You get to choose what grows in your life. What you’re feeding is getting stronger. If you’re feeding doubt, thinking about what you can’t do, how the obstacles are too big, how you’re at a disadvantage, that doubt is growing. If you’re feeding fear, thinking about if you get laid off, if you get that illness, or if your child gets off course, that fear is getting stronger. Sometimes we’re feeding insecurity, thinking we’re not attractive, not that talented, don’t have a good personality. Then we wonder why we don’t have much confidence and don't feel valuable. We’re feeding the wrong things.
You’ve heard the saying, “You are what you eat.” It’s the same thing in your mind. If you feed fear, you’re going to live fearful. If you feed discouragement, you’re going to live discouraged. If you feed past hurts and regrets, you will live bitter. If you keep dwelling on what didn’t work out, the mistakes you made, even though God has beauty for the ashes and there are great things in your future, you won’t see it. Pay attention to what you’re feeding. We all have doubt, fear, insecurity, and guilt, but we also have faith, hope, confidence, value, and victory. Don’t feed what you don’t want to grow. Starve your doubts and feed your faith. Starve the discouragement and feed your hope. Starve the inferiority and feed your confidence. You’ll be amazed at what happens if you quit giving life to the negative and start feeding the positive.
The Scripture says, “Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion” (1 Peter 5:8). He roars threats, trying to bring fear and cause you to shrink back, to live doubting, insecure, and unworthy. But if you quit feeding the biggest, strongest lion for a week, his growl is not going to be near what it was. In two weeks, the king of the jungle is not going to have the strength to attack. In a month, he’s going to be too weak to get up. If you quit feeding him, he loses all his power.
In the same way, fear, worry, and doubt can seem too powerful to defeat. But if you quit feeding it, if you quit letting it play in your mind, little by little it will get weaker and weaker. You’ll get to the point where it can’t control you. Every time doubt or fear comes, that’s the roaring lion trying to deceive, manipulate, and limit. You get to make the choice of whether you will feed it. Do yourself a favor and start starving those things. They lose all their power when you quit feeding them. Instead of feeding your fears, feed your hope, your faith, your confidence, your courage. Feed the promises of God and what He says about you.