So I’d like to begin with a quote today. From A.W. Tozer. He says, “What comes into our minds when we think about God, is the most important thing about us. What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” I love this quote because I think it gets after the essence of what I want to share with you today around systems of belief.
We can also see this play out in Proverbs 23:7. Which says, “As a man thinks within his heart, so he is. As a man thinks within his heart, so he is.” And we know this to be true. Because women who think they’re ugly, when in fact are beautiful – have a corrupt belief system. Women who think they’re fat, when they’re actually skinny are carrying around corrupt beliefs. And the systems of belief influence how they think and act in life, but they also influence – oh so carefully how they view themselves in relationship to God. And God himself, as AW Tozer is teaching us.
I have been so influenced in my life, gentlemen – by corrupt beliefs. I can remember as a very young man standing on the basketball court, as a teenager – hearing a young man come over to me, talking about a sexual encounter that one of his buds had with another girl on our campus as a young teen. He profaned this girl and shared all the details that he heard that Tony had done with another guy. And made one of the most profound influencing statements on my mind as a 12-year-old. He said this. “Guys, I guess Tony this weekend became a man.”
Now this very powerful thought stuck with me and went so deep into my thinking that it caused me to believe that having sex and being sexually intimate with another girl was the way to define my manhood. And gentlemen, this corrupt belief stayed with me for years. And influenced – unfortunately, the things that I thought, and the way that I interacted with young women. And I’ve got to tell you – gentlemen, sex does not define our manhood. I know this to be true, because I’ve seen 2 dogs having sex, and they didn’t turn into men. Just a little humor there, but the logic plays out well.
Sex does not define manhood. Something else does. But how do these corrupt beliefs, and these systems of belief find their way into our mind and corrupt how we think about life, relationships, God, and our future? And gentlemen, we need to deal with it.
So today, I want to give you 4 principles about belief systems, that will help and begin to help you see how we can rewire these very, very conscious beliefs that are corrupt that we have. And even maybe undo the ones that we don’t know that we have. 4 principles.
Principle 1 is this. We create belief systems. Gentlemen, we create belief systems. Isaiah 55:8 says, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways – declares the Lord. The Lord God is defining for us the very fact that he thinks differently than we do. Because we believe different things than he does.”
Gentlemen, we are a believing being. This is just simple philosophy 101. You are a believing being. It’s what makes you unique as a human being. Is the fact that you can believe. And as we are exposed to data, we make judgments and develop concepts and inferences about life that result in ideas and images that are burned and embossed on our brains and our heart, that comprise our beliefs.
You see gentlemen, belief systems require 2 parties. It’s very simple. The believer, which is a subject – which is you – and a proposition, which is an object that you believe in. When you put these 2 things together, as a result of it – you have beliefs about education, about money, about work, about family, about all kinds of things in life. And over a lifetime, you build a system of these beliefs. A cluster of these beliefs, we call them a belief system, and they’re just a cluster of ideas and images that you have built up over a lifetime.
Principle 2 is this. Not only do you create belief systems, but you are controlled by your belief systems. Again, Proverbs 23:7 says, “For as he thinks within himself, so he is.” Or how about Numbers 13:33? You’ll love this verse. It says, “And there we saw the Nephilim, and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers. And so we seem to them.”
I don’t want to get into a discussion about the Nephilim, these giant man-like creatures. But there is something about how people viewed themselves when they saw themselves in light of the Nephilim – that they seemed to themselves like grasshoppers. They saw themselves as less next to these giant supernatural creatures.
Gentlemen, these belief systems control us. Belief systems are what makes us a human being. And belief systems are what we use to make sense of the world around us. Belief systems dictate how we think, and what we do. They dictate our thoughts and our behaviors. I want you to think about both those things. Your thoughts and your behaviors. And they contribute to what you believe.
In other words, if I want to see what someone really believes about life, all I got to do is watch their behaviors. Because it tells me what they think about the world around us. The opposite is also true. The thoughts that you have in your mind, you act on as behaviors. Therefore, the world can see the things that you believe. And these belief systems are very, very subtle, and very pervasive – to each and every one of us.
Principle 3 is this. We have corrupt belief systems. Gentlemen, your belief system is corrupted. Romans 3:10 and 11 is crystal clear about this. “None is righteous. No, not one. No one understands.” You see that? “No one seeks for God, all have turned aside. Together they have become worthless.” Psalm 53:3 says, “They have fallen away. Together they have become corrupt. There is none who does good, not even one.”
Genesis 6:5. “Right at the beginning of mankind, the Lord saw the wickedness of man was great in all the earth, and every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continuously.” Do you see that? “Every intention of the thoughts of his heart.” We have corrupt belief systems. And gentlemen, corrupt belief systems distort everything. Including how we view God, his spirit, soul, mind, body – they corrupt our entire being. And we have to remember that they are not consensual or uniform. They are different for every single person – yet corrupt still the same.
I can watch the thinking and the behaviors of my children. Of my wife, of my family, my extended family, my neighbors, the people I work with. Everybody has a different corrupted belief system. Everyone does. Because they’re not uniform, yet corrupt all the same. And these corrupt belief systems are deeply personal. They can often involve long heritage. And when you combine that with strong personal commitment – you get things that are ingrained and indoctrinated into each and every one of us, that is hard to undo. I like to think of them as almost impossible to undo, or at least they feel that way.
Undoing a corrupt belief system can feel like you’re rowing out in a rowboat in deep water, and someone says to you, “Take the planks off the boat.” That’s what it can feel like. It can feel like you’re in this rowboat that you built over a lifetime, that’s sustaining you over deep water. And then someone comes by and says, “Take the planks off the boat.” It can be that hard to undo corrupt beliefs in our life. And here’s what they’re corrupted by – sin. Sin. Repeated, deep, personal sin that each and every one of us have in our life.
Principle 4 is this. God must reveal the belief system. John 14:6. Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father, except through me. I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me.” Gentlemen, only Jesus can help to reveal to us through his scripture the belief system.
And guys, I know right now you’re walking around with corrupt beliefs that you hold so dear to you. Corrupt beliefs that go so deep, they cause you to believe that you cannot beat your sin. That causes you to believe that you are not good enough. Corrupt beliefs that cause cognitive distortions in your mind. That seems almost debilitating at times. And gentlemen, I believe that God has given us the power through his word to overcome this.
That guy, we can ask God to reveal our corrupt beliefs and lead us into a new day. You know that corrupt belief I had years ago, that a young man had seeded in my mind? That corrupt belief was undone by the truth of God. By learning through Scripture. Through the teaching of Jesus, that there was a better way to live life. And by exposing yourself to Scripture, to Christian brotherhood, to prayer – God, throughout my lifetime has slowly been exposing deep, corrupt beliefs.
Pulling the planks off my rowboat, in the middle of deep water. Creating sometimes crisis’s for me. That causes me to rebuild with true beliefs. Beliefs that are aligned with God’s way, his thoughts and his truth. And gentlemen, I would ask you today to pray that God would reveal the corrupt beliefs that you are holding so dear. And ask him to give you the strength to overcome these beliefs that have been built over a lifetime. So that you can live life to the full.
