Talking to myself

I recall a sermon from a few years back that I heard at my church at a Sunday evening service. It was entitled: "What you FEEL vs. what is REAL". The speaker talked about how too often we let our emotions control what we do and how we go about our daily lives. We wake up and we think, "I'm not going to get up right this minute because I don't feel like it." Or there's a pile of work (or homework) sitting on our desks and we think, "I'm not going to do this work right now because I don't feel like it."
We do the same thing when it comes to our faith too. We think, "I don't feel like praying or reading my Bible right now so I'm not going to." We even go to the extreme and say, "I don't feel God's presence in my life, so he must not be there at all."
I cannot even count the amount of times I have let my emotions control the way I live my life...whether it's my faith or just my daily life. I always say that I don't feel like doing something at that time, but does that change the fact that I need to, even if I don't want to?
There is a difference between LISTENING to ourselves and TALKING to ourselves. Talking to yourself means actually saying, "You know what? Who cares if I don't feel like doing this! I need to, so I'm gonna do it!" We need to wake up at the time we say we're going to even if we're too sleepy. We need to do our work (or in my case, homework) even if we think we can put it off. We need to pray and read our Bibles even if we don't get a warm fuzzy feeling inside of us from it, because we need God's word in our lives. And most importantly, even if we can't feel God with us, He always is. No feelings can change that fact.
I don't know why this message topic popped into my mind today, but I know that over the past year I have let my feelings run me more than ever before. I have only listened to myself.
This year, and in the years following, I choose to talk to myself.