Messages from Your Past

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Hey everyone, this is Dr. Ray. Welcome to Self Talk with me, Dr. Ray Self himself. Appreciate you listening to this show today. We are sponsored by and enabled by the International College of Ministry at icmcollege.org. Enrolling right now. You got a call on your life. You need your degree. You need your credibility. You want to answer your call. That's what we're here for. We're affordable. We have scholarships. If you can't afford it, icmcollege.org. God bless you. 

I want to talk about messages. Messages from your past. This is an important show, an important topic. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, I thank you for the show today. I thank you, Father, for everyone listening to the show. I pray that my words will bring healing to them through your power, through the anointing of the Holy Spirit. Come, Holy Spirit. We invite your presence in this show, in this time together in Jesus name. Amen. Amen.

Well, when we go through events in our past, the events carry messages, and these messages can turn into a belief and the belief can shape our personality and our behavior, even our, our destiny and our future. Let's say, for instance, you were…at a party and…with your friends, and you're young, and you went to a birthday party, and your friends all developed into a little click, and they left you out, and it hurts your feelings. Maybe you're this little 10-year-old. Your feelings are hurt because you weren't chosen to play the game. And so there's an action took place there, but the action carried a message. What was the message? Well, you're not worthy. You're not, you're not liked. 

Let's say, for instance, you were playing a sport. I remember that uh, I played, like a lot of kids, I played pee-wee baseball and a little bit of football and basketball. And my parents almost never ever came to my games. Um, they, I'd be dropped off at the beginning of the game and picked up when the game was over. Of course, my father traveled a lot. He worked a lot, but my mother would drop me off at the beginning of the game and pick me up many times 30 minutes after the game was over. So, I didn't think about that too much, but that's just kind of the way it was. Well, what was the message? The message was I must not be that important, or my baseball really doesn't matter that much, or maybe I don't matter that much. There was an action. 

Maybe you were abused as a kid. You were hit by someone that you shouldn't have been hit by. Maybe you were physically abused or emotionally abused. There can be messages with that. These messages can be, “Well, God doesn't really love me. I'm not lovable.” Or a terrible message, “Maybe I deserved it.”

Now, events, negative and positive, carry a message into our psyche. Now, maybe you had a wonderful event. You got voted class president. Well, there's a message there. You are something else. You are really special. You're class president. Everything that happens to us creates an internal message. Now these messages can be true, or they can be lies. But these messages get into our psyche and turn into belief systems. And you know, and I know, as the Bible says, “As a man thinks in his heart so is he.” And so these belief systems affect our life. What we believe about ourselves largely has to do with our success or failure in life.

It's very difficult to be successful when you do not believe you're worthy of success. It's very difficult to be happy when you don't feel you're worthy of happiness. And so, a lot of the negativity in your life is coming from messages from your past. There is a, an expression that I read some years ago that really kind of shook me up, and it, it's a truth. It's not maybe an expression. It's just something that a teacher told me, and she said, actually, it was a him. He said that emotions do not age. I thought, well, that's kind of strange. You know, I've aged. You know, we all age, but emotions don't age. And so, I thought, well, how could that possibly be? And then, now I know that's true. 

I can look back at my past and remember something from my past. And even though it happened 30 years ago, it will bring up an emotion that is still there. Even though the memory has faded, the event is long past, the emotion associated with that event is still there. Now, the event creates a message which ties into your emotions. And those messages and emotions, they're still there that they carry into your present, into your future. And so, your past is over you. You're over your past. You know, it's water under the bridge. I get it. Okay? Don't, don't, you know, when you're driving your car, don't stop looking. Don't keep looking at the rearview mirror. That's why the windshield's so much bigger, right? You don't want to focus on your past. But I want to tell you something. There are messages from your past that are in your present day. And there are emotions from your past created by these messages that are still in your life today. And so, there's questions to ask yourself which can bring a lot of healing. 

So look at your past, good things that happened, and bad things that happened. What did you believe about yourself? What was the message to yourself because of this event? Now, like in my life, some of the messages I received was not because of something that happened to me. It was something that did not happen to me. For instance, my parents not showing up for my baseball game or not receiving the words that I needed. “Son, I'm proud of you.” Or not receiving encouragement. “You can do it! Go for it! You're amazing! You can do this!” And I didn't get that. Uh, I got love, and I got a lot of provision and I got correction, and I was taken care of, but I had very little encouragement. You know, go for it kind of stuff. So, what I did not receive in my life created a message that I'm not– I don't measure up. As a matter of fact, the message that I had in my life so much as a young person and even into my teenage years and, and I finally, I think I got through it by the end of college, was I was not as good or as important as other people.

And the way God took care of that is the Lord spoke to me one time, I was actually out on a walk. I remember exactly where I was. I was walking on, on a path around a lake, and the Lord spoke to me, and He said, "Ray, you are Ray Self. You're the one and only Ray Self in the universe.

There's no one else like you. There's no one better than you. There's no one worse than you because you are unique. You're the only you." And for some reason, that hit me where, before, the message was I didn't compare favorably to other people. I didn't measure up to other people. Why? Because I never got the affirmation I needed. My parents didn't show up for my ball games and other, other things. Now I love my parents. They were doing the best they knew how to do. But these messages created the feeling that I was not as important as other people. And so we used to, back in the old days, used to call it inferiority complex. I had that because there was a message. 

So here I am today in the year 2025. And my question to me and to you is, are there messages from your past that you still believe that are lies? You see, that was a lie that I don't measure up. It was a lie that I'm not worthy of someone watching me play baseball. It was a lie that I'm not as good as other kids. I'm not as important as other people. It was a lie that– another lie I believed, a message I had was I don't matter. There's a message, I don't matter. And that message carried, a matter of fact, I carried that message into probably my 30s. 

But you see, when you look at the events of your life that created these messages, and then you look at these messages, that they created an internal belief system that you tend to act out on and live out on, you need to challenge this. So what happened to you? What feeling and message did these events bring? And are you still thinking that, or do you still have that message internalized in your life? Or have you done the smart thing and the wise thing, began to challenge these messages from your past and go, “Wait a minute, that's the message that was given me. This is the message I received of what happened to me. But that message is a lie because it's contrary to God's word. It is different to what God says about me. That message is a lie. I am of the truth. Jesus is the truth. I am of Jesus. I rebuke that lie about me. I will never receive that lie. Lord, forgive me for believing that message from my past. I will not believe that anymore.” 

So things happen, and we develop messages from it. I mean, so many times I've counseled, sadly, very sadly, a woman who may have been sexually abused, and sometimes the messages that come out of sexual abuse are horrible. Um, God doesn't love me. It's partially– it's my fault. I deserved it. I'm not, I'm dirty. I'm, I'm shameful. All these things are lies. And they're dirty messages, horrible messages that came out of horrible events. But again, these messages can carry over year after year after year. And so what you need to do, I'm encouraging you to do, it's up to you, is to examine yourself and think about what do you believe about yourself. Are your beliefs about yourself really in alignment with God, who says you're fearfully and wonderfully made? Is that your belief about yourself that you're a child of God, joint heir with Jesus Christ? That you have risen together with and sitting– and you're seated in heavenly places with Christ Jesus. You're amazing. You're incredible.

But, are you carrying messages which created belief systems from your past that you still believe underneath it all that you, maybe you're not as good, you're not as smart, you're not as capable. You know, there's only one you. There's no comparison to you. You are amazing. You're created by God. There's nobody better than you. There's nobody worse than you. There's only one you. But to be all that you can be, it's critical that you challenge internal, internal messages from your past. And if this message that was given to you by a harmful event is not true, it's time to renounce it and replace it with the truth. And the truth is Jesus Christ and God's word. It's time to replace the lies with the truth. 

You see, these faulty, dishonest, deceiving messages that we have believed about ourselves are hurting us. Now, Satan is the father of lies. He loves these messages, and he'll do anything he can to reinforce this message in your life. Whatever the message was, you're unworthy, you're unacceptable, you're not lovable, you're not smart, you're not capable, blah blah blah blah blah, he loves to uh, remind you of those messages. But we can submit to God, resist the devil, he'll flee from us. It's time to examine messages from your past and renounce them…if they're not of God and they're not true. 

I want to, I want to give credit to a dear friend of mine, Dr. Naomi Madrid, one of our graduates from ICM, who triggered this. We, we had lunch, my wife and I had lunch with her just the other day, and we were talking about this very topic, and she has great revelation on this. Dr. Naomi Madrid of Lakeland, Florida. I want to give her full credit for this. 

So, I thank you for listening to this show. I thank you, Father, for everyone listening to me. And Lord, for anyone listening who's believing messages from their past, maybe subconsciously ask you to reveal it to them by the Holy Spirit and set them free. Who the son sets free is free indeed. And Lord, we receive and declare your freedom from harmful messages from our past. We will not receive the lies anymore in Jesus name. Amen. Amen. 

Thank you for listening so much to Self Talk with Dr. Ray Self. Remember, events, good and bad, create messages, and messages can create a belief system, and a belief system can govern your life. Again, this show is brought to you by International College of Ministry. Uh, if you can, if you'd like to donate to help sponsor this show, we really could use some partners. If you go to icmcollege.org/donate, that would help us. What would really help us is just make a recurring donation. And uh, you can, you know, hit the recurring button, $25 a month, $10 a month, $50 a month, whatever is on your heart that would help us a lot. Thank you for listening to Self Talk with me, Dr. Ray Self, and God bless you. Amen and amen.

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