Tearing Down Strongholds Series

Now matter how long we have been a Christian, we are still going to have battles. It may not be a heated exchange of words, or an out and out battle with someone…

But in the heart, the spirit, the mind are all battlegrounds where some pretty serious struggles are taking place.

Paul reminds us in our scripture today, that even thought we are human, even though we walk in the flesh, our real warfare is a spiritual battle.

Listen to this passage again… We are human, but we don’t wage war as humans do. 4 [a]We use God’s mighty weapons, not worldly weapons, to knock down the strongholds of human reasoning and to destroy false arguments. 5 We destroy every proud obstacle that keeps people from knowing God. We capture their rebellious thoughts and teach them to obey Christ.

Strongholds are the enemy’s fortresses… they are ideas, fears, habits, or lies that take root and resist God’s truth.

They live in our thinking, but they have a way of working themselves into our everyday lives. And because of these strongholds…

The devil doesn’t need to chain your hands if he can chain your mind. And my hope and prayer for you today, is that before you leave this place today…

Some of the chains that have held you bound for so long will break. Some of the strongholds that have held you captive for so long will come crashing down.

The Holy Spirit can break any chain that is holding you captive! So today… I want us to look at a few things that I think will help us to tear down these strongholds.

The first thing we need to understand is this… and this piggy-backs off of last week some.

1. Strongholds begin in the mind.

A stronghold in biblical times was a fortified city, a place of defense. In the spirit, it represents a fortified argument or mentality that resists God’s truth.

Strongholds are mental or spiritual fortresses. They are built brick by brick with thoughts, memories, and lies the enemy whispers over time.

Just like what we saw in the cartoon parable from Kyle Idleman.

Let me see if some of these fortresses might have been things that you’ve thought before… maybe you’re thinking them now.

“God can’t forgive me! I have done some really, really horrible stuff. There is no way a perfect, holy God is going to forgive me.”

Or how about this one… “I’ll never change, this is just who I am. There’s no hope fore me.” When you have those thoughts, that’s the devil building a barricade of lies around your mind.

And the reason he builds these barricades or this stronghold is so that he can limit how your live out your faith, so he can kill, steal, or destroy you.

This is the battle that we are in. In Kyle Idleman’s sermon on this same subject of taking every though captive, he talks about how…

we don’t just stop thinking certain thoughts… we identify certain things we wrestle them to the ground… and we interrogate them and we ask ourselves some thoughts about what we’ve been thinking.

Where did that thought come from? Why do I think this way? What’s the result of this thought in my life? Who do I now that maybe thought this way… and I picked it up from them?

We take our thoughts captive and we interrogate them. Otherwise, our thoughts form these neuro-pathways, that become stongholds.

And back during the time of this letter to the Church at Corinth that word picture that Paul uses would have been immediately understood.

A stronghold was built on the highest and most defensible point in the city, it had thick walls, re-inforced gates… it was designed to be impenetrable… and it was considered too strong to be brought down.

Those walls kept danger out… but if the city itself was wrong, those same walls would keep the truth out. And Paul uses this analogy to describe the thoughts that are on repeat in our minds.

Theses lies that Satan is feeding us are so fortified in us and so strong that they seem impossible to defeat.

Many people build walls around false beliefs to protect their pain rather than let God’s truth heal them.

And the problem with strongholds is that they’ve been a part of our lives for so long, it’s sometimes hard to recognize that we even have them. They just feel like they are a part of who we are.

Every stronghold starts as a thought. Before fear ever grips your heart, it starts whispering in your mind.

Before resentment builds that wall, it plants a seed of being offended and the need to retaliate. The enemy’s primary battlefield isn’t the circumstances you find yourself in… it’s your thinking.