9/18/2026 | Written by Idina Cole

I want to share something with you today, and I am not sharing this to alarm you, but to give you raw, diagnostic awareness about the exact season you are walking out. If you have been in the faith for a while and you are currently attempting to move forward into the big things you know God has called you to do, you are going to experience intense resistance. But we have to stop looking at that resistance through a broken, religious lens. We have been conditioned by traditional environments to run around crying, "Oh, the devil is after me, the devil this, and the devil that." We give the enemy entirely too much credit. Granted, he is cunning and he is smart, but he is not greater than God.

The Lord actually allows the enemy to create resistance for a specific reason: to see if you are going to finally stand up, use the spiritual authority He has already given you, and learn how to depend on Him completely.

I found myself in a situation where I felt completely distant from God. There was no logical reason for it. Nothing went wrong. My schedule was clear. But I could feel an invisible barrier blocking my peace. One morning, I woke up and I was completely distracted. My immediate default habit was to grab my phone and start scrolling. And the Holy Spirit pulled back the curtain and asked me a hard question: "Are you going to keep self-medicating your anxiety with phone apps and urgent noise, or are you going to obey My voice?"

This is exactly what the Lord began exposing in my heart through the book of Judges. In Judges chapter two, the angel of the Lord tells the children of Israel that because they disobeyed His voice and made covenants with the wrong inhabitants, He would no longer drive their enemies out before them. He said those inhabitants would become thorns in their sides, and their false gods would become a snare to them. And then we hit verse ten, and it says another generation arose who did not intimately know the Lord or the works He had done for Israel. They lacked identity. Because their ancestors failed to pass down an experiential, intimate relationship with God, this new generation was left running around loose, trying to figure out who they were. They did evil, they served the Baals, and they constantly conformed to the culture around them because they had lost their anchor.

When your vision gets clouded, your surroundings start looking impossible. You look at your bank account, your children, or the emotional pain of a failed marriage, and you conclude that you cannot afford to invest in your development or scale your business. You assume that because your natural circumstances are heavy, God is mad at you or that you are late. So you lay back and let life just happen to you. But your financial and relational wilderness is not a punishment. God left those specific giants in your land in Judges chapter three to teach you how to fight. He is using your hard circumstances to force you to stop relying on human prosperity and start depending on His divine revelation.

Reclaiming the Territory of Your Voice

This brings me directly to the second part of the equation: your confidence, because this is where I believe one of the biggest mindset blocks begins to surface. Let me step into my role as your coach for a moment and tell you why the name of my podcast had to transform from Her Voice is a Weapon™ into Get Realigned with Idina™. For an entire year, learning that my voice was a weapon was my way out of the dark. It gave me the courage to break out of the silence and begin reclaiming the sound of my own voice. But the Father showed me a deeper truth that weekend that I cannot unlearn: if you don’t have divine revelation governing your life, you are spiritually blind. And when your vision has been completely clouded by past trauma, you will automatically lose your internal confidence and begin to mute your own voice. You stop speaking because you cannot see where you are going, and you begin second-guessing every single thing you thought you heard from God.

The enemy doesn’t have to stop your calling; he only has to keep you from using your voice. He wants your confidence low enough that you believe you are incapable and undeserving of the results you seek, because as long as you are questioning yourself, you will keep trying to accomplish in your own strength what God never intended for you to carry alone. He wants you working your tail off, feeling broke, stuck, and disgusted with where you are, because he knows that the moment you step into your true identity as a daughter, your testimony will begin to multiply into the lives of thousands of others. Reclaiming your voice, then, isn’t just about learning how to speak out loud again. It is about getting your vision clear so you can speak with true Kingdom authority. The weapon of your voice is only as strong as the clarity of your vision, which is why we have to learn to look at this warfare from a daughter’s perspective.

Breaking the Isolation Trap

There are distinct phases to the resistance you may be sensing right now, and the first is the isolation trap. The enemy’s first assignment is to turn you into a lone ranger by keeping you from building a spiritual family, finding a cohort, or developing a trusted relationship with an alignment coach. He wants you to believe that nobody understands what you are going through and that you should be able to fix your trauma by yourself. Then, once you have been isolated, he moves you into the second phase: clouded vision. He wants to discourage you from pursuing your deepest heart desires, separate you from God, and keep you trapped in double-mindedness, constantly questioning what you see, what you hear, and what you believe God is saying.

But Jesus gave us a completely different picture of how we are meant to live in John 15 when

That means if you want to get your visual clarity back, you cannot keep managing the symptoms while leaving the root untouched. You have to come back into connection with the Vine. And one of the quickest, surefire ways to shatter that heavy oppression and begin clearing the darkness out of the atmosphere around you is through Judah praise.

Do you know what happened every single time the Israelites went into battle? They asked God who should go first, and the Father didn’t send the strongest weapons or the biggest army. He said, “Judah shall go up first.” Judah literally means praise, and it comes from the Hebrew word Yada, which means to extend the hand as a sign of absolute surrender. When you lift holy hands in the middle of your chaos, you are presenting all of your human limitations to the Lord and inviting His sovereignty to take over. Praise is not what you do after you win the war; praise is the weapon that clears the atmosphere so you can hear His instructions.

Let Praise Go First

So, as you’re facing intense resistance, remember this: praise is your weapon of defense. You don’t have to figure out how to fight every battle, force every door open, or find your own way through the darkness. Your invitation is to trust God to fight on your behalf and clear the way before you. When you praise Him in the middle of the chaos, you are choosing surrender over striving and making room for His will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Here’s what I want you to do: invite His will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, and then stand on Psalm 100:1–5. Don’t just read these words; let them become your posture before the Lord:

"Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands.

Serve the Lord with gladness: come before his presence with singing. Know ye that the Lord he is God; it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.

For the Lord is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth to all generations."

And make sure you have your journal and your Bible readily available, because this is not just a moment to praise God for what He has already done. Come expecting Him to clear your vision so you can see the way before you. Write down what He reveals. Pay attention to what begins to rise in your spirit. Let Him show you what you could not see when you were buried beneath the noise, the fear, the trauma, and the resistance.

You do not have to see the whole path before you take the next step. You just need enough clarity to obey the next instruction.

So let Judah go first. Let praise go first. And trust the Father to clear the way.

➡️Ready to Go Deeper

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