7: Double-Sided Beliefs

[00:00] Stephanie: Season 3, episode 7. Today, we are continuing our look at breakthrough engine number two: Unleash Your Beliefs. And also Happy Thanksgiving to our fellow United States of Americans. I said that very awkwardly.

[00:14] Marcus: That’s all right. Yes.

[00:17] Stephanie: Hello, Father.

[00:18] Marcus: Thanksgiving is not a worldwide holiday. It’s an American holiday.

[00:22] Stephanie: I know.

[00:22] Marcus: Yes. Well, hello Daughter. It’s good to see you. We’re getting ready for Thanksgiving. Are you making the turkey this year?

[00:29] Stephanie: No.

[00:29] Marcus: Oh no, okay.

[00:32] Stephanie: No, but I will enjoy being with people.

[00:34] Marcus: Don’t we usually just go to Costco and get like a turkey breast?

[00:38] Stephanie: We do different things depending on who we’re having it with and what facet of community we have. But yes, it is always good to be thankful. I’ve really found myself wanting to just appreciate Thanksgiving this month, all month. I feel like I’m normally okay with rushing into Christmas, not skipping Thanksgiving, but I’m not grouchy about Christmas things happening first. But this year I’ve been like, wait, hold on to autumn.

Anyway, before we jump into our topic, I just wanted to take a moment to let our audience know that we have something very exciting in the works that is our F.I.S.H. courses. It’s the heart-focused discipleship self-paced courses that we have been working on to help people go deeper on their walks with God, to be equipped, and through each of the four elements of the heart-focused discipleship model.

And so the Freedom Course actually released over the summer and that has been out, and we are about to launch the Identity Course. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about the Identity Course?

[01:50] Marcus: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, our mission at Deeper Walk is to make heart-focused discipleship the norm for Christians everywhere. That’s what we want to do. And the core tools for making that happen are our F.I.S.H. courses because they lay out for people what heart-focused discipleship is. And so freedom, you know, is important in dealing with those issues.

The Identity Course is unique in that this course covers both our covenant identity, so P.A.C.T., pardon, adoption, citizenship, title. It also includes brain science of what’s going on in terms of our brain and how it develops a sense of identity. And it’s one of the only courses I know of that combines those things. So I think people are going to get a lot out of it, but not only information, it’s going to have lots of exercises and things for people to do to help them get really grounded in their identity in Christ.

[02:36] Stephanie: So each course is 10 lessons with short video instructions by — I almost said yours truly, which is inaccurate. I was trying to say by my father, this truly. I apologize. I’m tired.

[02:56] Marcus: That’s all right. I had a flashback to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Truly scrumptious, yes.

[03:03] Stephanie: Anyway, we derailed. In the weeds. Okay. So yes. Anyway, just wanted to let you know that that is coming, and we’re very excited about it, and you can check out more at our website, and I’ll post a link in the description. So, yes. All right Father, beliefs.

[03:22] Marcus: Beliefs. Well, that’s a good segue actually because we’re talking about identity and beliefs and those connections.

[03:30] Stephanie: No, it’s true. So I’ll just segue from that to say I think one of my biggest ahas with beliefs was — I learned it in the context of lies — when Satan gets you to believe a lie about God, there’s usually also a double-sided lie about yourself and vice versa. When you’re believing a lie about yourself, there’s also usually a lie about God.

[03:57] Marcus: Right.

[03:58] Stephanie: And that applies to beliefs in general. It’s not just lies. I think what you believe about reality is going to reflect on yourself and God. If I said that right.

[04:12] Marcus: Yeah. And that’s because my identity, my true identity, is who I am in relationship to God. And so God is the definer of my identity.

[04:21] Stephanie: Yes.

[04:22] Marcus: Right, because God is the definer of my identity, any hole, if you will, in my sense of identity is also a hole in my view of God. And any hole in my view of God is going to affect how I see myself.

And so I sometimes picture it this way. It’s like if you have a coin, on one side of the coin is your view of God, on the other side of the coin is your view of yourself. And so I picture it as I flip this coin in the air and I take out an arrow and I shoot and I can’t put a hole just through one of those. If you make a hole in one, you’re going to make a hole in both because it’s going to go through the coin, and it’s going to affect both sides.

And that’s why wounds that affect our sense of identity always also affect our sense of God or wounds that affect our sense of God always also affect our sense of identity. And so when you think about wounds that lead to lies that lead to vows that create strongholds, that wound-lie-vow pattern often will — well pretty much always — some of the lies that come out of that are going to be about myself and about God.

[05:27] Stephanie: Yeah. And I think there’s a third dimension that’s not quite as core as lies about God and lies about us, but I think that if we’re believing lies about us and lies about God, we’re also going to then see the world around us a certain way and start believing lies or have a faulty lens.

[05:45] Marcus: In the same way that it affects our view of ourselves, a Biblical worldview, a worldview is anchored in God. And so again, to whatever extent our view of God is off, our worldview is going to be off, and it affects the way we see everything.

And again, your worldview determines your values. And so if your worldview has holes in it because of the wounds in your life or because even if those are A things you missed, you know, like A trauma, things you missed, if there are holes or gaps in your worldview, that’s going to affect your value system, which is going to affect the way you live.

[06:23] Stephanie: So next episode, we’re going to talk more about wounds and pockets of pain and W.L.V.S. and all of that, but I did want to just encourage people with another T-chart next week on all of that, but for this week, I do want to encourage you. It has helped me since that aha moment where if I do identify a lie to then press in and say, “Okay God, I have identified, this is how I have been wounded or the lie I’m believing about myself.” Did I learn anything about you that I need to resolve and to just automatically kind of press into both sides of that if I discover one side to look at the other. And so there’s a little tip. Were you saying something?

[07:12] Marcus: Well, no, I was just thinking back. You know, I have one of my memories that I’ve  processed on a few different occasions kind of has to do with getting bullied on a couple of occasions, and that wound made me believe things like, I am all alone in this world, and this is all up to me. Nobody is going to come rescue me. I’ve got to do this.

And so where that leaves you is that that’s a classic example of how that one wound is going to teach me something about me, and it’s going to teach me something about God. And so that wounded part was like, well, God isn’t going to come through for you. God abandoned me. I am all on my own. So you can see that’s why these things almost always reflect on one another.

And so in looking back and realizing, one of the things I noticed is, well, it didn’t last forever. It stopped. That’s not who I am anymore. God has brought me to another place in life. I don’t have to continue living as a bullied person, and I don’t have to roll over and let people bully me.

It’s like God has done a lot of things to try to help redeem that and change my understanding of him and my understanding of me and all that. But that’s part of what the healing journey is about, is often the reinterpretation of these wounding memories in our lives.

[08:36] Stephanie: Well, just like when, you know, with our levels of brain function, we can get stuck at different levels. And it’s not always the narrative. But if it’s the narrative, we want to get that changed. And sometimes the narrative isn’t great, but you need to solve other things first and then  get to the narrative.

[08:51] Marcus: We talk about the pain processing pathway. I think we had a session on that before. But Dr. Karl Lehman, in his book Outsmarting Yourself, talks about this. And with it comes this idea that your brain needs to metabolize pain, which is a fancy way of saying your brain has to turn into an anteater, not only in terms of eating the thoughts, but in terms of processing the pain at every level of brain function.

And the last of those levels of brain function is our narrative. So beliefs is like that last part. And so what happens is I don’t find peace, I can’t really be at rest until I’ve resolved the narrative part of the problem. And that’s why, again, this is an important element of what happens; dealing with body, dealing with bonding, and dealing with the beliefs all play a role in helping us get to a place of healing and peace.

[09:42] Stephanie: It’s important as we’re on our breakthrough journeys.

[09:45] Marcus: Yes.

[09:46] Stephanie: Yeah. So I will say then, since we’re talking about beliefs in terms of breakthrough, usually we’re going to need to deal with deceptions, with lies that we are believing as part of our breakthrough journey. So would you help us unpack deception a little bit?

And I will put a framework in place to say when it comes to deception, you talk about deception as hiding elements of truth, like stringing together true things but omitting things. Or sometimes it’s just bold lies, like that’s just outright false. And so we can look at both of those.

[10:23] Marcus: Okay. Yeah. And that’s where I was going to start, is there’s truly two different kinds of deception when you talk about it. One has to do with misdirection, right? Hiding things and misdirecting people. And the other is just bald-face telling somebody a lie, to bald-face say something that is not true.

So you have what I would call bold lies, where you just say, “No, I didn’t do it,” when you know you did it. That’s a bold lie. And then you have misdirection lies where you say, “Oh, well, I saw this person do it and that person did it.” You just leave out things that might implicate you, and so you’re misdirecting.

So the way deception works for most of us in that sense of misdirection is I think of it like an illusionist’s trick. You know, you think about that classic trick where there’s a lady in the box, and you saw the box in half. And what in the world? How did they just do that? It looks for all the world like you just sawed this lady in half. Now, most of us have seen the behind-the-scenes on that enough now to know what’s really going on.

But you go back to when that illusion first came out. You know, maybe 100 years ago, the audience had to be stupefied, like, what in the world am I seeing? Because your brain is going to reflect on three things that are absolutely true, that is this lady, one lady, got in that box, right? He sawed that box in half. Both of those things are true, right? He separated that box, those three things.

[11:47] Stephanie: I still see her head on one side.

[11:48] Marcus: Yeah, exactly. So what’s happening is that you don’t see how you’re deceived because everything you’re thinking about is true. And so this is what makes recognizing deception so hard for most of us, is that the things we’re thinking about are actually true. And so we don’t believe that we’re deceived because we go, well, this fact plus fact plus fact always equals this.

And so the issue here is that there are hidden facts. So there are other facts that are going on here, that if we knew those facts, it would change the whole equation, it would change our whole understanding, and our complete narrative would transform. And that’s why it’s so easy to get deceived and why it’s so hard to recognize when you’re being deceived because you’re just repeating facts, and they keep adding up to the same conclusion.

And a classic one, for example, is this bad thing happened. God did not stop it. That’s true. This is true. Right? I felt all alone in it. That is true. Therefore, God abandoned me. Okay? So as long as those are the only three facts I’m looking at, I will always come to that conclusion that God abandoned me.

So something else needs to enter in, some other fact needs to be presented in order for the outcome to change in our mind. But until I have some other fact, something else I can put in there, there’s no reason for that narrative to change, and a lot of us just get stuck. So now we are stuck in this prison house of the lies that we believe, and we don’t even know that they’re lies because they feel so true because the facts seem to support it.

[13:26] Stephanie: Yeah. Yep. So how can people get away with bald-face lies? How can Satan get away with bald-face lies? Can you give us an example?

[13:36] Marcus: Well, sure, you know, bald-face lies, you know, are again as simple as saying, “I did not do it,” when you did in fact do it, or saying to somebody, “You are a slut.” The devil likes to say that to young women especially or you know, to guys who have sexual thoughts that are inappropriate, “You are a pervert.” And now they go, oh, well, there are facts to support that, so that must be true, therefore I will embrace that. But that falls in the category of bald-faced lie too. There’s also the bald-faced lies of God isn’t good.

[14:19] Stephanie: Right.

[14:20] Marcus: Right. Now there is a spectrum on these things because a lot of times the bald-face lies do end up being supported with arguments that fall into the, well there’s a whole lot of holes in that argument. But sometimes people don’t walk you through the argument and let you figure out the conclusion yourself. Sometimes they just tell you the conclusion.

So that’s what we see in the Garden of Eden. “You will not surely die.” Well, it’s a bald-faced lie. They did surely die. It was death in the form of exile. They were exiled from the garden. On the day they ate the fruit, they were kicked out of the garden. That was exile from the Tree of Life, and they died. And so that was it, and death entered the world because of what they did. So those are some examples.

[15:06] Stephanie: So what would be some strategies to recognize deception?

[15:12] Marcus: So one of the ways we recognize deception honestly is the fruit of the Spirit. And that is if the narrative I am believing is robbing me of peace and causing me anxiety and robbing me of joy and causing me anger, then I need to take a closer look at that and why am I not experiencing God’s peace and God’s presence in the midst of this?

So if I am feeling alone with an emotion, that’s a signal that this is an unresolved emotion. So to the extent that something is unresolved, I’m going to tend to feel like I don’t feel connected to God in this emotion. That’s the bonding part of it. I’m going to feel like I don’t feel really connected to other people in this emotion.

And that means that the odds that I am deceived go up dramatically. And so you have to notice, like, what are the characteristics of someone who is deceived? And one of the characteristics of someone who is deceived is that the fruit of the Spirit does not come easily or naturally for them.

[16:20] Stephanie: And I would also say, like, it can be easy to fall into paranoia sometimes of like, well, what can I ever believe is true? If there could be something hidden or there could be something, you know, and would you have any strategies for that?

[16:35] Marcus: Well, and that is the challenge. And it’s one of the reasons why I have to remind myself sometimes of John, chapter one, we’re told that the light has entered the world, and the darkness cannot overcome it. And that light as truth casts out the darkness. And so it’s the truth that sets us free.

And so this is one of the reasons why we push in to Jesus and say, “I need to know the truth that you want me to know about this.” Because a lot of times we aren’t going to have the full peace we’re looking for until we are at a satisfying place intellectually. And sometimes the most satisfying place we can get to is, I’m never going to understand this, but I trust you to understand it.

[17:22] Stephanie: Exactly. I’m glad you said that, because if we could understand everything — we can’t understand everything — we are not God, but we can get to satisfying places with God.

[17:35] Marcus: Right.

[17:37] Stephanie: And so when it comes to deception, when it comes to lies, when there is a lie, we want to identify it, and we want to replace it. We want to uproot it and replace it. And then we also want to send any spirits that are giving you that lie away so that they don’t keep telling you the lie.

[18:00] Marcus: So what happens is when you get into deception, you are always on the devil’s turf.

[18:05] Stephanie: Yeah.

[18:05] Marcus: So when it says that the devil is the father of lies, what it does and doesn’t mean. Right. It doesn’t mean every time you believe a lie, it’s because the devil personally told it to you. But what it means is that all lies eventually have their origin in Satan. And that means that as the father of lies, they all give him permission, they all give him ground, they all, at some level, trace their way back to him. So you kind of almost think of a mountain and that is where the ice is melting, it’s forming streams, it’s going out, and it might go into a couple of different rivers that all head out there, but it’s all coming from the same source.

And that’s kind of what’s happening with lies. And so what happens is to the extent that we believe lies, we are giving the devil permission to a place in our lives, and we are in agreement with him on what we should be thinking. And that’s why there is a warfare element. Now, that means sometimes simply replacing the lie is enough to get him out of there.

And at other times, you actually have to take back the ground, and you go through that 3C Process of: I confess that I’m believing a lie, I renounce the lie and cancel the permission that’s given, and I command anything wicked, you know, any wicked spirit that’s taken advantage of that to leave, and then I commit this life back over to Christ.

So yes. So how do you know when to do that? And the answer is basically when replacing the lie with the truth doesn’t seem to bring resolution, then you might want to push into the warfare.

[19:39] Stephanie: Very good. Well, before we start wrapping up, I wanted to tell a very personal story. Well, I wanted you to tell a very personal story, which you have published before but that I felt like is really fitting for On the Trail because one of the things, like, we call ourselves on the trail because we are on the trail with you. Like, we don’t have it all together. We’re still doing stuff. And we are on the trail to go deeper with God as well. And as you were considering starting Deeper Walk Ministries, which is not — I don’t know if you need to —

[20:16] Marcus: Yeah, I understand.

[20:17] Stephanie: Brief context there too, but yes, you know where I’m going. You take it from here.

[20:22] Marcus: So in 2005, I lost my position as a senior pastor. I had just enough severance package to find the next thing I was going to do. And my options were to become a counselor, become a pastor, go back to being a professor, or start something new. And I felt led to start something new.

I wanted to start a discipleship ministry that focused on the heart. And so we launched something called Deeper Walk Ministries. And later in 2006, well, actually the end of 2005, a national organization named ICBC International came and asked me to be the president and said, just bring Deeper Walk with you. And so I came to ICBC, and by 2007, they changed the name of ICBC to Deeper Walk, and so that’s how we got where we are today.

But in struggling through this whole thing of, you know, should I launch a new ministry at all? And should I launch something called Deeper Walk? And I was struggling with this because I have a tendency towards dismissive attachment as it is. I have a tendency to kind of be Teflon when it comes to relationships, not as sticky as some people are.

And so it’s always been a struggle for me. I would tell people for years that studying the Bible was easy, but prayer was difficult, that I found it easy to study and get new insights, and I felt the closest to God when I was getting new insights from the Bible. But I didn’t ever feel this great intimacy with God.

And so it felt a bit hypocritical on my part to be launching something called Deeper Walk because it sounded like, okay, I have achieved this amazing intimacy with God, let me tell you how I did it. And I knew I was still struggling to grow my sense of intimacy with God. And I was, you know, journaling about this and going, “God, I don’t. Who am I to run an organization called Deeper Walk? This feels hypocritical. Like I feel like I should be farther along than I am.”

And I remember just clear as a bell, this fully formed thought came into my head, and it was, “I’m not asking you to be perfect, Marcus. I’m just asking you to go on the journey. Just asking you to go on the journey and invite other people to join you.”

And that’s kind of what got me through all of this, all this time, is knowing I don’t have to be perfect. I don’t have to have it all together. I don’t have to have the perfect walk with God. I just have to be on that path to a deeper walk. And that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to let people know what we’ve discovered, what we’ve found that’s helpful, pass it on, and make it as easy as possible for other people.

[23:14] Stephanie: Thank you for sharing. Thank you for being vulnerable, and thank you for following through. You know, when we talk about S.L.O.W. (stop, listen, obey and watch), you cannot obey and still watch what happens. And you obeyed and said, “Okay, I will do this.” And so thank you, and I honor you for that.

[23:31] Marcus: And here we are.

[23:32] Stephanie: We’re glad to be together. Well, next episode we’re going to be wrapping up talking about engine two, and we’re going to be looking at pockets of pain and some strategies for dealing with our beliefs and those pockets of pain.

[23:54] Marcus: Yeah.

[23:55] Stephanie: But for this episode, we’re wrapping up. Do you have final thoughts or should I close this out?

[24:01] Marcus: Yeah, no, it’s true. But I mean, as you can see, I think all of us have unresolved issues that we keep working on the rest of our lives. And I don’t think that God expects perfection ever in our journey, that we’re all always working on something. And so I think that we’re constantly refining our belief system.

And God doesn’t love you more or love you less if you’ve got a bad theology or if you’ve got a flawed perspective on things. He loves us just as much. Our value doesn’t come from getting things right. We talk about how to get things right and whatever just to help people walk in greater freedom. And I think it’s important to understand it’s not where our value comes from.

[24:44] Stephanie: Let’s do this together with God.

Thanks for joining us on the trail today. Did you like this episode? Would you like more people to see it? This is the part where I ask you to like, comment, subscribe, share with a friend.

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