Winning the War in Your Mind: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life

OUR LIVES ARE ALWAYS MOVING IN THE DIRECTION OF OUR strongest thoughts. What we think shapes who we are.

a lie believed as truth will affect your life as if it were true.

God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind. —2 TIMOTHY 1:7 NKJV

I swat at the swarm of thoughts flitting around my head and remember that I am not a victim of my own mind. I have power over my thoughts. I am not captive to them. With God’s help, I can make them captive to me.

YOU CANNOT CHANGE WHAT YOU DO NOT CONFRONT.

So if both the Bible and modern science teach us that our lives are moving in the direction of our strongest thoughts, then we need to ask ourselves, “Do I like the direction my thoughts are taking me?

One more time, because this point is crucial: a lie believed as truth will affect your life as if it were true.

your mind is a battlefield, and the battle for your life is always won or lost in your mind.

Today I get to experience God’s strength when I am weak. He gives me everything I need to do what he’s called me to do. Rather than a busy, bad day, I’m going to have a positive, productive one.

Now write this biblical truth into your own declaration: “I can be content regardless of my circumstances—in plenty or in want—because no matter what I don’t have

What science is demonstrating today is what God told us through Solomon almost three thousand years ago: “For as he thinks in his heart, so is he” (Prov. 23:7 NKJV).

Automaticity is the ability to do things without thinking about what you are doing. When repetition allows an action to become unconscious, automatic.

Increasingly research proves that the way to get someone to believe a lie is to simply repeat the lie.3 Psychologists call this the illusory truth effect. It’s been called a glitch in the human psyche.

That is the exact idea behind the word meditate. Meditating is taking a thought—in our case a Bible verse or a declaration based on God’s Word—and chewing on it, then swallowing it, then bringing it back to mind and chewing on it some more. Then we swallow it again, then bring it back to mind and chew on it more. We do that over and over and over. We aren’t talking about casual Bible reading; we mean repeatedly taking in every word, the meaning, and the context.

By God’s grace, he found me and saved me.

Our frame is how we view things. It’s the cognitive bias through which we look at and interpret what’s happening. Reframing is when we decide we are not going to hang on to old perceptions that have worked against us. We are going to choose a different, more godly, more productive way of thinking.

Jesus’ clear example, detailed for us in Matthew 4, is why it is essential that we know the Bible.

Well, why do cows ruminate on their cud? Because it allows them to get the maximum amount of nutrition out of the grass. Why do we meditate on God’s truth and God’s love and God’s great deeds? One reason is because it allows us to get the maximum amount of spiritual nutrition out of our godly thoughts.

The journey to your destiny starts with your thoughts. The right thoughts lead to the right life. Automatically. Zig Ziglar said, “Repetition is the mother of learning and the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment.

Christianity has never been about behavior modification; it’s about life transformation.

Social psychologists have a name for taking control of how we perceive things. They call it cognitive reframing.6 It’s when we learn to identify and correct irrational thinking. We could say this happens when we unbias our bias.

quickly discovered I could not speak French and found myself doing a bad Pepé Le Pew impersonation, saying with a pathetic French accent, “Oh, mon chéri. The devotion. The longing. How about you stop resisting me and I’ll stop resisting you?” (If you’re under, say, thirtyish, just search for “Pepé Le Pew” on YouTube for your animated enlightenment.)

The verb tense of “take captive” in the original language of the Bible implies a repeated and continuous action.

Cows get a mouthful of grass, chew it up, swallow it, throw it back up in their mouths, chew it some more, swallow it again, throw it back up into their mouths again, chew it some more, swallow it again, throw it back up again, chew it more, swallow it again. They do this over and over and over. That is what it means to ruminate.

In Joshua 1:8, Psalm 1:2, and at least six other passages in the Psalms, God tells us to ruminate. The word meditate in these verses is the same as the word ruminate. What does ruminate mean? Rumination is what cows do with their cud. (Sorry, this is where things get weird.)

The good news is that God is ready to renew our minds by leading us to “a knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 2:25). Why? So we can “come to [our] senses and escape from the trap of the devil

Social psychologists have a name for our distorted lenses. They call it a cognitive bias. The term refers to a standardized, consistent pattern of deviating from reality in how we see and process things. If you have a cognitive bias, you create a subjective reality. That construction of your reality, not actual reality, will dictate how you respond and behave in the world.5

Understand this: Satan is your enemy, and every day he is prowling around (1 Peter 5:8), watching you, looking for a place where you might believe a lie.

Eastern meditation is an emptying of your mind. What I’m suggesting—what the Bible calls for—is the opposite. Christian meditation is filling your mind with God’s truth, being strategic and deliberate about what you allow into your mind.

As the psalmist often wrote (Ps. 42:5, for example), I am wrestling with my thoughts. I am battling feelings of overwhelming anxiety because I have said yes to too many things and overcommitted myself again.