BUT IS IT MY SOUL'S CONTROL, MY SPIRIT'S CRY, SATAN'S WORKS, OR GOD'S DEALINGS?

ANSWER: Matt, I think this is a positive thing that you are going through. I don't think this is your soul "stopping" other peoples' words from injuring you. It is probably more of there not being so many open areas of need and hurt in your soul that formerly caused you to react to the words people said to you. This is because God has been healing you as you have opened up areas through your binding and loosing praying. However, your soul still may try to find alternative ways to control you, as it is quite tricky, so it is good that you are aware of the possibility.

ANSWER: Keep committing yourself in prayer--body, soul, and spirit--to trusting God to guide you and show you how to know the difference. Stay in the Word constantly. Remember that it is the two-edged sword of the Word working in you that will separate and divide your spirit's knowledge from your soul's deceptions.

ANSWER: This confusion is a smoke screen put up by your soul, with the enemy contributing to it in any way he can. God has no desire to make you work your way through a maze to get to His guidance and instruction and words of blessing. In fact, He wants you to come out of the maze of the smoke and mirrors of your soul and of Satan that are making it difficult for you to know His voice. Again, this is not something to let your soul set up "artificial stress" over. Know this: God will not punish you for wanting to be sure that it is Him speaking to you, even if it means that you misread and question some of His communion with you. If you are not sure that is true, then please stop right here and ask Him to show you if it is true. If you can focus on the fact that God is not giving you a test to see whether or not you are spiritual enough to hear His voice, then you can begin to rest in Him and let Him fine tune your inner "receptors." Don't be like the car owner who is so defensive about being accused of not taking good care of his car that he won't let the mechanic look under the hood. Keep binding your mind, will, and emotions to God's will, the mind of Christ, and the healing balance of the Holy Ghost. Keep feeding your soul with the Word of God. That's right, I said keep feeding your SOUL the Word of God. It is the part of you that needs the Word. If you are born again, your spirit is in direct communion with God and all that His Word and will entails. It is your unsurrendered soul that has a choke hold on "itself" to keep that communion of God from permeating its entire being. Keep commanding your soul to "Bless the Lord, O my soul, with all that is within you" as David did. Go to the Breaking Soul Power prayer on page 30 of Breaking the Power and pray that entire prayer once a day for at least 30 days. Your soul will begin to lose its ability to confuse you, which is a huge factor in its ability to continue controlling you. When that happens, you will pray with more understanding about closing the doors that have allowed Satan to get involved, as well.

ANSWER: I believe God has a plan and a purpose for every detail of our lives. Just because we "have a choice" doesn't mean we make the right choice in our own finite thinking. Finite thinking is the limited, human ability to understand and initiate an appropriate action. Infinite or divinely-inspired thinking means no limit or end to understanding and knowing how to initiate an appropriate action when our souls are completely unclogged (choke hold broken!) to receive God's input through our born-again spirits. We do need to know how to operate appropriately in finite thinking (i.e. putting gas into our car does not require fasting and prayer to hear the voice of God). We also need to know how to receive infinite or divine inspiration in our thinking (i.e. hearing the voice of God QUICKLY when we become aware that using that gas is about to cause us to drive straight into a massive pileup of cars and trucks on the freeway just ahead of us!). We do not need a divine visitation to peel potatoes and fry pork chops at dinner time. We may need divine inspiration, however, to know that the children next door have no food to eat, and God wants us to take the cooked potatoes and pork chops to them. We are designed to operate in both realms of thinking, but we often get clogged up in the finite realm. Binding and loosing prayers unclog and break the choke hold of our unsurrendered souls, bringing them to surrender, so they willingly receive from and cooperate with our born again spirits as God designed them to so operate.

When we humble ourselves, pray, seek, and turn from our own soulish reactions, attitudes, desires, and motives (wicked ways, 2 Chronicles 7:14), then we can more clearly understand how to choose His planned purposes for our healing and restoration. The "catch" here is that we must be sure to act upon His plan and follow it through to His desired purposes. God never gives divine inspiration and supernatural intervention to pluck us out of hard situations just so we can turn and go right back down our road of self-willed wrong choices. He has little patience for that!

He delivers us from our follies and mistakes to set us on track with His will for future decisions. When we make choices in alignment with His will, He accepts all of the responsibility of the consequences and the outcome of those divinely-inspired decisions. When we make self-willed choices, we become responsible for the consequences that will play out--regardless of how bad they are! When you are in that "whale's belly," all you can do is cry out in repentance and beg for His grace and mercy. Just know this: God will receive our repentance and forgive us and give us another chance over and over. That's the good news! The bad news it that it appears to be scriptural (according to the stories in my Bible!) that the consequences of willfully repeated wrong choices become tougher and tougher, harder and harder, and deeper and deeper. This is the natural outcome of God's divine plans to get our attention that, HELLO!!, there is a cycle in our lives that needs to be broken! Through both the hard consequences of our self-willed choices and the good consequences of our divinely-inspired choices, God keeps trying to teach us that His-inspired choices are best. Here is some more good news: we really do not have to live out hard consequences of other peoples' choices that appear to keep impacting our lives. The bad news is that so many of us don't understand this, and we keep blaming the people of our past for our consequence-filled lives today. The reality is that we are where we are today because of our choices to continue to blame and hold unforgiveness and resent and hate. If God cannot get you to cooperate with breaking that cycle through prayer, the Word, or the fellowship of other Christians, then He has no choice but to let you keep making wrong choices until the weight of the consequences drive you to seeking the truth from Him.

Still, you are absolutely right in saying that we get to make the choices. I've learned in the hardest of ways that I don't want to make choices out of my self-will any more. I want His choices, with a surrendered will in me providing the drive and courage to walk out His destiny purposes for my life.

Having said all of that, let me say this about the last portion of your question above--you are sort of running like a hamster on an exercise wheel here with your soul having something to stress itself out with, thereby giving the impression that it is "on the job." But its activity isn't getting you anywhere good. (I apologize for the mixing of metaphors in this paragraph, but it seems to fit!) You need to tell your soul to slow down. There is a place of resting in the Lord, but the unsurrendered soul has a very difficult time of going there. And, it WILL NEVER GET THERE as long as it is constantly revving its engines up to try to figure out everything from its "finite" point of view. That is one of the main goals of these kinds of prayers, that you will disable your soul's hamster exercise wheel and finally be able to rest in His will and in your faith in Him. Remember that the original Greek and Hebrew languages repeatedly go back to this same general definition of faith: Trust and confidence in the goodness, power, and wisdom of God directed towards you. You can rest in Him without fear when you have surrendered your will and your way to Him, because you no longer have to figure out any of the above questions. Instead, you can trust Him to guide you through each question according to His already established will in heaven regarding every one of them.

This way of praying your commitment to surrendering your will to His will is your chossing to agree on earth with what He already has established it in heaven. Remember what Jesus prayed in the Lord's Prayer, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." Right agreement, between you on earth and God in heaven, brings about a manifestation of His heavenly will being done in the natural realm of life here on earth. Does this give you a glimpse of the importance of you knowing how to pray right prayers on earth, prayers of right agreement with His will in heaven? The possibilties are awesome!