45: SOUL-L (Part 4: Lies We Believe)

[00:07] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On the Trail Podcast. You are on the trail with father-daughter duo, Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie, and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God.

Episode 45. We are continuing to unpack the five main areas the devil claims a right to be in our lives. Today we’re looking specifically at lies we believe. Hello, Father.

[00:33] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. Good to be back together always.

[00:37] Stephanie: And also, happy almost book birthday.

[00:41] Marcus: That’s true.

[00:43] Stephanie: The Four Habits of Joy-Filled People releases tomorrow, May 2. I love that you and Chris are concluding the Four Habits trilogy with a book for all people. Tell us what your hope is for this book.

[00:57] Marcus:  I’m hoping this is a kind of book that you can hand to anybody, Christian or non-Christian, who needs encouragement. This is a book really on emotional resilience. It packs in everything we’ve learned from Thrive Today and from Deeper Walk about the neuroscience of helping people. It’s a really packed, little, tiny little book.

And so I’m hoping it’ll be an encouragement to people and also something that folks could use in their churches as evangelistic small group materials, or for their personal life. It’s got a bunch of 15 minute exercises in it that Chris Coursey designed to help us all grow our capacity for joy. So, yeah, I’m hoping it’ll help churches and individuals.

[01:46] Stephanie: Oh, I’m so excited for people to get their hands on this book, so we have three ways that you all can celebrate this book release and build joy together.

First, the obvious, The Four Habits of Joy-Filled People. It’s on sale now, and we encourage you to pick up a copy.

We also invite you to join Chris and Dad on May 2 for the free release webinar, where they’ll be talking more about the new book. If you’re listening to this and you’re like, “Oh, well, it’s past May 2 and I’ve missed it,” you can still sign up for the recordings. So that is available.

And then thirdly, it’s never too late to grow your capacity to feel joy because your brain has the capacity to grow joy as long as you live. It only takes 28 days to form a new habit, so Chris Coursey’s ministry, Thrive Today, and ours, Deeper Walk, have partnered to put together a 28 day joy challenge for you. You can sign up for free at 4habits.org.

When you sign up, you’ll receive an intro email and then 28 days of simple joy exercises you can do, as well as some printable calendars you can use for a physical reminder about each day’s exercise. So again, you can find  it at 4habits.org. We’re really excited about it. We hope you will join the challenge.

All right, my father, let’s keep unpacking your acrostic SOUL-L.This acrostic spells out five common ways people surrender ground to the enemy. We’re walking through how to recognize these areas and how to reclaim that surrendered ground.

So we are onto the first of the two L’s. The first “L” is Lies we believe. First question: it is certainly not nice to believe a lie. We don’t like that. But how can believing a lie give ground to the enemy?

[03:40] Marcus: Yeah, it’s a fair question. You know, there are a lot of people who write about lies.: leaders believe lies, women believe lies, you know, so and so believes. There’re a lot of books out there about the negative impact of believing lies in our lives. What we’re focusing on here is the warfare element of believing lies.

Since the devil is the father of lies, what that implies is that if you are believing a lie, at the source, at some level, is this father of lies, and it’s the devil. And so whenever we believe a lie, we’re putting ourselves in the devil’s turf. We’re in his realm of operations. To be even more specific, when we agree with the devil’s lies, we’re essentially shaking hands with him and saying, “You’re right and God is wrong.” And so that’s entering into an agreement with the enemy.

If I enter into an agreement with the devil, I shake hands with him saying, “You’re right. I’m going to believe what you’re telling me, not what God is telling me.” Then I am now giving him permission to a place in my life, and that’s where it becomes spiritual warfare.

[04:44] Stephanie: So how does this manifest? Like, how do people know that they’re dealing with a lie they’re believing?

[04:51] Marcus: There are really two main kinds of lies that I run into. One is what I would call the illusionist, and the other is the bold lie. The illusionist lie is this idea that, if I go to see a magician perform, they are going to do an illusion. What they’re going to do is really a misdirection. They show me things that are true, like the famous one where they cut a girl in half. This girl gets in the box. The guy saws the box in two. He separates the box, and there’s legs sticking out of one and a head sticking out of the other. And everything I see is true. There’s legs there, there’s a head there. The box was separated. I saw all these things. And so what happens is they’re counting on me just looking at all these true things, but directing me away from other true things that would change my impression of what was going on. And so I’m deceived because everything I’m thinking about is true, but it is leading me to a lie.

So, for example, the classic illusionist thing is lies about myself, where I say, “I have failed. I let that person down. I harmed them. I did something bad. I have disappointed people.” All those things are true. And so if I put only those things together, I come up to a conclusion, and the conclusion is, “I’m a bad person. Nobody would love me who really knew me. I need to make sure that I hide who I really am from other people.”

I let these lies come, but I don’t recognize them as lies because it is the logical conclusion of all of the things I’m thinking, and the things I’m thinking are actually true, just like the illusionist who leads us away from some true things that would change our whole perspective, that’s the way the devil lies to us in that regard.

This also works with our view of God. And that is, it can be true that God did not keep a bad thing from happening to me. It can be true that I tried to cry out to God for comfort, and I couldn’t find him, and he felt distant. It can be true that when I needed him most, I couldn’t find him. And so I’m thinking about all these true things, and it’s leading up to one big lie that is, “God doesn’t care. God’s cruel, God’s distant.” And so I don’t necessarily recognize that I’m deceiving myself or that I bought into a deception because the primary things going through my head are true. And so in that way, it’s like an illusionist.

So pop in there, and then I could talk about the bold lies here, but I didn’t know if you had anything.

[07:26] Stephanie: I guess the follow-up to that would be, what do you do to recognize the other true things that are being hidden from you? How do you combat that?

[07:37] Marcus: So one of the ways that you start is that you’re looking for the fruit of the Spirit in your life. You’re asking yourself, “Are the thoughts that are running through my head promoting love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, self control, all these things, fruits of the Spirit? Or am I having a struggle? Am I feeling depressed? Am I feeling angry?”

If I have no internal desire to connect with God, if I’m feeling like hiding from people, if I’m feeling shame, then I want to go underneath there and take a look at, “What are the beliefs that are driving the way that I’m feeling right now? What are the beliefs that are sucking that energy for wanting to get close to God?”

So I look for the symptoms or the fruit, and if that fruit is not the fruit of the Spirit, then there’s a very good chance that underneath there, there are going to be misbeliefs, beliefs that are coming from the enemy to sabotage my walk with God.

[08:41] Stephanie: That makes a lot of sense and makes me think of a discussion about strongholds, which we can circle back to because I want to talk about WLVS here in just a bit. But let’s go back to bold lies first.

[08:52] Marcus: Yeah. So a bold lie is, somebody always says the biggest lie is the best lie, which is this idea that, just come right out and say, “Satan’s the good guy, God’s the bad guy.” That’s a bold lie. Somebody coming out and saying, “Well, you know, you’re just an idiot,” when you’re actually quite intelligent. You’re just smart in a different way maybe than they are.

In other words, somebody tells you a bold lie, somebody will call you a name, and because it’s a bold lie, we can buy into those too. So that’s just a completely different thing. But both of them function like what I would call an internal propaganda engine. And just like you can’t have warfare without propaganda, the devil doesn’t engage in war against us without a lot of propaganda.

His primary focus there is the lies he gets us to believe about ourselves and the lies he gets us to believe about God. So bold lies are a form of propaganda. And he’ll sometimes get us to try to believe bold lies about God, or bold lies about ourselves especially.

[09:56] Stephanie: So you talk about propaganda, which makes me think of things that the world does. So how is the world involved in the lie process? Is it just internal with me and with the devil? Or does the world factor in there?

[10:12] Marcus: When I think about the world, there are two kinds of things that come to my mind on that. One is in 1 John, the apostle says, “Do not love the world.” The way that always struck me was, if you picture the world, in my case like a guy, picture the world as a woman, or like a seductive woman, say, from the Book of Proverbs, the woman, Folly, who’s trying to seduce you. I picture the world as the devil’s mistress, and she is seductive, and trying to get you to cross a line that you shouldn’t cross, and it’s promising you something good if you’ll just cross the line.

And so what happens is, the devil uses the world to lie to us. In this sense, the world is the devil’s marketing agency. It’s like the big billboards that he puts out there. It’s all the things that the devil does to try to get us to look at life his way, or to look at life in some way that causes distortion, so that we do things that we wouldn’t normally do.

That’s why when, like in 1 John, when it says, “Do not love the world,” I think of it that way. It’s like, don’t let yourself get sucked in by folly. Don’t let yourself get sucked in by the seduction or the enticement of what the world is selling, because it’s going to ruin your life. It’s not going to lead you to the good life.

[11:40] Stephanie: Well, hey, we’ve talked about the Wounds, Lies, Vows, Strongholds model before. But as my professors love to say, repetition is one of the keys to learning. So will you walk us through the WLVS model here?

[11:55] Marcus: Yes, it connects and it brings all these things together also, because the world Wounds us, the devil Lies to us, our flesh makes Vows. So you’ve got the world, the devil, the flesh. The idea is that, in this fallen world we all get wounded. And it’s not the size of the wound that determines how much impact this has on us. It’s really the power of the lie that determines how much impact our wounds have on us.

Sometimes we fall into this trap of comparing our wounds with other people. Like, “Well, that person’s so wounded, I have virtually no wounds compared to them. So since I’m not as wounded as they are, I have no excuses. I shouldn’t have had a problem.” But that’s not the issue. We all get wounded, and all it takes is a little bit of a hole in our heart and it’s just big enough for a seed to get planted in there. That seed of deception, the seed of the enemy’s lies, gets into that little place in my heart, and now it starts to grow, now it starts to build something out.

The power is in the lie. And then when that lie takes root, as my flesh now believes it to be true, I stop trusting God, because that’s what the devil wants to do with his lies. He wants to get us to not trust God and to take control of life for ourselves, and that puts us in the role of entering into an agreement with the devil.

So the world wounds us. The devil gets his lies in there. If we believe them, we start making vows about how we’re going to live and in agreement with the devil, as part of that vow, I’m going to do this the devil’s way. I may not put it in those words, but that’s functionally what I’m doing.

The result of all of this is something begins to grow in my life. It may have started out small, but it begins to grow. And it turns into this vine that is growing and wrapping itself around the good things that God is doing. And it creates a different kind of fruit. [stronghold]

So I sometimes picture it this way: It’s like God has planted a tree in my heart that is growing, and good fruit is coming off of what God has planted in my heart. But the devil has wrapped this vine around that tree. And so now I’ve got this mixed fruit. It can be very confusing to people. I’ve even talked to people who questioned whether they were even saved, because they’re like, “How can I be saved and have so much struggle with this emotion or so much struggle with this behavior?” And they don’t understand that they do have the good fruit that comes from the Spirit. They just have this vine that’s wrapping itself around the tree.

Well, the good news is the vine can be gotten rid of. We can get healing for the wound. We can replace the lies. We can get rid of the devil. And when we do those things, we can get rid of that vine and restore what the spirit is trying to do in our lives.

[14:44] Stephanie: Amen.

[14:44] Marcus: A little more complicated, but that’s the gist of it.

[14:48] Stephanie: But there is so much hope to follow up on that. Once you’ve recognized the lie, how do you deal with it and take that ground back away from the enemy? How do we dismantle that vine?

[14:59] Marcus: At the simplest level, we replace our thoughts. So I love how Karl Payne explained this. First time I heard it, I just laughed because it’s right on the money. But he said that if I’m having trouble thinking about pink elephants with green booties and giant sunglasses, it doesn’t do me any good to say, “Stop it! Stop thinking about pink elephants with giant sunglasses and green booties!”

That doesn’t do any good. You’ve got to replace the thought. So he said, “Picture an iceberg floating in the North Atlantic with polar bears on it, and the polar bears are waltzing, and let’s think about polar bears waltzing on an iceberg in the North Atlantic.” The more we do that, all of a sudden I realize, “I’m not thinking about pink elephants with green booties and giant sunglasses anymore.” You get the idea. You’ve got to replace your thoughts.

Where spiritual warfare factors in here is when I can’t do that. If I can’t just replace my thoughts and focus on something else, it probably is a sign that I have a stronghold and that there’s something deeper going on. In one of my books, and I honestly don’t remember which one right now, I talk about the difference between beliefs that just kind of pass through our mind – a fleeting thought, tapes that we have, and voices that we interact with.

All of us have a tempting thought come to us now and then. And that’s like, lift up the shield of faith, quench the fiery dart coming your way. You know, that’s the moment of temptation kind of battle. But then there are tapes that we have. And by tapes, we mean these recurring things that we have to deal with over and over and over again that are like, “Why do I always seem to have this same battle in my life?”

And then the third level is voices, and a voice becomes a voice because it will talk back to you. You can have a conversation with it. You’ll try to tell it to leave, and it’ll just laugh at you. The devil can be involved in all three of those things. He can be involved in sending out the tempting thought. He could be the one who kind of got that tape going in our head. And then if it gets to the point where I can have a conversation with it, that’s like a sign of demonization as well.

And so I start by replacing the thoughts. I start by resisting the temptation, and then I’m replacing the thoughts. And then eventually, I get to the point where I have to do that CCC pattern that we’ve talked about so many times. In this case,

“I Confess that I believed a lie, (even if I’m not sure what the lie is. I confess I believed the lie, and there are a lot of them.) I Cancel the permission that’s given to the enemy, and I ask you, Jesus, to cancel any permission that’s given in the courtroom of heaven. And now I Command whatever demon has been taking advantage of these lies, have been assigned to tell me these lies, I command you to leave in Jesus name. I commit my mind to the truth, and I ask you, God, to show me what is the truth you want me to replace these thoughts with.”

Sometimes I’ve got to go through that CCC process of confess, cancel command, and then I can ask the Spirit of God to help me give a thought that will replace the other thought, and get me back into setting my mind on what is true.

[18:13] Stephanie: That’s really good. Do you want to go as deep as dealing with voices and things here?

[18:21] Marcus: Well, I kind of did. You know what I mean? It’s like if we… I don’t have a lot more to say about that. If I’ve got voices in my head, there’s one of three things going on: I’ve got something schizophrenic going on, I’ve got something dissociative going on, or I’ve got something demonic, or, I guess some combination of those. That’s the way I look at it. Now, I may be missing something, but..

[18:45] Stephanie: Those are the three categories that are helpful to address, because I think we’ve probably talked about that before, but I don’t know.

[18:49] Marcus: On the podcast? I know you and I have talked about it. I can’t remember if we did it on the podcast or not.

[18:55] Stephanie: Very good. How about a couple tools for people? Like, I don’t know. I’m thinking about the T-bar chart that you’ll do, or some listening prayer? Or do you have any strategies for people to be on guard for lies that they might already believe or that the devil is currently trying to get them to believe?

[19:15] Marcus: The T-bar chart you mentioned, is a tool. If I find myself routinely struggling with depression, or routinely struggling with anxiety, or shame, or some other emotion, it can be helpful to make a T-bar chart about that emotion. There’s a column on the left and in this column on the left, you ask, “God, help me to recall the beliefs that run through my head when I feel this emotion.” Kind of like, “It never works for me. It works for other people, but not me. I have a history of this. Nothing is ever going to change.”

And all of a sudden, I realize I’m telling myself a lot of things. Whenever I feel depressed, I’m feeling like, “It’s hopeless. It’s not going to work for me. It’s hopeless because I never get this right. It’s hopeless.” Whatever it is, I start writing down. There might be as few as one lie, but I find generally there are about three, and sometimes there are a lot more if this has been going on for a long time. And so you write down, what are these beliefs that are very commonly present when I feel that emotion? So that’s the left hand column of the T-bar.

The right hand column of the T-bar chart is where I now am going to replace that. Whenever I find myself thinking that thought, I now recognize it, going, “Oh, that’s that familiar thought that I have, and I am training myself now, and when I recognize that I’m thinking that thought, I need to replace it with this new one.”

And this new thought will be, “God loves me, and he knows my weakness, and he loves me despite my weakness.” Just a reminder that this is actually a call to go find Jesus right now and know that he wants to be with me right now. So for me, that’s usually one of the first ones if I hear that first lie. It’s a reminder to me, that is a signal that I need to go find Jesus right now, not a signal that I need to go beat myself up for a while.

And so you have to find replacement thoughts and replacement strategies, and you put those in the right hand column. So that’s kind of theT-bar chart. We do have a lot of these tools and various resources that we offer that are explained there. So I could give more, but that’s one big one.

[21:33] Stephanie: I think that’s a really helpful one. I was just thinking about the fact that so often when you discover a lie that you are believing, it’s usually a two part lie, a lie about yourself and a lie about God. And do you need to dig into both sides of that every time, or look for it, or is it just what God prompts?

[21:52] Marcus: You start with what God is prompting, but it’s not a bad exercise to, if you find that you are believing a lie about God, it’s not a bad exercise to say, “God, am I also believing a lie about myself?” Because lies about God and lies about ourselves tend to be flip sides of the same coin.

When the devil shoots an arrow at me and it wounds my heart, it’s like he shoots it through this coin. Well, it’s going to puncture a hole on both sides of the coin, and so it’s going to have an impact on how I see God and an impact on how I see myself. So if I do find that I’ve got a lie in one of those areas, chances are super high that I’m going to have a lie in one of the other ones, too. So it’s worth looking into.

[22:33] Stephanie: Thanks. So we are coming up to the end of this episode. Next week, we’ll continue working through the SOUL-L acrostic with a look at how the things in our lineage can give ground to the enemy. But for now, any final thoughts, Father, on the lies we believe?

[22:49] Marcus: Well, you know, I have a couple thoughts. One of them is that I used to think that all of our problems boiled down to lies. And I think that was just my western thinking. Like, if we just get rid of the lie, everything will take care of itself. I’m now realizing that lies are one of the engines that affect our emotions.

Attachment also affects our emotions. Our body can affect our emotions: if I’m not getting enough sleep, I’m not eating well, if I’m sick, if there’s something not functioning correctly.

It helps me to realize that if I have dealt with the beliefs as much as I can, but I’m still having issues with things, I might need to look at one of these other engines. Is it my body? Is it my attachments? I need to do something about moving out of my distracted or dismissive state into a healthier, joy-bonded state. And so I find for myself that these things are rarely just one or the other. They’re usually some combination.

But for right now, the battle for the mind is a big one. And I don’t want to make the problem bigger by saying, hey, you’ve also got to deal with this and this and this. But for those who’ve been dealing with the battle for the mind for a long time, I just want to let you know that if you’re still struggling, it could be that there’s some other things going on as well, and that addressing those might be helpful.

Here’s my second thought: the battle for the mind brings together the Holy Spirit in spiritual warfare and our physical brain in a really powerful way. And that is, the Holy Spirit is the spirit of truth, the devil’s the father of lies, my brain is a thinking engine, so all of this stuff comes together when we start talking about winning this battle for our minds and getting our beliefs in sync with God’s Spirit instead of the wicked spirits that want to take us into captivity.

[24:34] Stephanie: Thank you. Yes, I know this is a topic we will continue coming back to again and again because it is very interwoven in so many areas. So thank you for a good conversation, my father, and thank you all for joining us on the trail today.

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