Have you come to the point in your life that you’ve realized you’re living with self-made limits? Are you not seeing the breakthroughs others seem to experience? If so, artist and mentor Matt Tommey has the solution.
“When I think about my own life, I think most of the frustrations that I’ve had in my life have been because of the limits that I placed on myself and on God. Even limits that are placed on other people are in what’s possible in the kingdom, what’s possible for me, in my art life, what’s possible for me in my spiritual life, my financial life, my business life, whatever it might be,” Tommey says on The Thriving Christian Artist podcast on the Charisma Podcast network. “And as I look back at that, not only my own journey but in the journey of the thousands of artists that I’ve had the great privilege of mentoring, one thing really comes to mind: The limits that you put on yourself and the limits that you put on God tend to be the fruit of woundedness and baggage and undealt-with issues in your life.”
Like most people, Tommey developed coping mechanisms around his own woundedness that he took into his marriage and then into ministry. That’s when he started to recognize that not everyone else lived with these same limitations.
“And of course the enemy lies to you,” Tommey says. “And he says, ‘Well, you know, because they’re more spiritual, or they’re not as bad of a sinner as you are, or they’ve not done the things that you’ve done before, … God is blessing them. And it really skews your view of what’s possible.” As this vicious cycle continues, Tommey says, it “puts huge limits on what you’re able to believe for and receive from the Lord and from other relationships.”
So, what’s the solution? Tommey says if you want to live a life without limits, the No. 1 thing you must do is “walk with the Holy Spirit and allow Him to begin to heal the wounded places in your heart. And you know what most of that comes from? Most of that comes from agreeing with things that you thought were true at one time, but really are what we call ungodly beliefs or lies,” he says. “They’re just things that you’ve come to believe in your life as true, but that aren’t really true according to God’s Word; they just become true for you. They become your normal, if you will.”
To learn more of Tommey’s teaching on how Holy Spirit can help you move into a life of breakthrough in your life, work and art, listen to the entire podcast here.
