God's truth

I saw this really cool picture of Queen Elizabeth II recently. It was when she was on stage at a Live Aid concert in 1985, and she was wearing these cutoff jeans and this short sleeved white t-shirt. Actually, it was sleeveless, and she didn't have a crown on, and she didn't even have a tiara or jewelry. She just looked so relaxed and so cool standing there on stage and ready to perform. I had never known that she had done this, so it was really, really impressive. I was very impressed, and she really got my respect going there.

The thing is it never actually happened. It was an AI generated image, and I thought for a moment that it was real. That's something that our brains can do to us. If you've ever judged yourself and scared yourself, wondering why you've had intrusive thoughts or thought of things that you really are repulsed by or felt that because you had some fleeting thought or negative feelings, unpleasant feelings, that you were somehow causing something awful to happen, I want to help you have peace today. You see, just like that image of Queen Elizabeth was not real, the way you feel about yourself when you judge yourself simply by the messages and the way that your brain and your feelings put the messaging together when they receive it, can be faulty pictures, not actual truth, not based on fact, just mere images, creations that we ascribe meaning to that you think you're seeing clearly when that's not actually the case.

So, here's the main point of all of this in today's podcast. When you think things, I want you to realize that while what you think may be fact may be true, there is no way for your brain to know the only thing that your brain can do is to make predictions and calculations based on information and experiences that it has had exposure to before. So, when you have thoughts, they are not actual things that need to be scary or need to be feared, they are simply chemical reactions. They're neurons firing. When you have feelings, same thing. It's nerve fibers, it's chemicals, it's energy. It is information that your body is encoding and decoding. That's all it is.

It is not truth. Now, it can represent truth and fact and figure that out. The way it can do that is from prior experience, ways that we've learned things before that we know to be true, such as there is gravity. We know that because we've fallen down, or someone taught it to us, or we read it in a book, right? We know things because we've tested them out, or because God's word says it, or because the Holy Spirit has told us. But we don't know things as absolute fact simply because we've perceived them. That could tell us something that isn't true, and we might confuse it with something that is true. Many times, when I work with clients who have thoughts that are intrusive or that they don't want, they fear that they are somehow some sort of deviant, or that they should be punished or put away because they can't believe that they had those thoughts and they're so awful and that couldn't be further from the truth. These are typically clients who are very decent people who want to serve the Lord and who just are very aware of how they don't want the awful feelings or the awful thoughts to hurt anybody.

It's actually the opposite of what they're thinking, but because they make a leap and associate negative thoughts or feelings, unpleasant thoughts or feelings, things that they would never want to think or to feel with a value judgment, they get confused, and then they get scared and get down on themselves. If that's you, I want to encourage you to remember this Queen Elizabeth AI generated picture. You see, I had different parts of information. I had what my eyes took in as I looked at the different parts of the picture. I had my context of what I knew about Queen Elizabeth II. I had my memory of the fact that there was a Live Aid concert or something similar back in the 80s. I was able to think, I can't actually tell if this is true or not, but what I was able to tell was that I was getting information and I was trying to figure out how to process it's meaning and to ascribe to it and figure out whether that picture was actually true or false. Then I put it against other information that I had, and that other information told me that the queen is not somebody who was into casual attire. She was someone who took the monarchy very seriously. Knowing that, I realized this is probably not true, because I used other information and backed it up with facts. I did know from experience, from learning, from prior exposure, and was able to make a more accurate picture.

They are no more real and true as value judgments and accurate pictures of who you are or how situations are than money is something of value. Listen to this. Money is something that has value because people ascribe value to it and put meaning towards it and know what it's worth, how to use it, what you can get for it, what you can do with it, but in reality, what is money? Money is paper. That's it. If we didn't ascribe value to this paper, these threads, this fabric, it would mean nothing. It would just be paper. Same with the chemicals. They're just chemicals. The neurons are just neurons doing their job with energy. It is what we learn to tell ourselves about the meaning and about the picture that we're seeing as we try to put the facts together, or what we perceive as the facts together that can sometimes cause us distress. That's why it's important to take every thought captive, put it against God's word, pray about it, be wise and discerning. Because if we just take it at face value, like I did, that picture of the queen, we might believe something that isn't true. No matter how true it feels, no matter how true it seems, no matter how scared we are of it, how curious we are about it, or how surprised we are, we're simply having a human experience of input and nerves and wiring that God created. There is absolute truth, but it's not something that we can tell right off the bat. Just like with an AI generated image of the queen at a concert, I had to run it through its paces and figure out how I could find what the truth actually was.

That's what I want you to think about. Whenever you have thoughts or feelings that are unpleasant or intrusive or you start feeling bad about yourself for having, I want you to realize that it's not a sin to simply have input or to simply have these chemical reactions. What you choose to do with the thoughts or what you choose to do with the feelings is where there's some substance of something that shows your character and shows what you believe in, what action choices you've chosen, and what you will do. Having the thoughts is just something that happens. Having the feelings is just something that happens. Putting meaning to them is something that happens, but putting meaning to them can be true or false, accurate or inaccurate, and it can cause you peace or it can cause you disturbance.

I've seen this so many times in the women that I've worked with, especially when I work with Christian women who really want to do the right thing and be pleasing to God in the way that they live their lives. These unpleasant thoughts or feelings can really, really cause them a lot of headaches. I want to just give you the understanding that you don't have to have a lot of disturbance because of the meaning that you ascribe to thoughts and feelings. They're just chemicals, reactions, nerves, fibers, energy, and they're your brain trying to sort through and figure out what's what. You get to determine through putting it against things that are true, like the Bible and prior experience, to figure out what you're going to do with it. That's something you can control, that's something you can choose, and that's something that you can take action in wisdom on. So just like that picture of Queen Elizabeth was not actually true, I could have ascribed meaning to it, but I might have been wrong. So, I needed to run it through the paces and tell myself what was actually true, not what seemed to be true.

If you're telling yourself things about yourself because you've had intrusive thoughts, disturbing thoughts, painful emotions, fears, and that you start to make the leap and think that things are going to go badly because you had some fear, or that things are going horribly wrong because you had a thought, I want you to realize those are distortions. There's not a cause and effect that is absolutely true. The only thing that is absolutely true is you're having information nation, and you need to put it against other stuff to determine what is true and what is false so that you can take every thought captive and learn to tell yourself the truth. It'll save you a lot of internal grief and disturbance, and it's something that can help bring you peace, hope.

Go take on the day.

If you're here, you're likely a Christian woman, right? That's like a given, right? And so, what makes us Christian women? Romans 10:9 says that if we confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in our heart, God raised him from the dead, we will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified. It is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved. So when we know Jesus as our savior, then we want to live for him and like him, and we've died to ourselves and therefore we serve him. Right?

So those are like foundational concepts of salvation, but why then do we, particularly as Christian women who believe this and have that power, still end up with shaky voices, feeling like we can't speak our truth or feeling uncertain about ourselves, not feeling good enough, feeling worried about what other people think, having anxiety or physical sensations that come along with anxiety or have mental junk getting in our way?

The reason being, obviously, because we're in a fallen world and we're also in a situation where the enemy wants to come and mess with us, and so we don't want to let him mess with us, and that's something we don't have to let him do. So, I'm going to go through this as we think about those lies that you in particular may have kind of nagging you in the background. Raise your hand if any of those sound like things that go through your head on a pretty regular basis.

Yeah, It's like universal, and it's so dumb for it to be so universal. It's like the enemy is not that creative, right? So, it's not dumb that we feel how we feel, but if everybody is having this, it's like we should be able to see this is not real because I'll bet you can look at all the other women in here and think they have something important of God in them and have something important to contribute. If I were talking to them, I'd encourage them and tell them how great they are. Right? And you guys have done that. So, what makes you any different?

That's the lie of the enemy, that we're different. That's the lie that we're the ones who don't know what we're talking about, we're going to embarrass ourselves, we're not a good enough Christian, or whatever those lies are.

I just want to encourage you that that is the enemy's boringness as far as he's not very creative. It's the same old lies. It's the same old junk. He's all about comparison, and there really is no comparison in Christ, right? We're individuals. He's all about one-upping people and shame and guilt. That's not of God either. When we're aware of it and you realize, each of us realizes that we are not the odd-one-out (as in nothing new under the sun), and that God died for us, and we are saved because of Him, and we have His power, that's where we really can stand in that power.

So, this is a "both/and" thing, right? Because this membership is off of a podcast that's Mental Health for Christian Women. Well, mental health for Christian women is an important concept because there are mental health issues, there are emotional health issues, and there are things like nervous systems that have gotten lots of messages from trauma in the past and things that make us more prone to some of this junk that we're thinking. As a coach and as a therapist, I can say this and also say the other, which is feelings and thoughts matter, and yet feelings and thoughts don't matter. Both are true. They totally matter in the sense that we need to be aware of them. We need to take them captive. We need to be aware of what they're trying to tell us, because God made us with thoughts and feelings, but we can't be ruled by them, and we can't let them lie to us. They are not the most important thing, and they don't define us. When you look at it through that, it's, again, one of those concepts that I say a lot, which is "both/and" because they're important, and yet they are not the most important thing. They are not the truth tellers. They are not the things that tell you your identity. They are not the things that tell you the truth about yourself. They merely tell you perceptions of the experience that you're having in your thoughts and your emotions at that point, but they are not based on your identity in Christ.

Now, it'd be great if they always lined up like that and you could feel confident in your body, thoughts, and feelings. This all lines up in my identity in Christ. Ideally, that would be great, but because that's not how we always live in this world, it's very hard to do that because we do have bodies, but God made the bodies intelligently to protect us and help us. We need to do the "both/and" and pay attention to the thoughts and feelings as well as heal the wounds, get them tended to, whether that's counseling, going to a good friend, having prayer being done over us, or all of them. It's all good, but we need to take that intentional time to heal and to be aware of what we're noticing.

So, in that way, it's important, but here's why it's not the end all be all. First, your identity, your power comes from God. You've probably heard me say this before, but Romans 8:11, says that the same spirit that raised Jesus from the dead, lives in you as a Christian woman, which means the spirit that can overcome even death is in you and in Him, we live and move and have our being. That's Acts 17:28. Therefore, the power of God that is in you and that you live out of is God. You are breathed from God. In Genesis 2:7, it says, then the Lord God formed the human of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils breath of life, and the human became a living creature. That naturally goes into this next one, which is 1 Corinthians 6:19-20: Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit who is in you? (again, that power in you, that breath in you) whom you have received from God, you are not your own. You were bought at a price. So, if you are not your own, you are the temple of the Holy Spirit. And I say this to myself as well: How dare we think that we're not good enough? That's like a smack in the face in a sense, if someone says, no, I've given you everything. I've died for you. I've raised again. I've given you that power, and I know who you are, and you are mine, and I breathed into you. Who in the world are we to say, I can't do it? I'm not good enough? Oh, I should shrink back because what will other people think? Oh, I don't know. I'm too scared right now.

It doesn't mean that we don't have to deal with those things that hurt us or that God cares. He's there. He sees our tears. He bottles them up. He finds us precious and dependent on Him, of course. But at the same time, it's kind of prideful to think that we're not good enough because it's almost saying we have knowledge against what God says about us, and so wouldn't that be sin?

Maybe we need to get out of our own way and say, okay, let's take the stuff that's ensnaring us, those thoughts and those feelings, and instead turn them back to Christ and go, no, I know who I am in the Lord. I know that I have the breath of God in me and the power of the Holy Spirit. So then having that awareness, we get to put that towards our feelings, and that's where we get to take back our power. We get to realize that, as Matthew 5:14-16 says, we are the light of the world, a city that is set on a hill, that cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your father in heaven. So, when we are that lamp and let our light shine, we are glorifying God and that's our purpose. That's why we're here. It all points back to Him.

If you ever doubt whether God can use you, or whether you are good enough, or whether others know better than you, or whether your voice and thoughts and life matters, remember what Psalm 139:14 says that you are fearfully and wonderfully made, that God's works are wonderful, and we know that full well. If you would know that for your neighbor here, know it for yourself; you are that wonderful creation.

When the enemy tries to lie to you and 1 Peter 5:8-9 says that's the case: Be sober, be vigilant because he enemy tries to roar like a lion, seeking whom he may devour. Resist him, steadfast in the faith. Don't be one of those he may just. No, that's that old lie. Not true. I'm going to stand against that in Jesus' name. I know who I am In Christ! The enemy's going to say, she's no fun. She won't play anymore!