Dear Lord, help me to be courageous enough to speak honestly to You and to myself about areas where I'm giving in to compromise. Show me how to rely on Your strength for more self-discipline in my life — not for my glory, but for Yours. In Jesus' name. Amen.

When I am void of power, I am void of self-control.

This is the power available to us! The same power that raised Jesus from the dead. It may not feel like we have this power, but we do. And each time we proclaim, "I am made for more," I pray all the power-packed truths within that statement rush into our hearts and keep us enlightened.

What gives power to all that I fear others are thinking and accusing and saying isn't the people themselves. It isn't even the enemy. I'm the one who decides if their statements have power over me or not. It's me.

And somehow becoming a woman of self-discipline honors God and helps me live the godly characteristic of self-control.

The enemy wants us paralyzed and compromised by the whispers and doubts and what-ifs and opinions and accusations and misunderstandings and all the other hissing handcuffs crafted by fear.

There is no perfect decision—only the perfectly surrendered decision to press through our fears and know that God is working in us to bring about good through us.

1The LORD is my light and my salvation— whom shall I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life— of whom shall I be afraid?

We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are.

A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.

All men die; few men ever really live.

In your life you are William Wallace—who else could be? There is no other man who can replace you in your life, in the arena you've been called to. If you leave your place in the line, it will remain empty. No one else can be who you are meant to be. You are the hero in your story. Not a bit player, not an extra, but the main man.