It's becoming so common to live broken down spiritual lives that spiritually healthy people are seen as abnormal.

We keep trying to fix the surface things in our lives failing to see the connection to what's going on inside our hearts and minds.

The more we try our self-help techniques and experiments, the less money and time we have, but yet we're

still living broken down lives. How can we stop being so broken down? Thank you for joining

Keep the Heart for today's podcast with Francie Taylor. Francie is an author, conference speaker, and teacher.

She is passionate about teaching what to do with what we learn from God's Word. Now back to

today's valuable study. You know, so much of what happens in our lives begins internally, not externally.

The external things will happen daily, but our responses to the dailies are coming from our spirits.

Having a meltdown is merely a symptom of a need for more spiritual health and strength.

Instead of looking at that negatively, why not

tilt the head and consider another angle? We all need God's help to become spiritually healthy.

We weren't born that way, so God has to teach us how to master this fine art of biblical living.

Let's look at four brief areas where we can cooperate with God

as he trains us on how to be stronger. First, we need to manage our minds. The Bible term for this

is ruling over our spirits. You are probably very familiar with the verse from Proverbs 2528, which says it plainly.

He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down and without walls.

Now keep in mind that no matter how many times we've heard a verse, it still means very little to us if we're not applying it to our lives.

Let's break down some of the words in this verse. According to the strong concordance, the word rule means restraint or control.

The phrase over his own spirit is one word in Hebrew. And in addition to literally meaning our

own spirits, it also refers to our minds, tempers,

courage, and other impulses such as anger and impatience.

A roughly paraphrased version would read like this,

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