pREACH it

I've been reading Piper's book When I Don't Desire GOD
and this passage spoke right to my heart:

"We should not only be preached to; we should become preachers and preach the word of the cross to ourselves every day. We must not rely only on being preached to, but must become good preachers to our own soul. The gospel is the power of God to lead us joyfully to final salvation, if we preach it to ourselves. The following is from Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899-1981) a minister who greatly emphasized this truth:

Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them but they are talking to you, they bring back the problems of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you? Your self is talking to you. Now this man's treatment [in Psalms 42] was this: instead of allowing this self to talk to him, he starts talking to himself. "Why art thou cast down, O my soul?" he asks. His soul had been depressing him, crushing him. So he stands up and says, "Self, listen for a moment, I will speak to you."

The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourslef. You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself.... You must turn on yourself, upbraid yourself, condemn yourself, exhort yourself, and say to yourself; "Hope thou in God" --instead of muttering in this depressed, unhappy way, and then you must go on to remind yourself of God, Who God is, and ...what God has done, and what God has pledged Himself to do. Then having done that, end on this great note: defy yourself, and defy other people, and defy the devil and the whole world, and say with this man: "I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance, who is also the health of my countenance and my God."

(Piper) Of course, the "self" is not the only one who talks to us in our head. So does the devil, and so do other people as we replay their coments in our memories. Therefore, when Lloyd-Jones tells us to preach to ourselves, he knows we must be addressing all these joy-killing messages. That's why he talks about defying self, Satan, and other people. When we preach the gospel to ourselves, we are addressing every word of every enemy of every kind."


(me) That makes me think of the song "Voice of Truth" by Casting Crowns. Check out their lyrics sometime, it relates. C'est vrai que dans la vie, il y a toujours beaucoup de voix qui parlent et disent des choses different.. mais, laquelle on va écouter? In TheTwo Towers a character speaks words of poison, deceiving the king, mentally enslaving him by lies. In Revolutionary Roads, the last scene was my favorite. The old man turns down the volume of his hearing aids, muting the old woman blabbering on. That's what we must do to false voices-Tune them out! We don't want that! If there's "cold-shoulder", why can't we do "deaf-ear"? Our ears have holes, so they gotta be filled with SOMething. Do we want gunk or truth?
So when we wake up in the morning and look at ourselves in the mirror, we gotta Preach it Preacher!