Lies We Believe – Intro

We now begin to turn toward the answer.  How do we defeat this invasive, cancerous sin that not only inhibits our effectiveness in our external pursuits, but decelerates our spiritual growth by plaguing our minds with deep-rooted, self-absorbed patterns of thought?

How do we restore and empower our faith?

If you haven’t noticed by now, the fundamental source–the springboard–from which all the other habits of freedom we will explore emanate, is the Bible.  The truth is in there.  Learn what it says.  Get it inside your heart, mind, and soul, and it will transform you from a slave to a child of God who walks in the fullness of His will and grace.  If you’re already a Christian but find yourself tied up by the cords of this sin, then you need to be set free so you can be the person God saved you to be.  If you’re not a Christian, but know there’s something seriously wrong with the addiction that is hobbling your life, this is where you can begin to find the way out.

This section will help you develop a new way of living as we look at a series of lies the enemy wants us to believe.  Each lie keeps millions of people in bondage to sin, either by preventing them from even admitting they have a problem, or from finding any success when they take the risk to seize their freedom.  Each lie will be exposed and countered by a Bible verse.

The way you build your faith, and thereby expel your current belief in the lie, is to read these verses to yourself, speak them out loud regularly.  Faith will come as a result, as these verses promise:

II Cor 4:13
But having the same spirit of faith, according to what is written (Psalm 116:10), ‘I believed, therefore I spoke,’ we also believe, therefore we also speak. (NAS)

Proverbs 18:21
Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit. (NAS)

Joshua 1:8
This book of the law shall not depart out of my mouth, but I shall meditate on it day and night that I might be careful to do all that is written therein; for then I will make my way prosperous and then I will have good success. (NIV, personalized)

Psalm 1:2,3
But my delight is in the Law of the Lord, and in Your Law I meditate day and night.  I will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither; and in whatever I do, I prosper. (NAS, personalized)

Verses about this idea abound in scripture.  There’s another passage where one of the prophets actually eats a scroll containing God’s word.  Now that may have been in a vision, but the symbolism is still apt for our subject.  We must eat God’s word and ingest it, make it part of us.  Dwell on it; know it; then and only then will we start to believe it and be changed by it.

We must speak the word out of our mouths, audibly, regularly, in order to build our faith.  Why?  Because life is in the power of the tongue.  Speak words of life out of your mouth, and life will fill your heart and soul.  The last two verses up there are personalized (using ‘I’ instead of ‘you’ or ‘he’).  The reason for this is because when you say these verses out loud, it makes it much more real to you when you put yourself in place of the generic third-person pronouns.  God didn’t just want Joshua to meditate on the word, but for all of us to do so.  Put yourself in the Bible when you speak it to yourself.  You may just find yourself believing some of these crazy things after a few months.

That said, let’s get on to the lies, and the truth of the Bible that overcomes them.