38: Beliefs (Building Bounce: Ch 6) | S4E38

(00:00) Stephanie Warner: Welcome everyone to Season 4, episode 38. Hello, Father.

(00:05) Marcus Warner: Hello, Daughter. Good to be back.

(00:08) Stephanie Warner: Good to be with you. Yes, we are officially recording together after your European trip, where you were doing ministry in Austria, and you got a little bit of a vacation too.

(00:25) Marcus Warner: I got to hang out with epic people doing epic things. It was fun. I got to do five days of ministry with pastors in the Ukrainian church in Europe who were representing nine countries. I got to spend quite a bit of time with Andre and his wife Oksana and their whole family and got to know them better. He’s the official kind of Deeper Walk rep for TCM over there. He is on the full-time faculty with them and we just got to hang out a lot together. He was my translator.

Also another, Deeper Walk school ministry grad, Olia was  another translator for us. So it was fun. I got to hang out with a lot of really cool people. And then we got to go on vacation for a little bit. I’ve never been to Italy in my life. Brenda and I got a chance to go and check off that kind of bucket list item. That was fun.

(01:14) Stephanie Warner: That’s amazing. I know, I love you. You texted me and was like, I was just on my morning walk and I saw the Colosseum.

(01:22) Marcus Warner: Yeah, a little different than Indiana.

(01:24) Stephanie Warner:  Yeah, a little bit. Well, I am so glad to have you officially back. We did do a little pre-recording so we could make sure that there was a buffer around the trip, but we are back. It is summertime. Wow, we’ve been up to so much. And I also just want to say, thank you so much to everyone who joined the spring campaign, like this Austria trip. The people there couldn’t have brought Dad in. That was so much of you. Am I right in saying that, Father? Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, everyone.

Well, today we are continuing with our Building Bounce book study. And we are ready for Chapter 6. all about beliefs. In the ABCs, actually before I start us on that, see I’m sorry I’m a little rusty. The goal of this series is to help you grow your emotional resilience so you can thrive on your deeper walk with God. And I do want to direct you to a link in the description that will take you to a free discussion guide. So if you are leading your own book study through this, or even if you just want to have a little bit more focused study as you’re doing it on your own or with a friend, we’ve got a free group discussion guide for you in the description.

So, Father, let’s dig into Chapter 6, “Beliefs”. In the ABCs of Building Bounce, A is for appreciation. So we’ve been covering that with our quieting and appreciation. and B is for beliefs. So set us up here. Why are beliefs so important when it comes to building emotional resilience?

(03:12 Marcus Warner: I think that in the evangelical world, beliefs is the primary point of emphasis I was raised with. Get your mind right and everything else will take care of itself. Get your beliefs straight and the rest of it follows. And I just remember hearing constantly stories of how what you believe affects how you feel and then how you feel affects how you behave. So like, if you wanna change your emotions and you wanna change your behavior, you gotta change your beliefs. And in fact, your grandfather, my father, used to say all the time, people don’t practice what they say they believe, but people always practice what they really believe.

And if you can affect your beliefs, you can affect all the other things. So it is very true, it’s a very powerful engine. But as you know, we introduce in this chapter the idea of five engines and that this is one of those. And then we have a whole other book on those five engines called, Breakthrough! 5 Essential Strategies for Freedom, Healing and Wholeness. And I think that what we’re doing here though is we are taking some time just to dive into why beliefs are so important, why this matters so much. The kind of impact it can make and what are some basic tools that we can use to help win that battle for our mind.

(04:36) Stephanie Warner: So let’s look deeper into the power of these beliefs. So we talked in Chapter 3 of this book about the narrative engine and how our brains will put together stories and narratives based off of things. So, beliefs, take it away.

(04:55) Marcus Warner: So two or three things immediately popped into my mind when I think about the power of beliefs. One of them is like psychosomatic illnesses. When people believe something is wrong with them, they often will manifest those symptoms. And there’s all kinds of studies about this. They’ll do control groups and they’ll convince people that something is true and it’ll end up having a physical reaction based on what they believe is happening. I heard one just this week where they took a control group that were actors and they were supposed to go and interview people. But they told them that they were gonna put a scar on their face.

So they brought in a makeup team and they put a scar on their face. They let them see it in the mirror of what they look like. They’re like, so we want you to do this interview. But as you’re interviewing, we want you to pay attention to how people interact with you and whether that affects the quality of the conversation. And then just before they went into the interview they had the makeup people come in, just do a little touch up so they were ready. But what they didn’t know was they removed the scar. And so they thought they had a big scar on their face, but they didn’t. They looked fine. They looked like their normal selves. And they went in and did the interview. They reported back and something like 80% of them said it was significantly obvious that people were reacting to what was deformed about them even though it wasn’t there.

That’s the power of beliefs. It’s like, I am so sure that this is the case that I see it even when it isn’t there. That’s one example of what I mean. What I believe can have a profound impact then on how I feel and how I perceive the world around me. This takes us straight to the idea of propaganda. I first learned about propaganda and how it works, and actually, this will sound weird, but it was when I was studying hermeneutics in seminary. We were studying, how do you know an author’s intended message?

And we’ve had podcasts about this. How do you know the author’s intended message and there are strategies that an author can use to lead you where the author wants to take you. Once I learned that for the Bible, all of a sudden it was like the lights came on, and like, oh, this is what they do in the evening news. This is what they do in newspapers. This is what they do all over the place, the idea of selection and arrangement. I will select which stories I think are worth being stories. I will select which elements of those stories I think are worth including. And then I will arrange them in such a way to take you on a journey. And so as a result of this, what I can do is I can lie to you effectively without saying anything technically untrue, simply by what I leave out of the story.

(07:55) Stephanie Warner: That’s not always a negative though, like the Bible isn’t lying to you with its selection and arrangement.

(08:01) Marcus Warner: It’s how propaganda works and it’s how bias works. And I tell my Bible students all the time, we want the authors of the Bible to be biased. We don’t want a neutral discussion of the events. We want God’s perspective. What does God think about this? Anyway, I could spend a lot of time on that.

(08:24) Stephanie Warner: I’ll link back to our Bible series in the description if people are wanting more on that. Yeah.

(08:31) Marcus Warner: But just think about it this way, whenever there’s going to be a war, there’s also going to be a propaganda war, not just a bullets and bombs war. And that is because the propaganda has to convince people that this war is worth fighting. In order for a war to be worth fighting, you have to villainize the opponent. So like right now there’s the Iran War going on and so over there they’re getting a lot of stuff villainizing America. We get a lot of stuff villainizing those people. You have to have a propaganda that has to be strong enough to convince you that this war is worth it, because people might die and the cost is going to be great and whatever. So that’s why they always go together.

Well, our brain works this way too. What propaganda tries to do is to get us really angry or really scared. For the most part, those are the two main things that it is after, because those are two high energy emotions that really motivates us to do things. And it’s the same thing with our brains and there are certain belief patterns in our brains that motivate us constantly with fear or motivate us constantly with anger. And they drive the way that we live because we’re always reacting to something we’re afraid of or are always reacting in anger to something that we believe is going on. And we might be partly right about it, but we may not have all of the facts as well.

And so I just point that out because a lot of the deception that we live with is hard to recognize. And the reason it’s hard to recognize the deception is that there are facts behind what we’re believing. And so like the anti-American facts that you would hear in the Iran propaganda, there are some things in there that are true, right? But they leave out other things. And so, you can look at this in any kind of a war setting. And in my mind, this is kind of the devil’s strategy for me in the battle for my mind. He wants to get me to focus only on those true things that keep me locked in emotions I can’t deal with, that drive me into behavior that’s going to be counterproductive to my success.

That’s why I kind of compare propaganda to what an illusionist does. I’m going to show you some things. I’m going to make it really obvious that these facts are true. And then all of sudden you’re going to see something happen you didn’t expect because I hid other facts from you. And it was the facts you couldn’t see that actually changed the whole dynamic of what was really going on. And that happens in our brains all the time. And so what I believe about other people I’m with, what I believe about my church, what I believe about myself, and what I believe about God. A lot of times it’s hard to recognize when we’re being deceived because the deception is in the withholding of certain truths, not in the obvious distortion of the truths themselves.

(11:27) Stephanie Warner: Well, this is one of the reasons why you read over and over again throughout the Bible, meditate on God’s word, renew your mind, renew your thoughts. Take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ, because we need that lens. We need the lens and the truth of the worldview of the Bible to be our standard. So let’s see, any more you want to talk about that from a spiritual warfare level?

(12:11) Marcus Warner: Well, again, because the devil is called the father of lies, we know that one of his biggest weapons against us is going to be in the area of beliefs. He wants to control us with lies. And I’ve thought for ages, that if the truth sets us free, then the opposite is also true, that lies create bondage. And so that’s what we’re after here, how do we begin to recognize lies from truth in the battle for our mind? Understanding that my mind doesn’t know the difference between fact and fantasy. My emotions don’t know the difference between fact and fantasy. And that I will react emotionally to something as long as I believe it is true, whether it is actually true or not. Just like the people thought they had a scar and that influenced their emotions and how they perceived things, even though it turned out that wasn’t true. It’s that way with a lot of things in our lives.

So I remember Neil Anderson writing about this in Victory Over the Darkness. And the three emotions that really stood out to me that he talked about were anger, anxiety, and despair. And he said, anger tends to come because I believe that someone is responsible for blocking a goal. Something I really want, something that I feel like I need to have, or that I’m really invested in getting.

And if you block my way to that, I will get angry. Now, whether you’re actually the person blocking the path to that or not it doesn’t matter. As long as I believe that you’re the person blocking my path to that, I will be angry with you. And so anger responds to blocked goals. So that was one that stuck with me. He said anxiety is related to uncertain goals. It’s like,  if you’re in debt and you’re thinking, oh, I’m going to be in trouble if I don’t resolve this debt. What’s the worst that can happen? I don’t know if this is going to happen or not.? Or I want to be in a relationship, but I don’t think I’m going to be in a relationship. Or I don’t know about this particular relationship that I’m in and whether it should work.

And I have uncertainty about it. The more uncertainty I have about the way I envision the future or the way I envision my relationships is going to cause anxiety. And so beliefs about uncertain goals create anxiety. And then finally, he said, when I believe that a goal is impossible, it creates hopelessness or depression. And so I thought those were really helpful. Now it’s not the only things that create those emotions, but clearly beliefs can play a major role in generating emotions like that.

(14:32) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, and we just point you back to the five engines for other kinds of things that create those emotions, but that’s really helpful. So let’s pivot into some tools. Given all of this and more, seriously everyone, if you have not read Chapter 6 yet, there’s so much in Chapter 6. Get the book and go read Chapter 6.

(14:57) Marcus Warner: I know it’s true. Stephanie was reminding me everything that was in this chapter and I went, “that is a whole day seminar.” It’s like we can’t possibly get through all that in this podcast. But anyway, so read the chapter.

(15:08) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, that was good stuff. I just wanted to linger on, what are some practical tools that people can use to build more bounce in this area of beliefs. So I thought actually we could start with the idea of resisting the devil since we were already talking about some spiritual warfare.

(15:24) Marcus Warner: Resisting the devil can look like a lot of different things. I remember walking across the parking lot when I was teaching college and I just started feeling anxious and I didn’t even know what I was anxious about. I just said, if this anxiety is just an attack from the enemy, I command it to stop. I command whatever spirit is bothering me to leave in Jesus name. And it stopped, like in mid prayer, it was done. The anxiety left and I was like, okay that was it. Now I’ve had other times where I tried that and nothing. That did not fix it. So it’d be nice if this is all you ever have to do when you feel anxious. But it points out that sometimes it’s just the enemy messing with you. And part of what you do is resist the devil and make him flee.

(16:12) Stephanie Warner: Because not every thought that enters our head or every emotion we experience is ours.

(16:15) Marcus Warner: Right. And I remember too, one of the first times I was really aware of having panic attacks. It resolved when I was talking to somebody and actually said out loud something I hadn’t even thought yet. I was like, I am afraid that I put my family in danger. I am afraid that I have made this huge mistake from which there’s no recovery. As soon as I said it out loud, it was like the panic stopped. It was like there was this hidden lie that I was believing that I didn’t even know I was believing.

And it’s one of the blessings of a good counselor that they can kind of help draw things out of you that you don’t even know that you’re thinking. And so for me, that was such a gift because I’d been battling anxiety and outright panic for over a week. And as soon as that came out, it just all broke. And so I put that in a category, resisting the devil, making him flee, and exposing his strategy and his lies.

(17:18) Stephanie Warner: I would love for you to also back up a little bit more with this idea in the book when you talk about replacing thoughts, resisting the devil, and rhyming thoughts. And it also reminds me of when you and Karl Payne teach and talk about the world, the flesh, and the devil, and the strategies from that context. It’s really helpful to me at least. Could you give that context?

(17:42) Marcus Warner: So Karl Payne explains this. So this is just me repeating kind of his material from his book on spiritual warfare. And he talks about the world, the flesh and the devil. He would define them this way, the world is an external force that is trying to induce us to sin. The flesh is an internal force that is trying to induce us to sin. And then we have the devil, which I think Mark Bubeck used to call an infernal force trying to induce us to sin. So we have the internal, external, and infernal. And the way Karl explains this is like with donuts. It’s like if I’m driving by and I see a billboard advertising donuts and all of a sudden I’m craving donuts, that’s the world. I wasn’t thinking about it.

I wasn’t tempted to do this until I saw something out there in the world that made me think this. It is the same way when somebody else says something to me. There’s an external voice talking to me that’s something coming from the world. Karl would say that the solution to that is to flee, we flee things coming from the world. Let’s remove ourselves from that source of temptation

(19:00) Stephanie Warner: Take a different route home, don’t pass that billboard.

(19:04) Marcus Warner: Yeah, it’s Joseph fleeing Potiphar’s wife, right? Young men fleeing the lusts of youth, as he puts it in Timothy. The second one, the internal, I don’t need a billboard to think about donuts. I can be sitting at home minding my own business and go, I could really use a donut. That’s not coming from the world that’s coming from someplace inside of me, it is just self-generated.

(19:37) Stephanie Warner: It could be a donut demon, but it’s often just my own internal thoughts.

(19:40) Marcus Warner: It could be a donut demon but it’s probably my flesh. We have to get t-shirts like, “donut demons plague me.” I think that we need that.

(19:56) Stephanie Warner: So if you have an internal thought that I would really like a donut, but I shouldn’t have a donut right now. What do you do?

(20:04) Marcus Warner: So the idea here is to replace the thought. And I remember as a teenager when this became real to me, because I was sitting there trying not to go a certain direction with my thoughts. And I was just trying really hard not to go there, not to go there. And all of a sudden I read something, and I can’t remember what it was now, but I think it was in James. And it made me think, oh, wait, I actually need to think something different. And so I practiced, oh I’m going to think about this instead. The more I thought about that, I stopped thinking about the other thing. Karl has the wonderful story he uses about if you’re thinking about pink elephants with giant sunglasses, wearing purple booties. It doesn’t help much to say, stop thinking about giant pink elephants wearing sunglasses and purple booties.

(20:51) Stephanie Warner: You’re just reinforcing the image.

(20:53) Marcus Warner: It’s just reinforcing the image. You saying, stop being depressed, stop being anxious, stop being angry, is not all that effective. I’ve got to replace the thoughts that are driving me in that direction.

(21:07) Stephanie Warner: So instead, you’re going to think about..

(21:09) Marcus Warner: So he was like, think about polar bears waltzing on an iceberg as it floats out in the ocean. The more I think about polar bears waltzing on an iceberg floating in the ocean, pretty soon I’m not thinking about the elephants. So that’s a good example of the power of replacing our thoughts instead of just trying not to feel something, and trying not to think about the things that are driving a particular emotion.

(21:35) Stephanie Warner: But then if it’s an infernal…

(21:37) Marcus Warner: If it’s infernal, what he says is that the first two things aren’t going to work. You can try running away and you can try replacing your thoughts, but it won’t work. And so that’s actually part of the test. People ask all the time, how do I know if this is the world, the flesh or the devil? And using Karl’s model, you test it this way. It’s like, try running away from it. Try replacing it. If you can’t, then the answer is to resist. You’re going to have to do something to remove the permission that the spirit has to be affecting you, you cancel that permission and command it to leave.

(22:14) Stephanie Warner: So do you want to move into “ANT-eater talk” or any more on resistance?

(22:19) Marcus Warner: The ANT-eater idea was such a perfect metaphor for how you replace thoughts. And it comes from Dr. Daniel Amen, who has neuroscience clinics all over the country where they do brain scans. A lot of times in his clinics, you’ll find anteaters. I suppose this is why I love it so much. A.N.T is like an acronym or an acrostic of the word Ant,which stands for Automatic Negative Thoughts.

The other thing I like about this is that we’ve been talking about how what you believe can generate an emotion. So if I believe that you are doing something villainous, it will make me angry with you. If I believe you’re blocking my goal to something important, it will make me angry with you. He flips it a little bit and he said that once I have an emotion, there are automatic negative thoughts that almost always flow from that emotion. And so I begin to notice that when I get angry, there are supporting thoughts and beliefs that constantly come up.

And so I can start paying attention to when I am angry, what are those automatic negative thoughts that come up every time I’m angry? When I’m feeling shame and I just want to hide and I just want to disappear, what are those automatic negative thoughts that come up and reinforce that shame?

When I’m feeling anxiety, whatever the emotion is, each emotion will have its own set of automatic negative thoughts that come with it. So his idea was, well, if it’s automatic negative thoughts that are causing the problems and they’re like ants, what if you could train your brain to become an “ant-eater”?  I got to train my brain and I’m going to eat those thoughts and replace them with something else. So the way this works is you start by paying attention to what emotion really is eating your lunch, so to speak.

What emotion is really getting the best of me? What are the thoughts running through my mind when I feel that emotion? Write those thoughts down, and then we can turn it into a prayer exercise and say, God, what is the replacement thought you want me to have instead? And so now I’m beginning to practice listening prayer as well as spiritual warfare, as well as just kind of the regular cognitive therapy, the brain science stuff here. That’s why I like the ant-eater analogy. I like the idea of turning my brain into an ant-eater that recognizes and devours the automatic negative thoughts by replacing them with something else.

(25:01) Stephanie Warner: It’s so helpful in so many areas of life. And I feel like you also introduced the idea of bringing listening prayer into it, which is a great segue into this idea of rhyming thoughts. Can you explain that tool?

(25:15) Marcus Warner: The idea of thought rhyming comes from Dr. Jim Wilder. And the analogy at the base of this is that Hebrew poetry is different than English poetry. English poetry is usually about sound rhyming. Roses are red, violets are blue, I love you., blue and you rhyme. But Hebrew poetry is about thought rhyming. There will be a first line and there will be a second line that sort of repeats on and expands that thought. And so thought rhyming with God, there is a sort of poetry that takes place as I interact with God. And that poetry expresses itself in thought rhyming and that is where God’s thoughts and my thoughts are reflections of each other. It is a very poetic thing. It’s kind of in keeping with the way God wrote poetry in the Hebrew of the Psalms. That’s where the metaphor comes from.

And also I forget the verse right now, but there is a verse in one of Paul’s epistles that talks about this poetic nature of listening to God. When we talk about thought rhyming then, as opposed to saying, I’m going to go through this process and as a result of this process, I will hear the voice of God. That’s a little robotic and maybe a bit of a false promise that says, hey, if you just follow these steps at the end of it you will always hear the voice of God. What we’re saying is these steps or these things can help put you into a position to think along with God. To have thoughts that rhyme with God’s thoughts, to have thoughts that are in sync with God’s thoughts. And so the first time I ever practiced this, I didn’t even know I was practicing it. And that was taking people through Neil Anderson’s, Steps to Freedom in Christ. And realizing step number one, which is about the occult and non-Christian spiritual religious practices.

And you would have the person pray, God, would you bring to my mind any area in which I have opened a door to the enemy by practicing the occult or something like that? And you would rely on that person telling you, well, this is what comes to my mind. And you’d write it down. And so that was actually a listening prayer exercise. Then we’d go to the next one,  step two, and do the same thing. God, would you bring to my mind any area in which deception has been playing a role in my life?

And I’d go through a list of common deceptions and pay attention. What’s coming to my mind as I do these things? And so that’s what we mean by thought rhyming. It’s not like I heard a voice or God appeared in a burning bush, but I had thoughts in answer to questions I was asking that seemed to be in sync with something God would want me to know. At that point I don’t say, thus saith the Lord, but I do say, I feel like God is bringing this to my mind. I’m going to begin pushing into that and see what happens when I start treating that as if it’s true. And when I start treating that as if it’s true and we actually do something to resolve it, does that bring peace? Does it bring the fruit of the Spirit? Does the Bible come more alive to me, or do I actually go backwards in my behavior and my emotions? So there’s ways to test to see if these things really are my thoughts rhyming with God or not.

(29:13) Stephanie Warner: It’s so good and we could keep going but we are at time. Thank you, thank you. I love all of the… even the new stories and examples that you brought into this episode. It’s so fun. Well, we are so pleased to offer this podcast for you around the world. Thank you to each person who partners with us to keep us on the trail. Whether that is in prayer or volunteering. We have volunteers on our transcripts. So if you’re somebody who would really benefit from being able to read things, we have people who are going over the transcripts and getting them onto our website. Thank you to everybody who is sharing these episodes with friends, thank you, thank you. You’re keeping us here. So Father, any final thoughts for this episode?

(30:05) Marcus Warner: It’s just like anything else in life. It’s one thing to know about something, it’s another thing to do it. And even today, I can find myself falling subject to losing the battle for the mind. I don’t stop to recognize what’s happening and then realize, I am a battle for my mind. I’m letting really toxic beliefs take over. And sometimes I can deal with it by myself, but sometimes I need some help. And so I’d say there’s no shame in reaching out for help when it comes to trying to identify what those thoughts are that really need to be taken captive. So if that’s you, don’t be afraid to reach out for help. It’s a battle worth winning.