakthroughs in areas where you may have been stuck.
We’re going to talk about why God won’t do certain things for you. We’ll explore the source of some of your triggers. I’ll break down what true mind renewal actually requires, beyond just positive thinking. We’ll examine the origin of most of the stress and chaos we experience in our lives. And finally, we’ll confront the paradox that every serious believer and follower of Christ eventually faces when pursuing the things of God.
If you’re tired of Christianity that stays on the surface, if you’re hungry for truth that actually transforms your life, then this message is for you.
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Points
Let’s start with the very first reality.
1. God will not do what you are supposed to do.
Ok so let me tell you how this came up. I was having conversations with different people and the same theme kept coming up. They were praying and asking God for things that were their responsibility.
One person shared with me that they were praying and asking God to give them faith and my mind immediately went…uurrrp. Because I KNEW that wasn’t gonna get them the faith they were asking for.
Why? Because faith is our responsibility. Yes, God is sovereign, but He intentionally designed humans to co-labor with Him. Things like faith, obedience, discipline, and stewardship are human responsibilities. Prayer is not some kind of divine shortcut to walking out these things.
So when it comes to faith, God doesn’t just hand it out. He explicitly tells us in His word that we are to HAVE faith. It doesn’t say anywhere in there that He gives it to us. In fact, He makes it clear that if we don’t have it, then it’s impossible to please Him.
So if God isn’t just giving out faith, then how DO we get it? Well, the good news is that God actually tells us in Romans 10:17. It says that faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God.
So beautiful listener, if you need something like faith, discipline, etc, you’re gonna have to do it and use God’s word to help you along the way
Application… here’s what I want to encourage you to explore. 1) What instructions has God already given you that you keep praying about? And 2) Where are you asking God to do something He already empowered you to do?
Alright, let’s look at the next reality.
2. Mind renewal requires intentionality.
When we are born again our spirits must be educated. They have to go through a process of being educated and built up. This is important for multiple reasons. 1) destroy Strongholds. A stronghold is a way of thinking that is established over a period of time. It’s highly resistant to change, and it’s designed to keep a person from getting out.
We were intended to be men filled with God. The fruit from the tree of the knowledge of God and evil changed that. The fruit from that tree infused us with all sorts of information that corrupted our thinking. This is why it makes sense to many people to do things that are contrary to the will of God. There are people who genuinely think it is impossible to be in a romantic relationship without having sex. There are people who genuinely believe that they cannot have fun without being tipsy, drunk, or high. This is why Proverbs 3:7, CSB tells us “Be not wise in thine own eyes.” These beliefs are strongholds that must be broken through mind renewal.
When we are born again we are back to God’s original intent from a spiritual DNA perspective but now our minds have to catch up!
2) Mind renewal doesn’t just destroy demonic strongholds, it also gives us new ways of thinking. This sounds good but the process of this mind renewal requires a level of intentionality and commitment that many just are not aware of or prepared for.
We’ve been taught that mind renewal is reading the Bible, saying affirmations, listening to sermons, and ignoring thought patterns, imaginations, and inner dialogue.
That is where it starts. But what it actually requires is an active, intentional, and ongoing exposing and confronting of lies.
Thinking like Christ involves retraining mental reflexes AND beliefs.
Because I don’t know if anyone has ever told you this, but the more you follow Jesus Christ, the more you are going to find yourself in some interesting circumstances that will test your beliefs and may even have you questioning whether God is indeed good.
I remember hearing the testimony of a woman who God told to go to Russia decades ago to transport Bibles. She was caught and beaten and almost raped. Some of our Christian programming would have us thinking all sorts of things about God for knowing that following him would put us in a situation like that.
Let’s even look at new Christians and those who decide to fully commit to following Jesus without compromise and then all hell breaks loose in their life. But when they were in the world, they were on top. There are negative thoughts that form around the emotions they feel from these experiences and these thoughts tend to play on a loop in the mind.
If we don’t address negative thoughts, they will play on a loop and expand into beliefs that we begin to agree with. Mind renewal requires us to take those thoughts captive and bring those thoughts into the truth. Science recognizes this concept as well with a term called neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is our brain’s internal rewiring process.
From a neuroscience perspective, when we take a thought, isolate it, and examine it we can then redirect that thought into the truth. This weakens the old neuropathways and strengthens the new one that emerges as a result of our redirection. This is science’s version of mind renewal. And mind renewal is our responsibility. It doesn’t just happen.
So praying for God to renew your mind is cool and all but please understand that it is going to require something from YOU. You are going to have to actively confront wrong thinking with the truth which comes from God’s word.
3. God will trigger you!
Ok, this one may be a bit controversial and I get that because a trigger is something that causes an intense and usually negative emotional reaction in someone and a lot of us have a tendency to think that God would never do anything that appears negative, but stick with me because emotional discomfort does not automatically equal danger. God will cause a set of circumstances to occur that will trigger some very intense emotions in you and He is very strategic about how it happens and who He uses to facilitate it.
He isn’t doing it to pick on us. Triggers expose the parts of us that haven’t been healed. They also reveal idols, identity issues, and the parts of us that are still in bondage and captivity. This is always going to be an agenda item for God because He literally sent His son to the earth for this reason. Jesus came to set the captives free and in Ephesians 4:8 we find out that not only did he set us free but when he ascended to Heaven he also led captivity captive in the process.
Application: think about some of your triggers and ask yourself what belief or wound is being touched?
Alright, ready for the next truth!
4. Most stressors in life come from a lack of order.
Not just any order, but a lack of Godly order. If there is something amiss in your life 9 times out of 10, the root of it is a lack of order. anxiety, homelessness, financial struggles, depression, baby daddy issues,
The God of the Bible is a God of order. He established parameters that lay out how we should govern ourselves. Most people see these parameters as restrictions, but really they are mechanisms God uses to establish order, not to control us, but for our benefit. Because God knows that without order, there is chaos.
I looked up the definition of chaos in the english dictionary and under the definition were a list of synonyms. Guess what one of the synonyms of chaos is? It’s hell.
If someone were to show me an area of tension in their life, I can likely point to a place where they have violated God’s order. Pastor Manny Arango preached a message at my church titled Out of Order and he gave this example of someone who asked for prayer for their finances. Here’s a clip…
I know that was probably hard to hear, but when we don’t submit to God’s order in an area, then 1) we are not entitled to things he has promised us as a result, and 2) by default, we bring ourselves under the jurisdiction of the kingdom of darkness in that area. I’ve said this before, but there is no such thing as neutral spiritual territory.
Manny has a book called Crushing Chaos where he dives deeper into establishing order and finding peace as a result. I linked to it in the episode description and the show notes.
Application: If you are experiencing areas of tension or stress in your life, I want to encourage you to evaluate whether that area is misaligned with God’s order.
Alright, this next one is the ONE. This is the truth that I am probably most excited to talk about because it’s the one I fight the most with conveying to people, and it’s the contradiction.
5. The Contradiction.
I kinda struggled with what to call this one. I thought about calling it the challenge or the opposition but I think contradiction conveys a little more of what I want to communicate so we’re gonna go with that. But, here is the hard truth… when God reveals His purposes and plans for your life to you, when He begins to give you prophetic insight into your assignments, you will at some point, be met with the contradiction of what God has said.
If God has said, “I called you to do abc”, but the doors to abc remain closed; If God has told you that you are a kingdom financier and millionaire, but your bank account is in the negative; if God told you to build a school, but the permits keep getting denied, then you are smack dab in the middle of the contradiction.
When contradictory facts present themselves, many followers of Christ assume they misheard God, that God changed His mind, that the enemy has “won,” and they ultimately begin to question whether they should continue their pursuit, which sometimes ends up being them contemplating whether they should continue being obedient. But this is what the contradiction does.
This is a VERY hard concept for some to grasp, because we have been programmed to believe that when God has called us to something, then everything connected to it should be easy. And yes, sometimes it happens this way, but more often than not, this is just simply not the case, and it’s not the case for multiple reasons. First of all, you have a real and personal adversary that is Satan, and he has an entire kingdom of people and resources who are committed to preventing you from doing the will of God. He’s gonna throw all he has at you.
But more importantly, God also is invested in the growth of His children. How will we ever know HOW to have faith if our belief is not tested? How can we truly know how to love as Christ loves if we are not forced into a situation where we have to love someone who betrayed us? How will we learn how to expect a miracle if we are not in a crisis??
This struggle is not unique to us. It’s all throughout the Bible. God told Moses that he was sending him to Pharaoh so that he could lead God’s people out of Egypt, but Pharaoh told him no over and over and over again. The leader of these people is telling Moses no, which looks like he cannot do what God said to do. The contradiction.
Abraham was given the promise of being the father of many nations and having descendants, but his wife is not conceiving. This is the contradiction.
Joseph was given dreams of authority and leadership and where did he end up? In slavery and prison for years. This was a major contradiction.
The contradiction is going to come, so if we are going to prosper in our walk with Jesus in 2026, we have to shift our thinking. Let’s do away with the belief that confirmation only comes through favorable circumstances because sometimes, the confirmation comes through warfare. Let’s stop interpreting resistance as a sign to quit.
Application: so how do we navigate contradictions? 1) continue to confess God’s word which includes what He said to you and His written word that speaks of His promise to fulfill what He has said. This is going to build your faith. Say what He said until you see He said. 2) press forward even though you may not have any new confirmation or reassurance.
And ask yourself, what has God already said? Am I interpreting God through my circumstances or am I interpreting my circumstances through God? Here’s what I mean. Sometimes when we are faced with the contradiction we interpret God through our circumstances by saying things like, “God wouldn’t want me to experience or suffer through this,” or “if God still wanted me to pursue this, then it would be easy.” This is not how we are to respond to contradictions as followers of Christ.
We are called to interpret our circumstances through God. When we are faced with a contradiction our mindset should be, “I knew this was coming to oppose God’s word and I won’t be moved by what I see.”
So, when you receive a prophetic word or when God leads you to do a thing, expect tension, prepare to have to wait for it to come to pass, expect refinement along the way because nothing is ever wasted.
Here’s what I want you to take away from this: mature Christianity is not comfortable. It is not passive. It requires you to engage, to take responsibility, to allow God to do the deep work that most people avoid.
But when you embrace these truths—when you stop waiting for God to do what He’s called you to do, when you allow Him to order your life, when you press through the contradictions instead of running from them—that’s when you’ll experience the breakthrough, the peace, and the transformation you’ve been longing for.
If this message resonated with you, do me a favor—like this video, share it with someone who needs to hear it, and subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss future content. Drop a comment below and let me know which of these five points hit home for you the most.
And remember: God is faithful. He’s given you everything you need for life and godliness. Now it’s time to walk in it.
Want More?
If you enjoyed this episode, then you may also enjoy the episode of the show about the fear of success and how it hinders purpose or this episode detailing what to expect when operating in your purpose.
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