TRANSCRIPT

“Hey everybody, I’m Anne-Marie Michaelis, a Christian author and coach. Welcome to the Hidden Battles Podcast. My life was radically transformed during a supernatural encounter with Jesus.

God allowed my eyes to be spiritually opened long enough to see the truth of these hidden battles and to scare the rebellion against him right out of me. This workbook series is called The Truth to Overcoming Hidden Battles, taken from my Christian coaching workbook. I’ll be taking you through the workbook in podcast format.

This workbook series is designed to help you overcome negative thinking, limiting beliefs, irrational emotions, unhealthy behavior patterns, toxic relationship addictions and break spiritual strongholds. This book is a workbook and is available on amazon.com. You’re welcome to use the actual workbook or have a notebook and pen ready for taking notes.

You can always pause the video. Or if you like to have everything included, then pause and order the book first. If you’re jumping in and have missed any episodes, I suggest starting with the first one of this series so it makes more sense.

“Hidden Battles, revealing what the enemy does not want you to know. Please take a moment to follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and subscribe to my channel on YouTube at GodDesign LLC. Podcasts are available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcast.

For a free download of my memoir, visit my website at GodDesign.me. GodDesign does not guarantee and is not responsible for your results from the information in this podcast. You need to know that your ultimate outcomes will result from your situation and the innumerable circumstances beyond our knowledge and control.

This podcast is meant as a source of valuable information for the listener. However, it is not meant as a substitute for direct assistance by a licensed medical professional. If such a level of assistance is required, the service of a licensed professional should be sought.

For additional details, visit GodDesign.me. Hello, everyone. This is the first episode of the workbook, The Truth to Overcoming Hidden Battles.

“Episode 20 from the Hidden Battles Podcast, Module 1, Chapter 1, called What Science Says About Our Design. Before we begin, let’s start with prayer. Heavenly Father, we give thanks and gratitude for this time we have to take this walk with you today.

You are our Father and Creator of all that is seen and unseen. Jesus, you are our Savior who died for our sins to give us eternal salvation. And Holy Spirit, you are our Helper and Teacher.

Scripture says, Ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and it will be opened to you.

For everyone who asks, receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks, it will be opened. As we go into this session and chapter, we ask that you open our eyes to see your truths through your word clearly. Open our ears so that we may hear your voice guide us through areas of our lives that may need healing, growth, strengthening, clarity, purpose, and victory.

Prepare our hearts to fully receive and get to know Jesus as our Lord and Savior who brings eternal salvation as we walk in union with you. In Jesus’ name, we pray, amen. Throughout your journey, you’ll have the ability to take notes on every page if you have the workbook.

Reflection questions will be both throughout the chapter if you would like to answer on the page margins or at the end, there will be more room provided to answer the reflections. I also have an option to, if you don’t have the book, to opt in to receive a PDF for print of all the questions for each chapter so that you have them ahead of time as we go through and it’ll help save some time. Your journey map high level.

So what does your journey map look like high level? It’s going to look something like this. This is basically how the modules are set up.

Module one is about awareness of mind, heart and spirit, bringing awareness of thoughts and where they are coming from. The mind and heart are the battlefield locations. Module two, open doors that lead to spiritual attacks.

So we’re going to examine the open doors that lead to demonic attacks and spiritual warfare. Module three, godly versus ungodly traits. So we’re going to examine the traits and characteristics that will lead us to a good and fruitful life.

And then we’re also going to be doing an exercise that I call Flip the Script for renewing the mind. And then module four, spiritual warfare. Examining how to properly fight your hidden battles of spiritual warfare and what to do if you’re in one now.

And then module five is called your battle plan. It’s basically creating your battle plan of action, a combination of renewing the mind and breaking strongholds of demonization. So, you know, even no matter what you do, it’s really good to have a plan of action or you’re not going to do it, right?

So I figure let’s have a battle plan because or otherwise we’re going to keep going in this loop, right? And we’re just going to keep talking about it and not doing something about it. So we’re going to create a battle plan where this time you’re actually going to do something about it.

And you are going to, according to God’s word, come on out the other side. And then module six is the path to freedom, which is coming out the other side, right? Freedom through Christ.

So we’re going to implement the battle plan, the full process, activated and in motion, a believer in motion and in action, right? And so that’s kind of like the, the journey map. So here are the first set of questions for you to consider and jot down your responses to.

If you have the workbook, this is on page nine, or if you have the worksheets from the PDF, you download it on the Goddesign.me site, grab that now. Otherwise pause and take notes as I read through these questions for you to reflect and respond to before we jump in to chapter one. So the first question, why are you going through this workbook series?

Or if you’re in the book, why are you reading this book? Describe why you are reading this book or going through this workbook series and what you hope to learn or achieve. Second question, what top three areas are you currently battling?

List the top three areas of your life that you are struggling and how long is it gone on for? Now, the next two questions are about your actual vs. your ideal life.

So the first question is, what does your life currently look like? And what does your life look like currently in the midst of these battles? So what is your current situation look like right now?

How does it look within these battles as they’re going on? Then the second question for the set is, what would you like your life to look like? What would your life look like if you overcame your battle?

So what’s the idea life look like for you? Okay, now the next two questions are about the value of victory to you. So first question is this, which is most important to you to overcome and why?

So which of the three areas that you’re battling is most important to you to overcome and why? And the next question is which will impact your life the most and why? Which it could be different, right?

So which of these three areas will most impact your life if you overcome and why? And then the last two questions and then we’ll move into the chapter one. The last two questions are about your current beliefs or understanding.

So the first question is what do you believe about spiritual warfare? So describe your current belief and understanding about spiritual warfare, God’s ability to change your life and transform you, make you new and Satan’s agenda, right? The second and last question, what do you believe about your mind and heart?

So describe your current belief about your mind and heart from a biblical perspective as well as a scientific perspective. Okay, here we go. Module one, is this just me or is something else going on?

So is this just me? For most of my life, I was under the belief that this was all just me. All my troubles were created and generated by me and only me.

I went to numerous secular therapists to no avail. I read and owned every self-help book, you know, best-selling self-help book on the market, including audio versions so I could immerse myself 24 seven in the teachings and nothing helped and not permanently. Once I realized that my troubles were me, my thoughts, mindsets, beliefs, and behaviors and spiritual warfare, my entire perspective of thoughts, beliefs, mindsets, spirit, God, Jesus, and reality changed.

Basically, my world changed. For me, it wasn’t just me. I was battling learned mindsets from what was in me for 40 years and the demonic trying to keep me in the dark, believing all the lies I spent my entire life believing.

I want to read you a scripture. The scripture spoke to me the most for the beginning. This is the beginning of this module.

And this scripture may speak to you, too. It’s Romans 7, verse 21 through 23. I have discovered this principle of life, that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong.

I love God’s law with all my heart, but there’s another power within me that is at war with my mind. This power makes me a slave to sin that is still within me. So I’m not sure if this scripture speaks to you, and you also can relate to this struggle.

Let me know. I’d be curious to find out, because it really speaks to me, and it still does, still speaks to me. It’s so true.

Okay, chapter one, what science says about our design. How many of you personally have experienced, or perhaps you know of someone that has experience going in and out of traditional secular therapy for years? We are mind, body, and spirit.

What if our struggles are not biological or psychologically driven? What if they’re spiritually driven? We cannot psychoanalyze demonic oppression when we cannot medicate ourselves out of spiritual warfare.

I’ve tried, I’ve tried both, right? It won’t work. So, my first reflection question is this.

How are you caring for your spirit? So, I’m not denouncing secular therapy, but I’m rather promoting balance to realize that our spiritual side should also be considered and nurtured, along with ensuring that what we nurture it with is nurtured according to God’s design and not the design of the world. This book focuses on body, mind, and spirit in alignment with God’s design, not the world’s design.

It is Bible-centered and touches lightly on science to lead you through discovery and action plan to overcome your hidden battles.

Okay, we’re going to call out this reflection question. How are you caring for your spirit? Take some time and think about that.

Not how are you caring for your mind? Not how are you caring for your body? You know, not how are you caring for your emotions, but your spirit person, right?

How are you caring for your spirit? Are you connected to Jesus and the Holy Spirit? Do you talk to, you know, God the Father, Jesus, Holy Spirit?

Are you really like just immersed in a relationship with God in all three persons? Because they’re all so very special and very unique once you have a relationship with them. So how are you caring for your spirit?

Take some time to think about that one. And even if you got to pause this and answer that truthfully. Are we ready to look inside?

Look inside ourselves, right? My personal life was a disaster and I was stuck doing my best to hide this ugly reality from my professional life at all cost. That was me before I was saved.

I was in a long-term pattern of destruction that gradually got worse over the course of 40 years. I did not know I was opening myself up to more spiritual attacks with each thing I did. The New Age stuff seemed optimistic.

How could it bring me more negative? I did not understand God’s word. I did not know about God’s promises.

I did not care to follow God’s foundational laws, which were made for me, to help me live according to his design. And I did not realize that just as we parents create boundaries and rules out of love to protect and teach our children, God’s done the same for his children, you and I. So this book will be Bible-centered, but touch on science lightly, like I said before.

And why touch on science? Well, we live in a body of flesh, right? And need to understand it to some degree so that it doesn’t control us.

But we are spiritual beings and must also ensure we feed our spirit the right food, not spiritual fast food, spiritual food with preservatives, or spiritual GMO food, genuine organic and natural spiritual food based on the Word of God, and what he says we need to experience abundance according to God’s design. So, reflection question two, describe a time when you struggle to control yourself, possibly when you were incredibly angry, maybe cravings for certain foods, maybe something else. So think about that for a second.

Describe a time when you struggled to control yourself. Okay, so let’s look at science. Neuroscience teaches that our thoughts are the foundation of beliefs and mindsets.

Would you be surprised to know we have on average 50,000 thoughts per day?

All right, I just want to make sure you’re going to answer this question truthfully and honestly. Again, describe a time when you struggle to control yourself. I’ve had many of them, you know, but another thing to think about what was controlling you, right?

If you are struggling to control yourself, what was controlling you? Anger, food cravings, lust, greed, pride, arrogance, something else. You know, maybe it will pop up to you.

Ask Holy Spirit to speak to you. What was controlling you? So I have a lot of these, lots of times when I struggle to control myself.

So pause this and answer that question to the best you can. All right, what does science say about the mind? Did you realize that what happens in our minds with our thoughts and thought patterns create various chemical responses and feelings, basically our emotions?

This thought cycle, which includes a chemical release and emotional feeling impacts our complete well-being, mind, body and spirit. It can create addictive behavior patterns as well. And that was very alarming to me when I first learned about that.

So, beliefs are built by consistent thinking patterns and may or may not be based on the truth. So yikes, that’s pretty bad. Some of us have beliefs that are not even based on the truth for most of our lives, and that will surely set us up for trouble.

Traits represent our morality and alignment or misalignment with God. We’ll talk about traits in Module 3, and that’ll be called godly versus ungodly traits. Taking thoughts and patterns of thoughts, which are beliefs, a little further, mindsets are a way of thinking.”

Your mindset is a combination of your thoughts, beliefs, and traits, and it ultimately determines how you present yourself in a situation, or put another way, your attitude. But it all starts with a thought. God’s Word reminds us in 2 Corinthians 10 verse 5, We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

Are we doing that? We need to be doing that, right? Maybe not every thought, like, what toothpaste am I going to use?

But basically, you’ll know when you need to take a thought captive, and we need to be mindful to make sure we’re doing that, right? We’ll get into that more. But you look at the triangle that I have here, and you’ll see that the thoughts are at the bottom of the foundation, and everything starts to come up from that, right?

If you’re listening to the audio version, you can see the video of this on YouTube and Spotify, if you’re on Apple Podcasts. So just so you know that there’s a video actually of this, that people can see with, there’ll be more and more diagrams, too, as they come up. So if you’re watching it on Apple Podcasts, you might want to look at it on YouTube and Spotify instead.

So anyways, take a look at that, and you can read through some of that, screenshot it or whatever you need to do. But just how you see that, thoughts are the foundation, everything starts with the thought. So we need to be taking them captive to Christ, God’s word.

All right, another reflection question. Describe any patterns that may not be healthy for you. For example, addictive patterns, negative thinking patterns, compulsive worry, compulsive stress, something else that you can think of, something, you know, if you don’t know, kind of just pray about it, ask Holy Spirit to speak to you, lay it upon you, you know, what might be going on.

So what does science say about the heart? Thoughts are not only coming from the brain, did you know they are also coming from the heart? Did you know the heart is much more than an organ that pumps blood?

Scientific studies by the HeartMath Institute, which you can find at www.heartmath.org, shows that the heart is an information processing center. It sends powerful healing commands to the brain and body. Scientific studies say it is a source of wisdom, higher intelligence and a connection between the physical and spiritual heart.

It provides an access point for what science calls intuitive guidance or higher power. The heart is considered the global processing center, global coordinator of our inner self. Studies show that the heart communicates inside the body through nerve impulses, pressure waves, hormones and neurotransmitters.

Does you know it communicates outside the body through electromagnetic fields and can impact others? Scientific studies say the core heart feelings are love, appreciation and care. And when we focus on these feelings, there is an energetic makeup shift.

This energetic makeup can significantly impact our body, mind and spirit, either positively or negatively. And I find this interesting because they have all these things that they have come up with and they all these things that they have figured out. But the key thing that I find interesting is that they can’t point back to God.

They won’t. Science calls it a higher power. Well, who is that?

What is that? Right? Intuitive guidance, a spiritual heart.

Well, when you want answers and science leaves you hanging, you got to go to the Bible because God doesn’t. So this is also another really good reason. Why are we, you know, touching on science?

It’s because science never disproves the Bible. As science progresses and learns more and more bit by bit, it only further proves the Bible and God’s word. And it’s slowly doing that here.

But I’m not willing to wait forever and ever and ever because we’re never going to catch up to what the Bible already tells us. I mean, we knew this a long time ago, right? We knew that there’s a spiritual heart.

They can’t point back to the higher power of God. That is God, you know? They call it a higher power.

I mean, it’s good. Science is good, you know? But, you know, it’s only further proving God’s word.

So that’s really cool. So reflection question. Based on what we just learned about with scientific studies, seeing the core heart feelings, our love, appreciation and care.

And when we focus on these feelings, there’s an immediate shift in our heart rhythms, type of hormones released and our energetic makeup. Let’s think about this. What words would describe your heart feelings on a typical day?

Are they love, appreciation, care? And what about on a stressful day? Hopefully, it’s not the same thing.

Hopefully, your typical day is not a stressful day. So write that down. What are your core heart feelings?

So describe your heart feelings on a typical day versus a stressful day. And this is all going to make sense because we’re going to build on this as we go through each chapter, each episode, when we start to unpack what you’re taking inventory of with yourself right now.

What does science say about free will? Well, what does science or neuroscience say about free will? Well, let’s start with the definition of free will.

As Merriam-Webster dictionary describes, free will, freedom of humans to make choices not determined by prior causes or divine intervention. Okay, without getting into too many details, there is a concept by neuroscientists that although we appear to have free will, our brains have already determined the answers and responses that we will say or do. Everything you have been brainwashed from your environment, society, genetics, and experiences is stored in your memory to subconsciously predetermine the outcomes of decisions and choices you are presented.

And I call this being on autopilot. And so this takes us back to why we need to take every thought captive, right? Because otherwise, you’re going to be on autopilot and you’re going to basically keep repeating the same patterns that you have forever and ever and amen, right?

So we need to be really mindful and be very aware. We need to increase our awareness of our thoughts, right? And when we need to make a decision, not go on autopilot and make a decision based on your past.

And so this is really important to try to comprehend this. And so I’m going to ask you a question in a minute here. So what does your autopilot look like?

Have you ever been driving zoned out for a bit? And when you realized you were zoned out, you had driven yourself basically on autopilot quite a ways down the road with no input from your fully conscious self? Right, that is scary stuff.

But most of us have experienced autopilot on the road. And so I want to read the scripture to you before we get into the reflection question. This is from Matthew 6 verse 33.

But first and most importantly, seek, aim at, strive after his kingdom and his righteousness, his way of doing and being right, the attitude and character of God, and all these things will be given to you also. So we can’t be on autopilot. We have to stay focused on God, right?

And God’s designed for us, God’s purpose, God’s will, you know, God’s word. We need to stay focused on that, right? And so if you stay focused on that, things will turn out much better.

So let me get to the reflection question now. All right, your reflection question. In what ways have you caught yourself making decisions or functioning on autopilot?

And I already said about the driving down the road one, so try to come up with some other ones where you are possibly just making a decision, not even thinking about it, and you’re wondering, oh my goodness, I didn’t want to do that. Oh my goodness, why did I say yes to this or they know to that or do this or not do that or whatever it is? And that it was just like something that just kept just right away, decision, decision, decision, and you’re making these decisions and you’re not even just pausing, stopping, you know, being aware of where you’re kind of heading towards.

And decide, is that really what’s best, right? Is that really the best decision? So we don’t want to be functioning on autopilot.

That means we’ll repeat our past over and over and over again, because that’s what our memory banks are, have stored up. So, so again, in what ways have you caught yourself making decisions or functioning on autopilot? Okay, guys, that’s a wrap here.

So we’re going to go through some takeaways. So I’d like you to take some paper and pencil and again answer these questions, your takeaways for this chapter called What Science Says About Our Design. Number one, what was the takeaway from this chapter that spoke to you the most?

Okay, number two, why do you think this takeaway spoke to you more than any other? And then number three, what other takeaways spoke to you in this chapter? Hey friends, that’s a wrap of today’s Hidden Battles Podcast.

A transcript for this week’s podcast and my memoir are available for a free download on my website at GodDesign.me or check out some of my other books that you may find helpful. If you liked this episode, please share it with others. Hidden Battles, revealing what the enemy does not want you to know.

Never stop praying, never give up and I’ll see you next week.”