Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Spiral of Toxic Thoughts

by Jennie Allen

What we believe and what we think about matters, and the enemy knows it. And he is determined to get in your head to distract you from doing good and to sink you so deep that you feel helpless, overwhelmed, shut down, and incapable of rising to make a difference for the kingdom of God.

No human is ever meant to be the person who fills our souls or holds in place our worth. Only God can do that. But until I throw off the lie that God’s love isn’t for me, my emotions, decisions, behaviors, and relationships will remain twisted up in the mistaken belief that I’m worthless.

I’ll tell you: because real, connected, intimate time with Jesus is the very thing that grows our faith, shifts our minds, brings about revival in our souls, and compels us to share Jesus with others. It’s where the spiral stops. To put it plainly: all hell is against us meeting with Jesus.

A God who loves you, knows you, sees you, has shown you a love so radical, intimate, personal, and wild that He would painfully choose to lose a child to reconcile all mankind. “While we were still sinners, Christ died.”

Follow me, as I follow Christ. If you want to know whom to connect with in community, look for someone whose life shouts those words. Find someone who is following hard after Jesus, and then ask that person to coffee.

Beauty is evidence of something beyond ourselves. Beauty is evidence of a world yet to come. Beauty is evidence of a Creator who is loving and profoundly delightful. Beauty floods in and interrupts when, instead of cynicism, we choose trust.

Humility is perfect quietness of heart…. It is to expect nothing, to wonder at nothing that is done to me, to feel nothing done against me. It is to be at rest when nobody praises me and when I am blamed or despised. It is to have a blessed home in the Lord, where I can go in and shut the door, and kneel to my Father in secret, and am at peace, as in a deep sea of calmness, when all around and above is trouble.

Humility is a grateful and spontaneous awareness that life is a gift, and it is manifested as an ungrudging and unhypocritical acknowledgment of absolute dependence upon God.”16

The truth is, our hearts aren’t really after power; they’re after joy. And the deception we buy into is that somehow joy will come when we have power. Joy comes when we lay aside our power and rest in God’s. Joy comes when we put the emphasis where it belongs: on God’s awesomeness, not our own.17

“We rejoice in our sufferings,” Paul said, “knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”14