Jesus frees entrepreneur from hopelessness
S is a talented, enterprising and hard-working entrepreneur. Yet she was plagued by thoughts of failure and unworthiness. Here is her story of being set free from the lies that Satan has formed in her mind because of ungodly inner vows she had made about her own life. Praise God!
(See Chinese versions: 简体中文 > 耶稣释放一位绝望的企业家得自由 | 繁體中文 > 耶穌釋放一位絶望的企業家得自由)
I felt a lot of pressure from running a new business on my own.
I was unhappy and in a lot of doubt, even though I was convinced that God had led me to the business. In June that year, I went on a retreat to seek God’s comfort and guidance, but I failed to regain my joy in Christ. So I decided to take a break from the business and think about what to do next.
Instead, I sensed even greater heaviness and fear in my heart and my soul. Many negative thoughts clouded my mind, and I felt so hopeless towards life. I was paralyzed by the negative emotions that kept hovering in my mind.
When these thoughts pushed me to consider death to be better than life, I knew that they were not from God.
Therefore, I reached out for help, as I desired a breakthrough in my relationship with God and to regain my joy in Christ. This was not the first time I sought help from prayer counselling. I went to several prayer counselling sessions to deal with different issues of my life, including the unforgiveness towards my earthly father.
I knew that this time, there were still deeper issues that God wanted me to deal with.
Before the prayer session, I had a fight with my mum. This fight revealed to me that I had been holding a lot of grudges against my mum and myself. I love my mom but at the same time, I had been hurting her by my rude and mean attitude. Deep down in my heart, I was convinced that I had disappointed my mom by not achieving much.
Satan had been guilt-tripping me through this and accusing me that I don’t measure up as a follower of Christ. Gradually, my mind has become the playground of Satan’s lies, accusation and condemnation, which distorted the truth of God and His view of me.
During the prayer session, the prayer counselor pointed out my unforgiveness towards myself.
Even though God has forgiven my sins, I chose to continue to beat myself up. I treated God as a headmaster, instead of a loving and forgiving Father. I felt I needed to perform well in order to gain His love and acceptance. Consequently, my life was “me-focused” instead of being God-centred.
Like Martha, my mind has been constantly occupied with what I want to do or achieve. But Jesus said the best is not about our “doing”, but our “being” with Him, like Mary (Luke 10:38-42). I realised that I could do nothing to make Him love me a bit more or a bit less.
So I prayed to forgive myself and repent to God for judging myself. I also repented to God for holding on to a wrong image of Him.
We also had to deal with a lot of inner vows I had made over the years as a result of many hurts in the past.
I had told myself that I would be better off living alone by myself in an isolated place and I should not cry anymore. Consequently, my heart was hardened to people around God and me. I didn’t allow myself to feel love or love anyone – and built a huge wall around my heart.
During the prayer, the counsellor asked me to identify as many inner vows as possible. There were quite a few! Then we prayed and cancelled out all these vows in the name of Jesus.
One of the prayer counsellors then said that she felt God wanted to rename me “Joy”.
It was a confirmation that God called me into a life of joy, not of toil and misery.
She did not know that when I was young, my grand-aunt consulted a fengshui master and changed the last word (儀) of my Chinese name to (森), in the hope of bringing a brother to the family. As a result, my Chinese name sounds really boyish. One year before the prayer counselling session, I was at a Christian conference where the speaker’s wife announced that she sensed that God was giving a new name to someone in the congregation. I was often sceptical about these kinds of messages, but somehow sensed that God was telling me I should be called (靈樂), which means “Joy in the Spirit”. I wasn’t quite sure about the revelation until a sister-in-Christ at the same conference told me that she sensed God is giving a new name to me.
With my prayer counsellors, I then prayed to renounce the association of my name to witchcraft through the fengshui master, cut off spiritual ties with him, and rededicated my name to mean “Joy”. I truly felt so much more joyful.
After the prayer, I sensed that heaviness of my heart has been lifted up and my fear was gone.
Though I had a lot of head knowledge of God’s Word, I failed to put them into practice. The prayer counsellor suggested that I train my spiritual muscles by actively using the Word to fight against the lies in my head.
Now, I am more conscious of my thought life. I have begun to use Bible verses as a sword to fight against the negative thinking or lies. I praise God that Jesus has set me free with the truth.
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