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We have bought the lie that we are victims of our thoughts rather than warriors equipped to fight on the front lines of the greatest battle of our generation: the battle for our minds.
“take every thought captive to obey Christ.”1
taking control of our minds could be the key to finding peace in the other parts of our lives.
It’s all in our heads.
Our emotions were leading us to thoughts, and those thoughts were dictating our decisions, and our decisions were determining behaviors, and then the behaviors were shaping our relationships, all of which would take us back to either healthy or unhealthy thoughts.
The reality is that our emotions are a by-product of something else.
Our emotions are a by-product of the way we think.
The Bible tells us so. “Do not be conformed to this world,” one verse says, “but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.”5
John Owen said that the enemy’s goal in every sin is death. His actual words were “Be killing sin or it will be killing you.”
the vast majority of the illnesses that plague us today are a direct result of a toxic thought life.”7
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.
The great irony is that while I thought God was directing me to all this great, groundbreaking information—how my friends could heal their lives by healing their brains and by thinking more thoughtfully about their thoughts—so that I could help everyone else, what I couldn’t possibly have known at the time was that I was about to need this healing myself.
The thing is, I have always believed lies. And not just believed them but built entire chapters of my life around them. I’m pretty sure the same is true for you.
Over the phone that night, we walked through all the parts of our lives that were within our control and made sure there wasn’t an obvious place for us to be attacked. We relaxed a little.
there are three kinds of pits: the kind we jump into, the kind we accidentally slip into, and the kind we’re thrown into.
Doubt steals hope. And with no hope, everything that matters doesn’t feel as important anymore.
Have you ever been confronted with something so hard or heavy that it made you question everything you have believed?
Yes!😭
I have since recognized that the enemy was at work, but in the midst of the downward spiral, I couldn’t see it. My thoughts seemed to have control over me instead of the other way around.
The danger of toxic thinking is it produces an alternate reality, one in which distorted reasoning actually seems to make sense.
For eighteen months straight—more than five hundred days—this is what I thought… Until I learned to think differently about my thoughts. Until I remembered I had a choice.
“Jennie, this is the enemy,” she said. “None of this is from God. This awfulness you’ve been experiencing…this isn’t who you are.”
God is real, and I am valuable.
I had an enemy, and I’d let him beat me up for too long. I was over it.
Now I wasn’t alone. I was fighting, and in Christ I was given the authority and power to win.
We don’t have to spin out for eighteen months. We don’t have to spin out for eighteen minutes. We don’t have to spin out at all.
if our thought lives are the deepest, darkest places of stronghold within us, all hell will try to stop us from being free.
This is going to take work. This is going to take patience. This is going to take buckets of grace for ourselves.
Paul experienced a massive shift, and now he was a totally different man. No longer was he a slave to his circumstances or his emotions. Paul now chose to live aware of the power of Christ in him, through him, and for him.
The people who stand out to me are the ones who have chosen to trust Jesus more than trusting their ability to make everything work out fine.
The good news is this: once we recognize that a prevailing emotion is connected to outright, life-sucking lies, we begin to see that everything we need for life in God has been given to us already3—which means we begin to heal and live lives that matter.
Paul, in order to make the shift from “warped philosophies” (a.k.a. overwhelming doubt) and “barriers erected against the truth of God” (a.k.a. 3 a.m. disbelief) to focus on something more in line with the “life shaped by Christ,” we must take up the weapons of warfare and destroy the strongholds that are dominating our thoughts.4
But we don’t simply need our spiraling thoughts to stop; we need our minds to be redeemed.
What do you do once you take a thought captive? You then submit that thought to Christ. That is how you experience a new mind, a new identity, a new way to live, one that’s Spirit empowered.
Before Jesus chose to go to the cross, He had a thought: “Father…not my will, but yours, be done.”4 How we think shapes our lives.
One God-honoring thought has the potential to change the trajectory of both history and eternity. Just as one uninterrupted lie in my head has the potential to bring about unimaginable destruction in the world around me.
You are what you think. The Bible says, “As he thinks in his heart, so is he.”5
so if we are believing things that are not true about us, then we are believing what the devil wants us to believe instead of what God wants us to believe.
Taking every thought captive is not about what happens to us. It’s about choosing to believe that God is with us, is for us, and loves us even when all hell comes against us.
the problem we face, the mission we embrace, and the victory that’s ours in the end.
Romans 8 lays it out so clearly: a mind set on the flesh leads to sin and death, and a mind set on the Spirit leads to life and peace.7 That is the simple reality we face.
Thankfully for us: big God.
In Deuteronomy 20, God reminds Israel that He is with them in their battles and that He is with us: Hear, O Israel, today you are drawing near for battle against your enemies: let not your heart faint. Do not fear or panic or be in dread of them, for the LORD your God is he who goes with you to fight for you against your enemies, to give you the victory.10
If God is in us and is for us, then you and I can choose to fight from a place of victory.
We then get to decide whether we are going to choose life and peace, the mind of Christ, the fruit of the Spirit—or sin and death, the mind of the flesh.
The spiraling, chaotic thoughts that have so long kept us trapped will give way to the peace and beauty and abundant life Jesus died to give us.
Because if I slowed down enough to look at my soul, I might be overwhelmed by all that needed fixing in me. I didn’t want to hear what God might want to say to me—or take the risk that He would remain silent, hidden, deepening my doubt about His existence, His love. There are so many ways we avoid silence, so many types of noise we choose to fill the gaping voids in our souls.
Why did I refuse to practice solitude during that eighteen-month span? Because I was afraid that if I reached out to God, there would be nobody home to take my call.
Behind every one of these fears is a lie: I cannot face God as I am.
We have a choice between chaos and quiet, between noise and solitude with God, between denial and healing.
The antidote to running from ourselves is running to the only One who helps us get over ourselves. The lie is that we will be shamed. The truth is that the God who is creator and sovereign over the universe and the God who conquered sin and death is the same God who wants to be with you in your pain, doubt, shame, and other circumstances. “God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance.”4
