Living on the Edge

Kyle Idleman: A stronghold in the ancient world was this fortress that 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.

Dave Druey: Is there a lie you've believed for so long it just feels like who you are? "I've always been an anxious person." "I'm not worthy of love." "I always mess things up." Well, those thoughts aren't just habits; they're strongholds. The good news is they can be torn down. Today on *Living on the Edge*, Chip Ingram brings to the stage guest teacher Kyle Idleman for an important lesson on keeping every thought captive and why strongholds must fall. Here's Chip Ingram to introduce today's guest teacher.

Chip Ingram: This whole series is about something that happens inside your mind and my mind. Life change actually happens and the root of all life change is in our thinking. And so we need to get the truth in our mind. What I love about Kyle's teaching in this series is I know Kyle. He's authentic. He's real.

He's sharing real life stuff that you struggle with, I struggle with. And then he helps us learn through Scripture and science how to put into practice taking every thought captive so that the Spirit of God can take the Word of God in the context of community and see those areas that need to change in your life and my life become a reality.

Dave Druey: Today's message from Kyle Idleman is titled "Strongholds Must Fall."

Kyle Idleman: There are 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 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." So there is a war we're a part of. It 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. A stronghold. And in ancient days, that word picture would have been immediately understood. A stronghold in the ancient world was this fortress that 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 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 like 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, "Ah, 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 a routine in your life, 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've 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 that's the way God made me." 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 lie.

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 are 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." 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 this 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." 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, it won't be done right." "I've got to be in charge of everything." And the thought of you not controlling something 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." And 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 that 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 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 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 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 in 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.

Dave Druey: You're listening to *Living on the Edge* with guest teacher Kyle Idleman. There's more just ahead, so stay with us. Today we continue our journey through a fundamental series called "God’s Dream for Your Life." And if you’ve missed any part of this study or want to find more Bible lessons, just go online to livingontheedge.org. There you’ll discover a wide array of teaching content, downloadable materials, and daily discipleship with Chip Ingram. Find it all at livingontheedge.org. Well, now let's get back to our lesson with guest teacher Kyle Idleman.

Kyle Idleman: 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's been established.

And so I want to spend some time just identifying some of those strongholds. And so as I talk 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.

And I just want to talk about where these strongholds come from, as a way to help us identify them in our own lives. The 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 are 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.

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 that's been around for a while that I think perfectly illustrates what it looks like when strongholds get passed down generationally. The story goes like this: 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 off both ends of the turkey? It's perfectly good turkey." She said, "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 it in the oven." And the husband thought, "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." "Well, why do you do it that way?" The mother-in-law says, "I don't know exactly, but that's the way my mom always did it."

So the next day he calls grandma, 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. That's how I cooked 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." And you've got three generations of turkey cooks wasting all kinds of perfectly good turkey.

And 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 that of someone saying by God's grace and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it stops with me. It stops with me.

A person recognizes the way their family has operated under a stronghold of fear, under a stronghold of addiction, under a stronghold of control or anger or rejection, and they say 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 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's 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'd had since we were boys that were affecting our lives now as 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 this 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.

Dave Druey: You're listening to *Living on the Edge* with guest teacher Kyle Idleman and a lesson titled "Strongholds Must Fall." Chip Ingram will join us to share some of his own thoughts on today's lesson in just a moment. A stronghold is a lie you've believed so long it starts to feel like the truth. Maybe it was passed down through your family. Maybe it was planted in a moment of rejection or loss. But here's what Kyle made unmistakably clear today: because of the power of Jesus and the Holy Spirit, that stronghold can fall.

And if you're one of the faithful friends who already gives to support *Living on the Edge*, thank you, sincerely. It's because of your partnership that teaching like this reaches people who are quietly carrying strongholds they've never told anyone about. You may never know this side of heaven the lives your generosity has touched. What you're doing matters deeply and we're grateful for you.

And if you've been on the fence about giving, today's a great day to join this team. Your gift of any amount helps us continue bringing God's Word into the moments when people need it most. Your support, whether monthly or one-time, makes this ministry possible. Will you join our team today? To give visit livingontheedge.org or call us at 888-333-6003. You can also mail your gift to *Living on the Edge*, PO Box 3007, Atlanta, Georgia 30024.

You can also stay connected with us beyond this broadcast, subscribe to the *Chip Ingram Sermon Podcast*, available wherever you listen to podcasts. Find us on Facebook and Instagram @livingontheedgewithchipingram. And subscribe to Chip Ingram's YouTube channel. Well, now here's Chip with some final thoughts.

Chip Ingram: Man, that is a subject I never get tired of digging into. Today my buddy Kyle taught about strongholds, those fortified lies we've believed for so long they actually become a part of our identity. The apostle Paul says in 2 Corinthians chapter 10 that we have divine weapons to demolish these strongholds. They are not impossible to defeat.

You know you're dealing with a stronghold when you start saying things like, "Well, you know, that's just the way I am," or "I've always been this way." When you start using identity language to excuse patterns in your life, that tells you it's a stronghold. Here's the good news: these strongholds can be broken. You can be the generation that breaks the pattern.

Ask God to help you identify what are the strongholds in your life and even more importantly, what's the lie behind them. I have to tell you for years I was a prisoner of pleasing people growing up in an alcoholic family until I identified the real issue behind my workaholism and pleasing people was a lie that I didn't measure up unless other people gave me approval. That was a stronghold. You have yours, I have mine. I'm here to tell you they can be broken.

Dave Druey: I'm Dave Druey. Tomorrow Kyle Idleman continues with the next step after identifying your strongholds. How do you actually begin to tear them down? Find out next time here on *Living on the Edge*. Today's program is produced and sponsored by *Living on the Edge*.