Now if you love yourself, practice agreeing with God, and take the time to reprogram your thinking, so you agree with God. You do something wrong, normal thing if someone does something wrong is, they feel bad about themselves. What a believer does, they don't feel bad about themselves; I did something wrong. I am not a bad person, I'm still a good person, I'm still a child of god, and so I apologise, I ask forgiveness, I get over it, I move on. That's how we walk. We don't accumulate baggage. Fortunately many have come in, we've got a lot of baggage, so we've got to work on that - number one. So number one, practice agreeing with God, embracing His word into your mind and heart, and speaking it over your life, day by day, through the day.
The second thing, boundary or limit destructive influences. Put a boundary around anything that's destructive to you. If you love yourself, don't let yourself be destroyed. If you love yourself, don't let negative influences into your life. If you love yourself, put up a boundary. That means put up a fence, put up a barrier. That means actually, when it gets on the ground, just saying no. That's what it involves. Now a lot of people don't think they can say no. They've got to love, and so on and so forth. It's true we love, but it's also true we say no. If this is destructive to me, I will say no. Now that's loving yourself. A lot of people, because they can't communicate what they really want to say, allow things to happen and flow in around their life, and therefore they feel low esteem and low value, because they haven't stood up, a child of God speaks the truth in love. Therefore in love, I will say what I need to say to put the boundary up. You have to do that, see how it goes.
A boundary's a wall or a barrier that defines what you're responsible for, so if you permit destructive influences into your life you are not loving yourself. Loving yourself means you actually identify things that are negative coming into your life, and confront them. That's how you love yourself, see? Interesting that one. I need to agree about what God says, and learn to say no, no thank you, no. I met one guy, he had real trouble saying no. I said every day when you get up, and stand in front of the mirror, and in about 20 different ways smile and say no. No. No. No. Thank you very much, but no. Some people, they can't say no. Is that true? [Yes.] [Laughter] I'm sorry, that was a bit mischievous wasn't it aye? [Laughs] You have to put up a boundary, stop those influences okay, so basically they fall into two categories really. One falls into the category of destructive influences by people, destructive influences by people. In Psalm 1, Verse 1, it says blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the way of sinners, sits not in the seat of the scornful, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law does he meditate day and night. He shall be like - now you understand it actually is making a stand about ungodliness.
I'm not going to walk with sinners, not going to sit in the seat of the scornful, and point the finger at other people, and mock what they're doing. It's actually about making a stand, of setting boundaries around your life. Now many people that come into our life, we can love them, embrace them, we can welcome them, we can talk with them. We can help them, but we cannot let their negativity, and their negative influences, come in and invade our life, so you'll find people that you come across who are very negative. When you talk with them they complain, continue to complain. They're critical. They're running someone, or something down. They're running the boss down, the government down, they're running the church down, they're running all kinds of things down. You find people who are demanding. They're putting pressure on you, you've got to do this, got to do that. You meet people who are bitter. Sometimes you can see it on their face, but you definitely hear it in their words.