Notes of Faith May 19, 2023
Old Lies, New Truth
Winning the War in Your Mind
If we are going to demolish our strongholds, we have to recognize the power that lies have over us.
Are you also a prisoner, missing out on the life you want but believe you can never have? You crave close relationships but are paralyzed by the fear of rejection. You want to try something new but assume you are destined to fail. You long to be debt free and give generously but feel certain that could never be you. You dream of losing weight and exercising but feel resigned to fail yet again. You want to change but think you never can.
Why?
You are constrained by a lie, something that doesn’t exist. The Enemy has arranged enough hurtful circumstances, in key places of your life, in which you got just enough jolt — a bit of a shock, a sting of pain to your heart — that you have decided trying even one more time is just not worth the risk. What makes it worse is that the number of places where you have stopped trying is growing ever larger.
The greatest weapon in Satan’s arsenal is the lie.
Perhaps his only weapon is the lie. The first glimpse we have of the devil in the Bible, we see him deceiving Adam and Eve in the garden. He created doubt in Eve’s mind by asking her,
“Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman.
“For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” — Genesis 3:1–5
What Satan did in the garden back then is the exact same thing he will attempt to do in your life today.
In 2 Corinthians 11:3, our thoughtology professor Paul said,
I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ.
The greatest weapon in Satan’s arsenal is the lie.
Satan will whisper accusing questions and deceptive statements. He schemes to twist your mind, because if he can, he then
diverts you from your purpose,
distracts you from God’s voice,
destroys your potential.
If he can get you to believe a lie, your life will be affected as if that lie were true.
Unfortunately, Satan’s lies are easy to believe. Why? Part of the reason is that because of sin, we have a flawed internal lie detector. God warned us:
“The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure” (Jeremiah 17:9).
“There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death” (Proverbs 14:12).
That’s definitely the problem, so what’s our solution? How do we access God’s power to stop Satan’s lies? How can we demolish his strongholds in our lives?
If Satan’s primary weapon is lies, then our greatest counter-weapon is the truth of God’s Word.
Not just reading the Bible but learning to wield Scripture as a divine weapon. God wants us to view His Word that way. See how Hebrews 4:12 offers a direct solution to the warning of Jeremiah 17:9:
The word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.
In Ephesians 6:17, Paul’s legendary armor of God passage, the Word of God is called “the sword of the Spirit.” God’s Word was the first weapon I learned to use to remove lies and replace them with truth, changing both my thinking and my life.
Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. — Romans 12:2
The second half of that sentence is in the passive voice, meaning it is not something we do but instead something that is done to us. The good news is that God is ready to renew our minds by leading us to “a knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 2:25). Why? So we can “come to [our] senses and escape from the trap of the devil, who has taken [us] captive to do his will” (2 Timothy 2:26). “Then,” as Jesus said, “[we] will know the truth, and the truth will set [us] free” (John 8:32).
Excerpted from Winning the War in Your Mind by Craig Groeschel, copyright Craig Groeschel.
We would like to think that everyone would share only truth with us and that we should believe them. That is until they prove themselves to be a liar… No, I think most of us have been hurt by the sin nature of others so that we are likely to trust no one. Trust is earned. Lying is assumed. Sad, but true. Let us sincerely renew our minds with the Word of God and use it to not only transform our lives but the lives of others God brings into our sphere of influence.
Pastor Dale