Speak With Power: How to Align Your Mouth & Unlock Breakthrough
Excerpted from Radical Healing.
When your mouth agrees with your heart, it is powerful.
In fact, Romans 10:9-10 confirms that it is the very source of our salvation. It says, “If you openly declare that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is by believing in your heart that you are made right with God, and it is by openly declaring your faith that you are saved.” Believing in our hearts and declaring with our mouths is how everything in the Kingdom comes to pass.
But somewhere along the line, people got it twisted and forgot the belief portion of the equation. Many Christians think that anything they say has power. They think it’s like the Miranda Rights: “Everything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law!”
In fact, there is a danger when people go around declaring things they don’t believe. It creates cognitive dissonance, which is the phenomenon of holding two conflicting beliefs or attitudes. In other words, it is an internal hypocrisy between your head and your heart.
You may have seen cognitive dissonance operate on a macro level in some churches and organizations. Some pastors and churches preach a message that God’s grace saves us, not what we do. They say all the right things, yet their operations run counterculture to their message. There is a culture of fear, and as people get a closer view, they get hurt. What they feel when they walk into the room is very different than what’s being preached. So, people start to question the validity of church and the Christian faith at large. When moral failures get exposed in Christian leaders and pastors, this same painful pattern repeats. In short, cognitive dissonance can happen in a congregation when leaders don’t practice what they preach.
On an individual level, cognitive dissonance occurs when we declare something without believing it in our heart of hearts. For example, we can declare scriptures like Isaiah 53:5 (NIV), “And by his wounds we are healed,” but still feel there must be a reason we are not qualified to receive healing. Or we declare 2 Corinthians 8:9, “So that by his poverty he could make you rich,” while we still feel unworthy or even uncomfortable uttering the word rich.
I want to be clear about this, we can know things in our head that we don’t believe in our hearts. We know things in our conscious mind, which is the left side of our brains, but we believe things in our hearts, which is really the right side of our brains where our subconscious is. It’s in the right side of our brain where our “identity” is stored. This is why we can say what we know (left brain knowledge), but we create from what we believe (right brain beliefs). That’s what differentiates between something we heard or learned and simply agree with, and something that is truly ours, part of us, a core belief or something we live by. I wanted to lay this out because it will help us understand cognitive dissonance better and the dangers of this internal hypocrisy.
With that being said, people go around saying or declaring things they know are right but do not necessarily believe. Many times, they don’t even know that they don’t believe them, which is what leads many into frustration, confusion, and new wrong beliefs in efforts to explain why some biblical promise hasn’t worked for them the way it has for others.
We have to also understand that our heart (subconscious right brain) will win every time it fights against our mind (conscious left brain) regarding any idea. The left side of the brain runs at 5 Hertz and the right side runs at 6 Hertz. Identity wins every time, good or bad. I can learn a new biblical principle that tells me I’m a child of God, but if my heart continues to believe I’m not enough and I’m an orphan, it will drown the new revelation and kill it. Then I will continue to act and live like an orphan because my heart belief is still that of an orphan’s. This explains why many times we fight this duality of what we know is true from God’s Word and what we continue to live out.
One of the biggest known cognitive dissonances among many Christians is the question of whether we are sinners or righteous. Many pride themselves on calling themselves sinners saved by grace and fewer believe they’re actually the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. Those who believe to be sinners saved by grace struggle more with sin because at their core, they still believe they’re sinners. And sinners are gonna sin sin sin sin. Those who truly believe they’re now righteous by grace stop sinning because that is not who they are anymore. Identity dictates their behavior, not the other way around. Learning to live and operate from the heart, the place where our identity lives, is the way of living by grace. Living by grace means we are empowered by God. The opposite, however, is living out of knowledge (knowledge puffs up, 1 Corinthians 8:1), which hard work. In this life, we try to behave in order to determine our identities. It is a works-based system.
So we must learn to live from the heart!
We need to align our mouth with our heart, and we will see those things manifest in our lives. Most people speak what they know and see nothing created. Speaking what we know and expecting power to manifest is like shooting blanks. They’re empty of power. On the other hand, speaking what we believe, what is ours, what comes from who we are, is full of power and will create and manifest God’s Word. This internal hypocrisy that many live with is very harmful. It is like having a house divided against itself right inside of us. We know and say something, but we don’t always believe it. It sounds good. It’s truth. But it’s not ours yet because there are bigger, deeply seeded, opposing beliefs fighting it. These are the wrong beliefs we need to uproot, destroy, overthrow, and demolish so that we can plant and build the Word of God in our hearts and produce a hundredfold!
Salvation comes because you believe it in your heart and say it with your mouth. Healing comes because you believe God can and wants to heal you, and then you declare that aloud. Otherwise, you will become frustrated that healing is not happening and think, “I have to declare it more! I have to declare it louder!” This compulsion can be painfully prevalent when you know God’s promises but don’t experience them.
You can only reproduce what’s in your heart. For example, Jesus tells us that the greatest command is to love God and love others (Matthew 22:37-38). However, what do you do when you realize that you don’t actually love the people in your office or church? Do you pretend and try to convince yourself that you love them? No! If you do, you will experience cognitive dissonance with love because your head says you should love, but your heart knows you don’t. If you want to reproduce the fruit of the Spirit, you must invite God into that space. Confess your true feelings and ask Him to help you love others like He does. Then, meditate on and declare biblical truths that have to do with love. That’s a prayer He will answer every time! Regarding healing, your declaration may need to be, “I’m ready to believe for my healing,” not, “I’m healed, I’m healed, I’m healed!” When my leg was recovering from the dirt bike accident, I didn’t go around and profess my healing as if I was ignoring the screws attaching metal bars to my femur and tibia. Instead, I said, “God’s power is at work inside me, and today will be better than yesterday.” Faith doesn’t deny the problem; it takes away its power to become bigger than God in your life.
If you don’t fully believe a biblical truth, don’t try to convince yourself out of feelings of inadequacy or shame. This will only make you feel distant from God or like a hypocrite. Instead, ask God questions like:
What in my heart is so strongly opposing this truth?
Why can’t I believe this promise is for me?
What toxic belief, negative image, or destructive memory is opposing Your Word in me?
If you want to have faith, God will lead you to a faith that will do immeasurably more than you can ask or imagine (Ephesians 3:20). However, if you ignore the process of combating cognitive dissonance, you will only create more internal conflicts and delay the manifestation of God’s revealed Word in your life. The Holy Spirit is amazing and will lead you into all truth (John 16:13). So, whenever the Holy Spirit makes you aware of your cognitive dissonance, be encouraged! Now you know exactly what to pray to uproot and have a blueprint of what type of scriptures to meditate on.
