“This Is All In My Head”
Every Thought Captive, part 2
Wildwind Community Church
January 28, 2007
David Flowers
Last week I established with you the great importance of the mind as we pursue God together. The mind is the seat of everything that is most important about you. Your thinking is more important, even, than your feelings, since it’s not what happens to you but how you think about what happens to you that determines how you feel about it. Thinking leads to feeling leads to behaving. Behaving leads to either positive or negative effects, and whether the effects are positive or negative will have to do with what? Whether the thinking that ultimately gave rise to behaving was positive or negative thinking.
The Apostle Paul wrote in Romans chapter 12 that we are not to conform to the patterns of this world, but rather we are to be transformed. And he said that we are transformed how? By the renewing of our minds! The mind is the seat of life in God. The mind is also the seat of life outside of God. The difference is in how a mind is trained, what it learns to think on, what it comes to understand as reality.
Correct, or proper, thinking depends on our ability to understand truth. If you erroneously believe someone has stolen something precious to you, you will treat that person accordingly – with coldness, perhaps even with hatred. You have wrong emotions toward this person, and act wrongly toward him why? Because your beliefs about him are not based on truth but on falsehood. He in fact did not steal from you. Notice it is not truth that determines how you feel about him, but your perception that is based in falsehood. In other words, perception is reality. The point being that you can be surrounded with truth, truth can look you in the eye, and you can miss it – you can live in falsehood.
Jesus said,
John 8:31-32 (NIV)
31 …If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples.
32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
What sets us free? What in this passage does Jesus say sets us free? Not simply the truth, but KNOWLEDGE of the truth. Truth will not free you if you do not know it.
There. In just a few minutes we have set up today’s message. Jesus called us to live in freedom. Freedom depends not on truth simply existing somewhere, but on us knowing what it is. Truth is the freedom-bringer. If that’s true, what are lies? Lies are freedom-destroyers. Show me a person living in emotional, intellectual, and/or spiritual bondage, and I’ll show you a person who believes lies.
In twelve years of ministry I have born witness to a tragic fact. Many Christians – many people who say they serve the Lord of freedom – live in continual bondage. Though they were called into freedom, they do not live in it. Instead they live in chains. Chains of guilt. Chains of regret. Chains of perfectionism. Chains of fear. Chains of addiction. Chains of insecurity. Where do chains come from? Lies. Always? Always.
There are several particular lies Christians live with all the time and I want to address and hopefully dismantle those things in the coming weeks. You need to know the truth, so the truth can make you free. The lie I want to address with you today is the lie that spiritual experience is all in your head, that it’s just a big head-trip that you’re imagining. Let me give you a scenario of how this often looks.
Often you’ll have a person who has been on a journey toward God for some time. And they reach a point where it seems clear that they must surrender their life completely to God, repent of their sins, and follow another direction under the management of the Holy Spirit. They do so, whether that would mean going forward at some kind of altar call in a church, filling out a card at the end of a service, talking and praying with a friend to receive Christ, or whatever. Somehow the decision is made to become a Christ-follower.
It goes pretty well for a while. They often report a feeling of lightness, of joy, of a burden having been taken off their back. They look forward to their new life and rarely think about the old life they have left behind.
But something changes. Suddenly the weekend is over and they’re back to school, back to work, back to normal life whatever that is for them. By the end of the first week, or perhaps the second, they are having all kinds of doubts about what they experienced. They’re thinking, “Maybe I was just emotional because I was at camp, at church, whatever.” “Maybe I was fooling myself that God would be a way out of my problems.” “Maybe I only did this because others were doing it and I felt pressured.”
This is the scenario we often see with new Christians, but the thing is, it’s also what I see at many steps along the journey. Someone takes a step forward, and they’re so certain this is the right thing to do, then a few days later they’re questioning themselves, wondering if maybe they were just in dreamland or something. Some of you are sitting out there right now doing that very thing, telling yourself that perhaps some of this God-stuff has been in your head. Perhaps some of you out there who have not formally committed your lives to Christ are wondering about that right now – how do I know if maybe this is just all in my head?
Let’s talk about where that idea comes from, because it’s very common. This idea comes from two places. The first is the fact that we don’t understand the difference between processes and events. For example, turning an iron on and off is an event. If you iron a shirt and then later on wonder if you turned off the iron, you can go back and check the iron. If it’s still on, you left it on. If it’s off, you turned it off and didn’t remember. It’s something you do at a specific point in time, and the evidence shows immediately. Going to the store to buy milk is an event. If you get home and can’t remember the next day whether or not you picked up milk, all you have to do is look in the refrigerator, or find a receipt. If the milk’s in the fridge, or the receipt’s in your pocket or purse, you bought milk. Case closed. The problem is we treat spiritual things the same way. That’s because they start out as events, and then immediately become processes. Let me give you an easy example.
You find an acorn and plant it in the ground. Good for you. That was an event! You got a shovel and dug up the soil. You planted the acorn in the ground, covered up the acorn with dirt, and poured water on it. It was something you did at a specific point in time. It was an event.
But almost everything that happens after that time is not event, but process. You planted the acorn, right? Event. Immediately after you do the planting, guess what takes over? Process! You planted it, then covered it with dirt and left it. A few days later you can barely even see where you planted it. Forget about the acorn being a mighty oak tree right now. Something very real is happening, and it’s happening not only under the ground, but deep inside the acorn. It’s necessary transformation that has to happen for the acorn to become an oak tree, but at this point you wouldn’t even see that process going on if you dug up the acorn. It’s real, and it’s happening, but it’s invisible to the naked eye. Eventually that acorn will spring up above the soil and will be the beginnings of an oak tree. No leaves yet, no real signs of “oakiness,” but everything needed to eventually become an oak tree, and it could be said to be a young oak tree even now. It will become an oak tree, but it will continue to follow a process – a process dictated by the nature of what is already in the acorn.
Remember this: A few days after almost every spiritual decision, your life will seem exactly how it was before you made the decision. Things around you will get back to normal and you might not even be able to detect much that’s different in your life. That’s because spiritual decisions are events that lead to processes. The events are obvious and clear, but the processes going on underneath are not obvious at all. At least not for a while.
Spiritual transformation often begins with an event. A prayer of commitment. A conversation with a close friend. A crisis of some kind. Those are events that happen at set points in time. But from the moment a spiritual decision is made, process takes over. You must respect the process. If you plant an acorn and keep going back to the scene every ten minutes hoping to find a tree springing up, you will get frustrated very quickly. It’ll be a while. If however you don’t worry about the tree and just determine to create conditions where growth will be likely – proper soil, water, and sunlight – eventually you’ll see something springing up.
In the same way there are proper conditions for the process called spiritual transformation. They are proper relationships, personal habits, and prayer. If you keep checking your feelings every two seconds to see if you feel any differently, you’re not gonna last a month! Instead, just make sure you’re cultivating the proper conditions. Build the right relationships. Create new personal habits like regular church attendance, generosity, and service. Learn to pray and do it regularly. The seed of God’s Spirit planted in you, under those conditions, will eventually grow and become obvious not only to you but to everyone around you.
If it’s not giving your life to Christ but some other spiritual decision – changing your spending habits, being more available to your family, giving up drinking – the same thing is true. Make the decision – that’s the event. But then commit yourself fully to the process that will eventually produce the results you want to see.
Now remember – you can’t go out and just start pouring water on the ground and expect an oak tree to spring up if you haven’t put an acorn in the ground. The process begins with the event! Likewise no amount of prayer or church attendance will make God spring up inside of you if you have not invited God to plant the Holy Spirit in your heart, in your life. But if you have done that, then with enough prayer, enough supportive relationships, enough hearing of God’s Word preached, that seed will spring up into something incredible, something you have no doubt about, something much, much easier to see. So this is the first reason we question our spiritual progress and decisions – because we think of spiritual things as an event rather than a process. If we think of it as an event, we’ll decide later on that the event didn’t happen if there’s no evidence when we return to the scene. But if we think of it as a process, we’ll just diligently continue to tend the soil and expect that the seed will grow into something. We’ll realize that just like the acorn is undergoing transformation deep under the ground, so the Holy Spirit is doing something in our lives deep below the surface, and God’s timing is perfect. We’ll see it when it’s ready. In the meantime, we need to just keep watering it.
That’s the first reason people often think they are imagining spiritual things. Notice it has to do with improper thinking – mistaking a process for an event. Notice also that it’s about truth and falsehood. Spiritual growth is an event. False. Spiritual growth is a process. True. You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. Now when I say it’s a lie, that doesn’t mean it’s a lie that somebody is actively telling you. A lie is simply a proposition that contradicts the truth. In this context a lie could be something somebody is telling you, or it could simply be something false you have come to believe in whatever way. I’m sure no one ever said, “Hey, mistake a process for an event.” After all, who talks that way other than me, and I didn’t tell you that!
But the second reason people often think spiritual growth is in their head might be connected to someone telling them something. Wildwind is a Free Methodist Church and Free Methodists are evangelicals. Evangelicals believe in a personal force of evil. We do not believe that evil is simply the absence of good. Don’t get me wrong – evil CAN be the absence of good, in the same way that darkness is the absence of light. But we also believe in an active, personal force of evil. The Bible refers to this as the serpent, the devil, the evil one, Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, and many other things but leaves us unable to get away from the idea that there is personality behind this being. We see in scripture that this personal evil being stands opposed to God in every way. We have described God as bringing truth, and knowledge of the truth as setting us free. Listen to how this personal evil being is described in scripture. Jesus himself says:
John 8:43-45 (NLT)
43 Why can’t you understand what I am saying? It is because you are unable to do so!
44 For you are the children of your father the Devil, and you love to do the evil things he does. He was a murderer from the beginning and has always hated the truth. There is no truth in him. When he lies, it is consistent with his character; for he is a liar and the father of lies.
Elsewhere, the Apostle Peter says of this being:
1 Peter 5:8 (NIV)
8 Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.
Finally, Jesus again speaks of this being:
John 10:27-29 (MSG)
27 My sheep recognize my voice. I know them, and they follow me.
28 I give them real and eternal life. They are protected from the Destroyer for good. No one can steal them from out of my hand.
29 The Father who put them under my care is so much greater than the Destroyer and Thief. No one could ever get them away from him.
Jesus speaks of this being in eerie ways, like he has a great deal of familiarity with him, and this is never fully explained. But in these passages we see the Devil, or Satan, described as a liar and the father of lies, as a roaring lion looking for someone to devour, and as a Destroyer and a Thief.
I have mentioned these to you today because there is one who stands opposed to God, one who denigrates truth, one who does not want you to know truth. Why? Because knowledge of the truth will set you free, and there is one who does not want you to be free. According to Jesus He is a thief who wants to steal us from the hands of God. He does not want us to know God, does not want us to love Him or live for Him. Why is this? According to scripture it is because of his hatred for God – he wants everything that belongs to God. God’s glory, God’s power, God’s beauty, God’s knowledge, and God’s children. Now look at this:
2 Corinthians 4:3-4 (MSG)
3 If our Message is obscure to anyone, it’s not because we’re holding back in any way. No, it’s because these other people are looking or going the wrong way and refuse to give it serious attention.
4 All they have eyes for is the fashionable god of darkness. They think he can give them what they want, and that they won’t have to bother believing a Truth they can’t see. They’re stone-blind to the dayspring brightness of the Message that shines with Christ, who gives us the best picture of God we’ll ever get.
What we see here is that even the elusive nature of spiritual things is due to the fact that people believe lies that come from this god of darkness. “They think he can give them what they want.”
It seems we have digressed, but we have not. Those who believe, “Oh, that spiritual stuff was only in my head,” are believing a lie that comes from the elusive nature of spiritual things, but the reason spiritual things are elusive, the Bible says, is because the Devil has made it that way. We are so attracted to physical things, temporary things, shallow things, things that don’t really matter, that somehow we can end up spending our whole lives pursing them and never pursue God – never be open to anything beyond our own concerns.
Do you think that was God’s doing? Do you think God said, “I know, I’ll create the world. Then I’ll put people in it, then I’ll surround them with things so attractive that it becomes next to impossible for them to see me in all of it.” I doubt it. There’s a reason spiritual things are hard to understand, hard to see, and hard to admit.
My friends, the idea that spiritual things are in your head comes from two places. First is the elusive nature of spiritual things. It’s just stuff that’s hard to see, and it’s hard to see because we think it’s an event, when it’s actually a process. We don’t understand that instead of continually looking for evidence that it was real, we need to be creating conditions where the seed that was planted in us can spring to life and become strong and healthy. Second is the fact that a personal force of evil exists in this world. I don’t care what you call him, but don’t dismiss him. Don’t think Wildwind is too progressive a place to believe in something outdated like that. Wildwind is an evangelical church that holds to the authoritative Word of God. Jesus himself believed strongly in this being, and warned us about him again and again.
Please know that when you believe that spiritual things are all in your head, you believe a lie, and that lie will keep you in chains. Spiritual stuff is more real than anything else going on around you. There is an active, personal force in this world that seeks to keep you from understanding that. I’m not talking about possession or anything like that. I’m talking about the god of this world who aims to keep you from knowing God, and so tells lies like that to keep us from knowing the truth.
There is only one way to combat the lies we’re dealing with, and it’s to take the advice of our theme passage:
2 Corinthians 10:4-5 (NIV)
4 The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds.
5 We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.
We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ. That’s active, people! You don’t take something captive by sitting around and wishing it were captive. You run out there, hunt it down, tie it up, and throw it in the truck. Spiritually we are to be doing that. When a lie comes into our minds, when we find ourselves believing something that sets itself up against the knowledge of God (and this definitely does!) we must 1) pursue it. We must 2) counter it with God’s truth. We must 3) think more on truth than on the lie. We must 4) identify the source of the lie and 5) understand how it will keep us in chains, and we must 6) dispense with it for good. Thoughts like this don’t belong in your head. How can God renew your mind if you continually suspect maybe you’re making it all up?
Have you believed this lie? Do you believe it now? If so you are making it impossible for spiritual things to ever become clear in your life. If you continue to entertain this false idea in your mind, you will become so preoccupied with it that it will determine your feelings and your behaviors. Some of you are already doing that. You can’t get past this, you wallow in it, and consequently your faith is not growing. You are weak and indecisive and spiritually flabby. You need to go lie-hunting and take some thoughts captive.
Will you pray with me. Lord Jesus, help us distinguish truth from error. You are the God of all truth. Wherever truth can be found, you are behind it all. Wherever lies can be found, your enemy – and therefore the enemy of our souls – is behind it all. We reject his worldview, and we open ourselves to what you would have us understand about who you are and who we are because of you . We are open to spiritual realities, to things that go beyond us, and we ask that you would help us see you in the things around us. Amen.
