By Jason Cruse
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about agreements.
The more I take inventory of my life, even in looking back to my past, I find places – mile markers of sorts – when I made an agreement. Not an agreement with a person, but I shook hands with the devil no less.That’s who is often behind those mental handshakes. Just so you know. How does it happen? It’s very, very subtle.
I see agreements everywhere I look, you just have to learn how to look for them. I seem agreements in a friend whose elementary school teacher in Texas told him, literally told him, he was “stupid.” He rejected 99% of her venom, but that 1%, well he accepted it just a little bit.
And every time he makes a mistake as a grown man, he hears her voice, and then has to deal with his agreement in believing that “maybe she’s right a little bit.”
Yes, I could go on and on about agreements.
They are almost always intangible. They are these little and most often quiet moments in time where a man exchanges truths from the Father for some variation of a lie that sounds close to being right. “I’ve got to work 70 hours a week to provide for my family” when in reality, way down deep in his soul, he’s afraid of being poor like his daddy was. Instead of trusting God for his provision, he looks to himself as partners with God in the providing process. And you can see the outcome from there can’t you?
Some boy told her she wasn’t pretty, and broke up with her. She didn’t want to believe it, but she accepted it a little. Now she’s 40 and her self-worth has never fully recovered from those 60 seconds in the front seat of his car where he dropped her off at home after that date. Truth be told, she’s an attractive woman. She had no idea that back there in the 10th grade she actually was pretty then, too, and that boy was breaking up with her because she refused to have sex with him. So he called her ugly to make himself feel better. Just words to him. An earthquake to the soul for her.
Don’t feel too bad. It happens to theological rock stars, too.
Just recently in church my pastor drew up a image from Elijah’s famous mountain story. Even there I saw an agreement the prophet made. Almost immediately after one of the greatest displays of having God on your side by calling down fire from Heaven, Elijah felt like God had abandoned him. Even to the point of pleading his case with God, telling Him, “I’m the only guy that really cares about You, You know?!” When in fact God told him, “Yet I will leave 7,000 in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal.” (1 Kings 19) Elijah was surrounded by people unwilling to sell out, but you wouldn’t know by how he was living. You know why Elijah was mentally misguided? He made an agreement. He assumed, just because he had not physically met them, that there were no other people alive that loved his God.” And in that moment, he exchanged an assumption, and made it into a reality. He actually believed a lie. In making an agreement with a lie, that lie became a physical reality, and what he believed in his mind affected how he was living in real time. God saw the view from 10,000 feet. Elijah just saw what was in front of him, and he assumed he knew the rest of the story when in fact he hadn’t a clue.
Ask yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing. You may just find that what’s fueling your trajectory is something laced with toxicity that started in an agreement you made back there somewhere.
You can stop it.
God takes heart when you to break those brand of covenants, for those were never agreements that originated with Him.