Strongholds Must Fall, Part 1

There's some strongholds in your life that maybe you didn't choose. They were handed down to you. Maybe it wasn't purposeful, but here you are.

There's some thoughts you've been thinking that control so much of who you are—your emotions, your relationships, your spiritual journey in ways that you don't…you don't fully see are being controlled by a stronghold, a lie that you’ve believed and you're living your life by, but because of the power of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit, that stronghold can fall today.

Paul writes about this in 2 Corinthians chapter 10, and he says, “For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does.” (NIV) So, there is a war we're a part of. May not seem like it. It may not feel like it. You might be treating your life like it's on a playground, but it's really on a battleground. “And the weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, the weapons we fight with, they have divine power to demolish strongholds”—these spiritual weapons that we've been given. So, “we demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God.” And here it is: “We take captive every thought and we make it obedient to Christ.”

And so, we're in this series called ‘Every Thought Captive,’ and what we're learning together is that our thoughts shape our lives. They determine so much of who we are, and God will transform us when we align our thoughts with him.

How do we do that? Well, we take our thoughts captive. It doesn't just mean we stop thinking certain things. It means we identify thoughts we've been thinking, and we wrestle them to the ground, and we interrogate them, and we ask ourselves some questions about the thoughts 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 know that maybe thought this way, where I picked up on it from them?

And we start to interrogate our thoughts so that we can take them captive. Because otherwise, our thoughts form these neural pathways that become strongholds, and that's the word Paul uses here as a word picture, the stronghold. And in ancient days, that word picture would have been immediately understood.

A stronghold in the ancient world was this fortress. It was built on the highest and most defensible point in the city. It had thick walls, reinforced gates. It was designed to be impenetrable. It was considered to be too strong to be brought down. And Paul uses this language to talk about the thoughts that are on repeat in our minds, these lies that we are living our lives by. Strongholds that are so entrenched and so fortified, they seem impossible to defeat.

And so, what we're going to do in the next few minutes is we're going to diagnose some strongholds in your life and in my life. And I'm going to spend a little bit more time doing some diagnostic work than I might usually do. Because the thing about strongholds is they've been a part—for many of us—they've been a part of our lives for so long, we have a hard time seeing them. We have a hard time identifying them. They just feel a part of who we are.

So, first let's talk about some characteristics of a stronghold, how you know you're dealing with a stronghold. One, they feel unassailable. You know you're dealing with a stronghold when you'll use language like this, you'll say, It's just the way I am. It's just how I feel. I've always been this way. It's just how I think.

And when you find yourself using identity language to excuse a behavior or routine in your life, it's a good…it's a good chance you're dealing with a stronghold. So, here's what it looks like. You say, I know I shouldn't worry so much, but you got to understand, I've always been an anxious person. It's just the way I'm wired. Stronghold. I know I shouldn't be such a slave to some of my sexual desires, but I just feel like this is the way God made me. I don't feel like I can really do anything about it. Stronghold.

When you hear yourself making statements like this, you are identifying a stronghold. It's something that's become so entrenched in your identity that changing it feels impossible. It's just who you are.

Second characteristic of a stronghold is they're built on lies. A stronghold is a lie that we live our lives by. And so, every stronghold has at its foundation, a lie that we've bought into. And I'm going to give you just three categories of lies that tend to make up strongholds. These are broad categories, and I'll give you some examples for each category of lies.

There are lies about God. He doesn't really care about me. Look, if you believe this lie, if this thought is a stronghold for you, I mean, it's going to affect your spiritual life in every way. If you were convinced that, yeah, there's a God, but he doesn't care about me. Or if God loved me, my life would be easier. Or I've messed up too much for God to forgive me.

So, there's these lies about God. Another category would be lies about yourself. Just thoughts that you've thought about yourself so much it's created the stronghold. Like, I'm not worthy of love. And maybe that comes from some abandonment or some rejection when you were young, and that got established in your life, and now that stronghold, I mean, you filter almost everything through this lie. I'm not worthy of love, or I always mess things up, or I'm too broken to be used by God. It’s a stronghold of shame.

Another category of lies would be lies about life. I have to control everything or it'll fall apart. Like, if it's not done, my way won't be done, or I've got to be in charge of everything. And the thought of you not controlling something just has created all kinds of anxiety. My desires are meant to be satisfied. I wouldn't have this desire if it didn't have to be satisfied. It's just how I feel. I can't trust anyone. You have these lies that have become a stronghold in your life.

Now, look, the enemy is brilliant at mixing just enough truth with lies to make it believable. So yeah, you've made mistakes. That's true. What's not true is that that means you're worthless. Yeah, life can be difficult. That's true. Life can be really hard. What's not true, is that it doesn't mean God doesn't care about you. And yeah, people will disappoint you for sure. They'll disappoint you. That doesn't mean that nobody can be trusted. And here's what a stronghold will do. A stronghold will take a kernel of truth and then build a fortress of lies around it.

Third characteristic of a stronghold is they resist truth. One of the ways you know you're up against a stronghold is you hear a truth that should be freeing and instead, it feels threatening. And so, you hear these truths about God's provision and you're threatened by it. You're immediately defensive and you're like, Well, that's…that's not how it's going to work for me. That's not going to apply that way in my life.

Or you hear somebody give a testimony about God's faithfulness and you immediately say, Well, he can't work things out for the good in my life; things are too broken. It's too late for that. You hear God’s Word speak on a subject that's really personal like sexuality or money, and you're immediately defensive about it. You immediately resist. That's how you know you're up against a stronghold. Truth…truth should feel liberating. The truth is what sets you free. Truth should feel liberating. So, when truth feels threatening: stronghold. It’s because it's coming up against this stronghold in your life.

Four, they govern our behavior. Strongholds don't just affect how you think, they determine what you do. You'll find yourself acting out in ways that you don't even want to. You're not even sure where it came from. And it's obvious it's against what's best for you, but you're still doing it. And that's because you've got this stronghold that needs to be torn down because it's…you're trying to deal with behavior modification to change your behaviors.

But this stronghold, this way of thinking that has just gotten reinforced again and again is what's dictating the direction that you're going. And so, if you've got a stronghold of rejection in your life, well, you'll end up doing things that make no sense. Like, you'll sabotage really good relationships because you're expecting to be rejected. You're expecting to be abandoned, and you're not going to put yourself in a vulnerable place to be disappointed in that way because of this stronghold.

If you've got the stronghold of control, then you'll micromanage everything and create the very chaos you were so desperate to prevent. If you've got a stronghold of unworthiness, it'll show up in your life by you working yourself to death trying to earn love or by giving up completely because, what's the point? You're just going to blow it anyway.

And Paul, I think, understood all of this. I think it's what he's talking about in Romans 7 when he says, “I don't understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” He's recognizing that sometimes his behavior and his actions go against what he wants. Why? It's because there is this stronghold in his life, in my life, that we are living from without even recognizing it or knowing it.

And neuroscience helps us understand this. So, this is how neuroscience and strongholds and Scripture come together. What Paul calls a stronghold, neuroscience would call a neural pathway. That your mind has some trails that have been established and the first time a thought goes through that trail, it’s knocking away bushes and trees and clearing space.

But every thought you think is like a new hiker going down that trail. And the more thoughts you think, the more times you think it, the more hikers go through that trail and eventually that trail becomes a road, becomes a highway. Because the more a thought is repeated, the more that neural pathway is established or Scripturally, the stronger that stronghold becomes.

Dr. Donald Hebb, a neuroscientist, discovered a principle that's known as Hebb’s law to help us understand this. Hebb’s law would say that neurons that fire together wire together, meaning that every time you think the same thought, you are strengthening a neural pathway, and if you think that thought enough times, it's where almost every thought you have gets sent down that pathway.

So, let's say you have this thought that gets seeded in your mind, maybe before you even remember, that says, I'm not enough. I'm not enough. And you think that thought, and you think it again and you think it 10,000 times, and now that thought has created a highway that is affecting everything you do, every relationship you have. It's affecting all the emotions that you're trying to monitor and understand. It's all coming from this one superhighway that got established. And so, I want to spend some time just identifying some of those strongholds.

And so, as I talked through this next section, what I'd love to do is just challenge you to identify one or two strongholds in your life, some lies that you've believed. Maybe you don't recognize it as such, but just some things that have been determining the direction of your life, some thoughts that you think subconsciously that you're going to really pay attention to. I just want to talk about where these strongholds come from as a way to help us identify them in our own lives.

First, they come from early and frequent thinking, early and often thinking. When you are young, your brain, my brain is when it's the most plastic; it's the most moldable. And there's some strongholds that were passed down to us that we never wanted, and we didn't intentionally choose.

Second is cognitive reinforcement. This is how some strongholds in your life have been formed. It's your instinct and my instinct to surround ourselves with voices and opinions that reinforce thoughts that we've had for a while. Cognitive reinforcement or sometimes confirmation bias would be another way to talk about this is what we naturally do when we start looking for information and interpretation that reinforces a thought that we've had.

And we stay away from information and interpretation that might challenge a thought that we've been thinking. So okay, let's say the thought that you've had is people always let me down. If that's a stronghold in your life then confirmation bias will lead you to, in a relationship, look for ways that that's true while ignoring ways it's not.

Thirdly is emotional association. Our thoughts are strongly connected to emotions when it comes to forming lasting patterns. This is why thoughts that you have during a time of trauma or rejection or intense loss or intense grief will create—without you even knowing it—will create a stronghold. That a thought that you have during an intense time of loss or grief or something traumatic will create a stronghold even though you haven't thought it repeatedly, it gets connected to that emotion and that pathway gets established.

And so, one painful rejection can create a stronghold that says: I'm not lovable, and it will have a grip on your heart. One traumatic event can build a stronghold that says: People just don't understand me, nobody understands me, and it'll cause you to build walls around your life.

Fourth is generational patterns. Some strongholds are passed down through families, not genetically, but through repeated patterns of thinking, of speaking, of believing. And it just gets transmitted from child to parent, from child to parent. This is why some of you, you said to yourself, I can tell you one thing, I'm not going to handle stress the way my mom does or the way my dad does. And yet when you're stressed, you find yourself doing it.

There's an old illustration, it's been around for a while, that I think perfectly illustrates what it looks like when strongholds get passed…strongholds get passed down generationally. Story goes like this, that there was a young couple on their first Thanksgiving together. The new bride was preparing the Thanksgiving turkey, and the husband was watching as she did it.

And he watched as she cut off both ends of the turkey, stuck it in the pan, and then put it in the oven. The husband says to the wife, “Why did you do that? Why'd you cut up both ends of the turkey? It's perfectly good turkey.” She said, “Well, I don't…I don't know. That's just how you do it. That's how you cook a turkey. That's how my mom always cooked a turkey. You cut off both ends, put it in the pan, stick in the oven.”

And the husband thought, Well, that's…well, that's really weird. But maybe he's wrong. Like, maybe that is how you're supposed to cook a turkey. And so, he called his mother-in-law and said to his mother-in-law, “When you cook a turkey, do you cut off both ends of the turkey before putting it in the oven?” The mother-in-law said, “Well, yeah, that's how you do it. That's how you cook a turkey. You cut off both ends.” “Why? Why do you do it that way?” The mother-in-law says, “Well, I don't know exactly, but that's the way my mom always did it.”

So, the next day he calls Grandma. He says, “Grandma, when you cook a turkey, why…how do you cook the turkey? Do you cut off both ends and put it in a pan and stick it in the oven?” And the grandma laughed and said, “Well, yeah, yeah, that's how I cook the turkey because my oven is really small. And so, I had to have a small pan. So, I had to make the turkey fit the pan to fit in the oven.” (Laughter)

And you've got three generations of turkey-cookers wasting all kinds of perfectly good turkey. And this is…this is where some of us are.

Ezekiel 18, though, says that these generational patterns, these generational strongholds can be broken. And it's one of my favorite things about being a pastor in this church is almost every week I witness it, of someone saying, By God's grace and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it stops with me. It stops with me. (Applause)

A person recognizes the way their family has operated under a stronghold of fear, under a stronghold of addiction, under stronghold of control or of anger or rejection, and they say, Not…not anymore. It stops with me.

And part of this is understanding the fifth factor and that is, it’s spiritual warfare at its heart. It’s spiritual warfare. The Bible calls our enemy the Father of Lies in John 8. His job from the time you were born is to get you to buy into a few of these lies, because if he can get you to believe this lie and establish a stronghold in your heart by the thoughts you think then his…his job is done. He doesn't really have to do anything else. The stronghold will do what the stronghold does.

If…think about this, if Satan can get you to think, God doesn't really care about me, if he can get you to say that out loud and think that over your own life, then it affects everything. It keeps you from prayer. It keeps you from believing God's promises. It keeps you from having a relationship with God. If he can just get you to focus on a few failures or inadequacies or insecurities and convince you to believe this thought, you're not worthy of love, then he can create a fortress around your life that will sabotage you from all the good God wants you to have in walking with him and sharing life with others.

And so, this is why when we talk about taking our thoughts captive, we're not so much talking about psychology, we're talking about spiritual warfare. So, what is a stronghold in your life that needs to fall? Can you identify it?

I was at a men's conference, speaking at a men's conference a few years ago. And I sat down at a table with a group of men, and we were focusing on this idea of strongholds and trying to identify them specifically looking at these strongholds that we've had since we were perhaps boys that were affecting our lives now as men. And we just went around the table to share the strongholds.

And so, Joe went first and Joe said, “I didn't think it was okay to be sad.” And he grew up in a home where the expectation was to be happy no matter what, all the time. Real men aren't sad. Being sad is for weak people. And so, when his family dog died and he cried, he remembers his dad teasing him.

And now Joe, because of the stronghold of ‘it's okay not to be sad,’ he deals with lots of loneliness in his life. Why? Because when he's sad, it doesn't feel like it's okay to share that with anybody. So, he keeps his sadness to himself, and that's really isolating, and it's really lonely.