In His powerful statement about faith, Jesus says that if we had enough faith we could cast a mountain into the sea (Mark 11:23). But the key was believing in our heart without doubting.

But I think we are missing a second critical element in this verse. Jesus also said that we needed to speak to our mountains. It wasn’t enough to believe, we needed to verbally declare our faith.

In other words, we can have all the faith we want, but without speaking nothing changes. There is power in our words.

In Proverbs 18:21, the writer states that the tongue has power that can lead to life and death, my interpretation is faith or unbelief.

Words make a difference.

And I am not talking about what we say to other things or other people, I am talking about what we say to ourselves.

Studies indicate that upwards of 70% of the thoughts we think in a single day are overtly negative or at least have a negative bend to them and considering that we have between 12,000 to 50,000 thoughts daily, our thought life is heavily weighted towards negativity.

So we need to start pushing back against that negative onslaught.

There are two steps.

First the Bible says that we need to take control of our thought life. Paul writes that we are to take every thought captive (2 Corinthians 10:5).

Considering we have thousands of thoughts, we are talking about a pretty big jail cell. But fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, it is estimated that most of our negative thoughts are repetitive.

Not that they are exactly the same, but along the same “beating ourselves up” themes:

“I am not good enough because (insert the hundreds of different reasons why here).”

“I can’t do this because (insert the things you have failed at here).”

“I am a failure because (insert the dozens of reasons why here).”

“I am so stupid because (ruminate about the thing you just did here).”

“I not as pretty or as smart or as talented as (insert names here).”

We need to quit believing a few foundational lies (the first part of each declaration) in order to take a multitude of thoughts captive. By an act of our will, we need to take control of our thought life and refuse to entertain these thoughts.

But it is not enough to take those thoughts captive, you need to replace those negative thoughts with God thoughts.

Proverbs 12:25 says that anxiety acts as heavy anchor on our soul, but a “good word” can cheer it up. When there is fear in our hearts, what we say can change our attitude.

Words make a difference.

We need to start talking faith, because the Apostle Paul also says that faith comes from hearing the word (Romans 10:17). So it is not enough to think faith we need to start talking faith.

We need confess that I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

We need to confess God has a purpose and plan for my life.

We need to confess that we are now God’s child.

There is a verse in Ephesians that I have misread for years. The Apostle Paul writes:

¹⁹ Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord;

Ephesians 5:19 KJV

I have glazed over this verse thinking it was simply talking about worship, and certainly there is an element of that as we sing melodies to the Lord.

But Paul starts off this verse stating “speaking to yourselves.” Now some versions translate the Greek “heautou” as one another, but it can easily be translated himself, herself, themselves, ourselves or yourselves, in fact many versions footnote that word with that idea.

In other words we are speaking these Psalms and hymns not only to God and those around us, we are also importantly speaking them to ourselves.

So speak to your mountain of self-hatred and unbelief and cast it into the sea.