You Are What You Eat: The Power of Words and Images

By Elizabeth Hagan Asamoah

Words and images just like nutrients have the potential to impact the well-being of an individual positively or negatively, based on the type of words or images a person keeps feeding themselves with. The self-esteem, confidence, spirituality, morality, and physical and emotional health of an individual are highly influenced by the kind of information one feeds on. Through the words of our mouth, we can create our own worlds and dictate the direction we want our lives to go. Words are said to have spirit and are alive, so we must be very careful how we use them. There is life and death in the power of the tongue.
You Are What You Eat: The Power of Words and Images was written for all ages, but especially for the youth, those in their formative years, adolescents, and young adults, and even young parents. The book addresses some interesting topics like the following:
Positive and negative confessions
The impact of spoken words on our destinies
Dealing with verbal abuse
Look out for Elizabeth Hagan Asamoahs first fiction, The Taboo.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Dec 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496953544

Elizabeth Hagan Asamoah

Elizabeth Hagan Asamoah was born and raised in Ghana, West Africa. She and her husband relocated to the United States in 2000 and currently live in Lavon, Texas, with their thirteen-year-old daughter. The author is currently a graduate student in nutrition at Texas Woman’s University and has been a member of the Potter’s House of Dallas since October 2000. Elizabeth Hagan Asamoah has always enjoyed reading and has read all sorts of books, ranging from fiction to nonfiction, Christian/religious to nonreligious, romance to crime stories. She started reading when she was five years old and has been privileged to read books from some of the best writers. Through her reading experience, she has grown to understand that the kind of material that you read has a way of shaping your thinking and lifestyle. She enjoys travelling, especially to foreign countries. She also enjoys giving back to the community through volunteering. Through her church, she has volunteered with the Street/Homeless Ministry, New Member’s Ministry and the mission ministry. She also leads praise and worship on the Covenant International Prayerline with members in about ten countries all over the world, including almost every state in the United States, Canada, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Austria, Finland, and others. Currently, she volunteers with the Meals on Wheels at the Senior Citizen Center of Collin County, Texas, and with the Food and Nutrition Department of Medical City of Dallas, Texas.

Book preview

AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

© 2014 Elizabeth Hagan Asamoah. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  12/16/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-5355-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-5354-4 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

KJV

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the Holy Bible, King James Version (Authorized Version). First published in 1611. Quoted from the KJV Classic Reference Bible, © 1983 by The Zondervan Corporation.

CEV

Scriptures marked CEV are taken from the Contemporary English Version, © 1995 by American Bible Society. Used with permission.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1    Life and Death Are in the Tongue: Positive and Negative Confessions

Chapter 2    The Impact of Spoken Words on Our Destinies

Chapter 3    God Still Speaks

Chapter 4    Dealing with Verbal Abuse

Chapter 5    Be Careful Little Eyes What You See, Be Careful Little Ears What You Hear

Chapter 6    Watch Your Vision and Memory Gates

Chapter 7    Culture

Acknowledgments

I am extremely grateful to the Almighty God for giving me the opportunity to be of use to Him even with all the mistakes and the numerous ways I have let Him down through the course of the years. I know there is no way I could have written this book without Him giving me the wisdom and the inspiration to do it.

I also would like to thank the pastors whose obedience to the Lord has allowed them to be God’s mouthpieces in my life. Their encouragement and prayers through the years have kept me strong and going. Prophet Prince Adjeman, Reverend John Oscar Sabogu, and the other pastors of Kingdom House Missions and Covenant Prayerline of Accra, Ghana. Bishop Bodecia Adomako, Kumasi, Ghana; Apostle Benjamin Owusu of IPDCC, Dallas, Texas; Apostle Fred Asare of SOJ, Dallas, Texas; and Pastor Martinson Sarfo of ICGC, Dallas Branch, Texas, my study mate at college. I did not know you would one day become one of my pastors. And last but not the least, Bishop T. D. Jakes of the Potter’s House of Dallas, my home church pastor for the past fourteen years, who over the years has mentored me indirectly to overcome my fears and insecurities and has helped me to grow more in my faith and Christian walk.

I also want to thank Deacon Edmund Mensah of Pentecost Church, Norfolk, Virginia; Julius, my nephew, and Sister Sigei, my church sister, and others for their encouragement and sharing their stories with me.

Finally, my love and appreciation to my two babies: my dear husband, Enoch Asamoah, and daughter, Babette Asamoah, and then my parents and siblings and their families who have been there for me through all the thick and thin and never let go of me. Their love, support, and encouragement helped me to hang on even during the times I did not have hope in myself. My old dad, Nana Akwasi Hagan (aka Emmanuel Kingsley Hagan), my number-one cheerleader, for your encouragement and all the knowledge you imparted to me all these years. I love you all, and this book is for all of you.

Foreword

Words are very powerful and they go a long way to impact the outcome of our lives. They can make or break an individual, depending on the one speaking them into the person’s life. They can bring an individual a blessing or a curse. Words come in many forms, but the Word of God is the ultimate, as it carries a lot of power and is life. Thus the Word of God can turn bad situations in our lives into good, failure into success, poverty to riches, sickness into healing, and we therefore must base our lives more on them. We are snared by the words of our mouth and are taken by the words of our mouth. We must therefore adopt the habit of making positive confessions into our lives and the lives of others. Death and life are in the power of the tongue, so the wrong choice of words is capable of sending a person on the path of destruction whilst at the same time speaking positively can end up unlocking the door of life, full of hope and goodness for a person. A lot of people do not know this truth and have ended up spinning their own doom by constantly making negative utterances about themselves and even their loved ones. Likewise, the kind of images we keep feeding our minds with also go a long way to dictate the directions our lives go as we end up adopting the concept of the images we feed ourselves with. Constantly watching and listening to bad news and stories on the TV can instill unnecessary fear in individuals, robbing them of their peace and their right to happy living. Both words and images can affect the health status, confidence, and boldness of a person.

There are some people who, when they speak into your life, their words become like a sword and pierce the heart of the recipient of the word, causing pain and troubles. Such people use their tongues to destroy others. But God has blessed each person with a tongue, so if somebody uses their tongue to make negative incantations upon your life to cause you pain, then He has also endowed you with the potential to reverse the negative impacts of the wrong utterances with your tongue by making positive utterances into your life. In so doing, it can bring healing to any wounds inflicted by another person’s wicked words. We can also use our tongues to unwind the things the enemies bound us with through words. It is therefore very important to be mindful of the people we allow to speak into our lives. Our lives become like fallow grounds that need to be broken up and cultivated to be productive again if people, especially those in authority or influence in our lives, keep speaking negatively into our lives. Negative utterances and words continuously spoken into our lives can be like thorns that choke out the good things and blessings of our lives. We must therefore pray ourselves out of the wrong things others say into our lives and must not allow anybody’s word to force us into any form of enslavement.

Many people are ignorant of the importance of words and images in their lives and destinies and have allowed themselves to become recipients of others’ wrong utterances as well as their own. The impact that words and images make on our lives can last for a lifetime, so it is very critical to look at what we are receiving into our lives. This book therefore is a good teaching material that will enlighten many people about this important aspect of life and will go a long way to empower many too. I therefore recommend this book to everybody. Thank you, Elizabeth, for availing yourself for the Holy Spirit to speak through you through this book to bring healing and deliverance to others.

—Prophet Prince Kwabena Adjeman

Introduction

Words and images just like nutrients have the potential to impact the health of an individual positively or negatively, based on the type of words or images the person keeps feeding him or herself with. Nutrients form a very integral part of our lives, likewise are words and images. Every form of living being be it animals or human beings required communication to survive. Nobody is an island; you cannot exist without communicating with other people in one way or the other. No matter how anti-social your life maybe, you still communicate one way or the other through conversations, reading, watching TV, listening to music, surfing through the internet, video games among others. Just as the nutrients we eat get stored in our bodies till we need them to function, the same way the kind of information we feed our minds with gets stored till we have need of them. Bishop T. D. Jakes put it nicely: The Word is nutritious to the soul. And with that, he meant the Word of God, which is really a good source of information. We are encouraged to meditate on the Word of God daily for wisdom, empowerment, and direction. The word meditation, which is used several times in the Bible, from its Hebrew origin, is said to mean to be preoccupied with. From the Biblical point of view, it means we must preoccupy our minds with the Word of God and when taken literary means preoccupying our minds with some kind of information, hopefully the right kind of information. The word meditation is also used for a cow chewing its cud in order for it to be more readily able to absorb the nutrients. So in other words, preoccupying your mind with any form of words, be it the Bible or a novel, is like making those words more available to you for ready absorption by the mind, just as your body absorbs nutrients.

The self-esteem, confidence, morality, spirituality, physical health, and emotional health of an individual are highly influenced by the kind of information one feeds on. Likewise, a person’s relational as well as career choices are most of the time also dictated by the kind of information they feed themselves with. It is therefore imperative that we watch the kind of information we feed our minds with because memories, once formed, are very difficult to shake off or discard. Even though the mind is a terrible thing to waste, we must see to it that how we are feeding it is helping us, not hurting us.

It is very important that as humans we maintain good memories that give us the grace to remember the goodness of God through the things He has spoken into our lives. In so doing, whenever we get to a crossroad in life and our faith starts to wobble, we will be able to fall back on what God has promised. God’s word, as we know, does not return void to Him till it fulfils every purpose it was sent to perform in our lives, so we can rest assured in His spoken words concerning our lives and not the enemies’ lies. Whenever the enemies start to create fear and doubts in our lives, that is the time we need to cudgel our memories to pull the good things God has done and said about our lives to counteract the negativities the enemies try to feed our minds with. We need to hang on to the word that God has spoken concerning our lives, not the enemies’ lies, no matter what form of media through which it was spoken to us. We must also learn to be able to recognize God’s voice over the masses. Though we do not see Him, we can still hear and understand Him when He speaks.

God created man in His image, so He has endowed us with the same potentials that He has. We must therefore be mindful of the words that we profess over our own lives and those of others. Because if through words God was able to call a whole universe into being, then as His image, we also have the potential of calling so many things into being in our lives and others’ lives only through our words.

The kind of information we feed our minds has so many ways of affecting our ways, which may be positive or negative. Information can be obtained in various forms, either as words or images. Just as one does not become obese just by eating junk foods occasionally, the same way you do not become what you feed your mind with by reading or watching or listening to a particular kind of information once or occasionally. One do not become addicted to pornography by watching or reading one inappropriate movie or book respectively but rather the addiction sets in when the person adopts the habit of doing it over and over again. You cannot just choose to like a particular kind of music by hearing it once; it is going back to listen to it several times that will bring the likeness.

Chapter 1

Life and Death Are in the Tongue:

Positive and Negative Confessions

Psalm 19:14: Let my words and my thoughts

Be pleasing/acceptable to You, LORD,

because You are my mighty rock and my protector.

Through the words of our mouth, we can create our own worlds. In other words, we can dictate the kind of world we want to live in through the words of our mouth. In Genesis 1:25–30, God said, Let us create man in our own image, which He did, and thus human beings were created as part of the universe. So if human beings were created in God’s image, that means we are also endowed with the same potentials, abilities, and powers of God. Therefore, if God, through the power in His words, was able to create the universe (Genesis 1:1–3), then we, who were created in His image and likeness, also have the power to create at least the little world that we want to live in just by the words of our mouths. This world will be a good or bad one, depending on the kind of words that we constantly profess over our lives or most especially what others speak into our lives and vice versa. We tend to believe what others say of us.