The Key To Healthy Relationships | | daily devotional

Good morning, everyone. And welcome back to another mornings with the masters where we devote ourselves to the Lord daily with you. Good morning, you guys. Good morning. Indeed. We're picking up with day two of our cultivating emotional maturity, devotional in the Bible app. There's a link to it in the description. If you guys want to follow along with us. And as always, I'm going to read the scripture and Tori's going to pick up with the Devo. Let's do it. The scripture is Psalms chapter 51, verse 10, and it says this. Create in me a clean heart. Oh God, renew a loyal spirit within me. The devotional is titled how the battle in our mind began to understand how the internal chatterbox voice has taken up residence in your thinking. Let's understand how your belief system is created at birth. We come into the world with a clear belief system, like an empty computer disk. And from day one, we gather and absorb information. What we hear, see, smell, sense there's actual, and then there's perceived and all of it is stored. We take things personally. And at a very early age, we start to make positive and negative decisions about ourselves and the world around us. By around seven years of age, we have sorted and refiled all of the evidence, putting labels known as triggers on the drawers of our mind and start the comparison game, judging and comparing how we match up against other children. Is she prettier? Is he more popular? Is she more talented, et cetera. We keep adding evidence to prove we are right. And then when we reach adulthood, we are wearing our own designer belief system lenses. Any negative thoughts about ourselves and the world around us get activated and they go on display for everyone around us to pick up. Similarly, other people's belief systems activate and all responses collide with each other, creating the mood music in the room. As adults, what we sense, feel, hear, and see often has nothing to do with the issue at hand, but rather each person's emotional hurts and setups from the past that have been activated. Those involved often have no understanding of what is actually happening in the room. When a negative trigger is activated, it can cause us to hold back, create stress and or harm our relationships with others and ourselves. A trigger consists of a thought. I feel disregarded, inadequate, powerless, unsupported, plus an emotion, anger, joy, sadness, guilt, shame or fear. The amount of emotion or emotions attached to that thought determines the size and potential impact of the trigger. Triggers can work like dominoes. Once one is pushed, others follow suit. So allow God to highlight the triggers that have become rooted in your belief system and then be aware when you speak them over yourself. For example, I'm so stupid. No one cares. Recognize your triggers and then replace them with godly truths. Yeah, I think this is really important because we have relationships with everything, not just people. We have relationships with our career. We have relationships with our things. We have relationship with money. We have a relationship with the way we feel. We all have connections to different things. And something I was feeling as you were reading is like when you take like this is something that we all are aware of is just take money, for example. Imagine on one hand, there's someone who's raised in a very affluent family, but the father is completely absent. And then they actually take that relationship with money and it creates a disdain in their heart for it because it caused their father to be absent because his form of loving them was just providing money. But on the other hand, there's a family who grew up incredibly impoverished and their family was constantly fighting about the lack of money. And so for them, they have a negative view on the lack of money. And so it's like money is just money, but it's your relationship with it. And that's why when scripture says I just looked it up as you're reading in First Timothy six, verse 10, it says for the love of money is the root of all evil. So it's it's your relationship with the thing. And I think it could be really important for us all to start breaking down. What is our relationship with that thing? And another small little anecdote that it's like it's almost like at the very end of this devotional when it talked about how a trigger can begin another trigger, it's like dominoes. It can also happen emotionally, relationally. For example, when Tori and I have had a fight or an argument in the past, I'm someone who's inclined to raise my voice because honestly, that's what I was like raised around. That's like my that's how I saw conflict handled. So monkey see monkey do. And Tori was not like that. And so, for example, whenever I would raise my voice, she would shut down. So my trigger to a situation caused her trigger to do something which caused me to get even more upset. And it was literally this domino effect of our relationship with conflict management. And it's just that's not like me doing that. I can't I can't arm wrestle her into living within my worldview. And she can't arm wrestle me into living within her worldview. What we needed to do was process our emotions and our pasts and our, quote unquote, triggers with maturity and say, oh, that wasn't very healthy. I'm sorry that my response to a tense emotion was to make myself bigger. And then she said, I'm sorry that mine was to shut off. And you can start to process your relationship with the situation to actually make better decisions for your life. Yeah. And I think that, you know, when we're talking about different triggers and we're talking about how they impact us relationally, it's so true. And I feel like the enemy will use this like he'll he will use this trigger because the enemy does not want unity in the body of Christ. He does not want unity inside of the family. He especially does not want unity inside of marriage because marriage is such a force to be reckoned with. You're you're in covenant with the Lord. Right. It's not even just two people. It's us with God. And so the enemy will do anything he possibly can to create a wedge, to create a divide. And so we cannot have this super strong conviction about things that aren't necessarily true. Like my strong conviction was, oh, if you raise your voice, I am not going to respond to you. And I felt very convicted in that. But that wasn't. Right, you know, and I think we can feel very convicted about certain things, like just how you're saying, like money, et cetera, our relationship to certain things, we can feel very passionately about that. But that doesn't mean we're always right. And so I think making sure that as these things come up, as we are triggered by certain things, as we're noticing how they impact us relationally, it's time to start processing that in a healthy way, whether that be in alone time with the Lord, whether it be with wise counsel or an actual counselor. It's something that we're going to really need to work through for the rest of our lives because we're always going to be in relationships with people. And I think that it's really important to not allow these triggers to divide us. Yeah, I have one more thing I want to say before we pray on out and that I first off, let me let me qualify this, say your feelings are valid. I want you to know that like you have valid feelings. I'm not negating your feelings because we have feelings for a reason. But you are not controlled by your feelings. You control your feelings. You are not subject to them. They are subject to you. And so it's so important for us to really, honestly, I would challenge you and I'll challenge us whenever we're feeling triggered by something. Like, why is that? What's going on? Why does my feeling, whenever I perceive something, lead me to something else? For example, if you're scrolling on the explore page, why is it when you see that girl, guys start to feel lust or girls start to feel jealousy? Like, why does that happen? What's happening? Right. And what do you need to do to protect your feelings and your triggers and your thoughts? Not lead you down a downward spiral. And so that's just one quick example of what could be a million different examples. But we need to take this stuff seriously because we don't want to be grown up children. We want to be mature adults reflecting the love and light of Christ in the world. That's so good. I'm gonna praise him out. I do. Dear Heavenly Father, Lord, I pray that you would just highlight these different triggers that we have ingrained inside of our belief system. Lord, if they're triggers that are not true, God, we just surrender those to you and we pray that you would rewire them, God, that they would be subject unto you, God, that we would not be controlled by our feelings, but that we can make our feelings obedient to you, our thoughts obedient to you, God. And to do that, we need the control of the Holy Spirit, God. So I just pray that your Holy Spirit would be so active within us, Lord. We absolutely cannot do this without you. So we pray these things in Jesus name. Amen. Amen, God. Amen, y'all. When I was at perfect time to break out the worship music, break out the journal and continue pressing to Lord. Yes. And y'all don't forget that you are God's masterpiece. And don't forget that we love you. We love you guys. I'll be talking to you tomorrow. Hasta luego.