1-Page Summary

Many people live as victims of their own minds, consumed with negative thoughts that seem to control them. In this book, Jennie Allen, founder of the influential IF:Gathering discipleship conference for Christian women, presents a comprehensive strategy for winning the war for your mind.

Starting from the apostle Paul’s instructions to “take every thought captive for Christ” and “be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” Allen uncovers Satan’s master plan for trapping you in a life of defeat by poisoning your mind with self-reinforcing cycles of toxic thought. She then teaches you to escape from these cycles by using your spiritual ability as a Christian to consciously choose your thoughts and replace ungodly ones with scriptural truths, resulting in a spiritually victorious life.

The War for Your Mind

Satan is invested in your defeat, and his primary target is your mind. His mental attacks catapult you into downward spirals as negative emotions drive your thoughts, decisions, behaviors, and relationships. You live on autopilot, circling ever downward into dysfunction and misery.

The key to stopping these spirals is to interrupt them by learning to think about your thoughts, to “mind your mind.” Taking charge of your thoughts is in fact a biblical command, and it begins with the realization that your thoughts, not your emotions, determine your experience. This means you can change your whole life by reprogramming your mind with God’s thoughts.

For help, you can draw on the findings of modern neuroscience about the human brain and its plasticity. By remolding your brain with new thought patterns, you can literally grow more fully into the mind of Christ, since your brain-based thoughts and emotions correspond to what the Bible calls your “heart,” the center of your personal being.

Self-Lies, Toxic Thoughts, and Mental Strongholds

Satan’s attacks come as deceitful thoughts that convince you to believe lies about yourself. These lies fall into three general categories: “I’m helpless,” “I’m worthless,” and “I’m unlovable.” Behind each of these is the more fundamental lie that God’s love isn’t for you. Ultimately, these lies create their own alternate reality, a false mental state in which distorted reasoning seems true.

The author of this book experienced just such an attack on her thoughts after she told an audience of women at a church conference about demonic spiritual warfare. During a break, a woman approached her and warned her, “We’re coming for you. Stop talking about this.” Soon after this, the power went out at the church, and beginning that night, the author was plunged into an 18-month inner battle in which she felt estranged from God and feared that she was losing her faith.

The distorted thought life that Satan’s lies create about you and God is the deepest, darkest stronghold of evil inside you. The devil wants to keep you locked in there forever, and his intention is reflected in the psychological fact that up to 70 percent of all spontaneous thoughts are negative. Negativity appears to be our default setting.

The Key to Freedom

The key to liberation from this mental imprisonment is another thought, the “interrupting thought.” And it’s simply this: “I have a choice.” As a Christian with God’s Spirit living inside you, you have the power to interrupt negative thought spirals and choose the mind of Christ instead. You break free from Satan’s mental strongholds by using the interrupting thought (“I have a choice”) to identify, reject, and replace the toxic lies about yourself and God that are keeping you imprisoned.

In the author’s case, a friend helped her to realize that she had never really lost her faith at all, and that the very idea itself was a lie from Satan. She had merely stopped feeling her faith.

The apostle Paul’s conversion experience also illustrates the use of the interrupting thought. Paul had been trapped by the idea that Jesus wasn’t the messiah and that he (Paul) had the God-given duty to stamp out Christianity. But after the resurrected Christ appeared to him, he recognized the truth of Jesus’s identity and experienced a total spiritual and mental transformation that changed his life. He realized that he could choose to replace the lie in his mind with the truth of Jesus’s real identity and lordship.

Mental Story Maps

A mental story map is a tool that can help you use this key of the interrupting thought.

(Shortform note: To learn a similar approach to “minding your mind,” read our summary of Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Basics and Beyond.)

Fighting Battles

You face three general barriers to victory in the war for your mind: the devil, your wounds, and your sin. These factor, in various ways, into the specific battles you’re called to fight against seven mental enemies. You must learn to fight against these enemies with the right weapons and strategies. As a Christian, you belong to an entirely separate reality. You’re primarily a citizen of the Kingdom of God instead of the kingdom of this world. In learning to think like it, you also have to learn to fight like it.

The Battle Against Distraction

Your enemy in this first battle is distraction, which keeps you from seeking God’s help to quiet the chaos in your mind. You can distract yourself with any number of things, from social media and busyness to playing music constantly and “doing things” for God without taking time to actually meet with him.

The enemy’s basic lie in this battle is that you’ll feel better if you remain distracted. The lie is fueled by your fear of facing yourself and being “found out” by God. This fear breaks down into three sub-fears:

Underlying all these fears is another lie: the idea that you can’t face God as you really are.

Defeating Distraction

The truth that explodes the lie of distraction is that God specifically built us for silent communion with him. This claim has extensive scriptural support, as well as scientific support in the form of evidence that quiet meditation and focused attention produce brain benefits such as relaxation and a younger, better-preserved brain.

Your weapon against distraction is stillness, a state of silent rest in God’s presence from which you can recognize and combat your negative spirals. Stillness with God is the foundation for fighting all of the other battles in the war for your mind.

You use this weapon by choosing stillness and learning how to practice it deliberately. A primary technique for doing this is to reframe your negative thoughts, which have a basic pattern: [negative emotion] because [reason]. For example, “I’m overwhelmed because I have so many responsibilities.”

You can choose to reframe these with a positive pattern: [negative emotion] and [reason], so I will [choice]. For example, “I’m overwhelmed and have many responsibilities, so I will pause to thank God for giving me the strength to accomplish what I need to do.” Use this technique to identify and understand your negative thoughts and then replace them with positive, empowering ones.

The Battle Against Shame

Your enemy in this second battle is shame, which leads you to behave self-protectively by generating an illusion of self-enclosed autonomy. The enemy’s basic lie in this battle is that you can “do it on your own,” that you can live your own life and solve your own problems. This lie is generated and fueled by your shame, your fear that other people would reject you and abandon you if they really knew your thoughts, actions, and true identity. Shame produces a dysfunctional behavioral pattern by leading you to act self-protectively, to push other people away, to refuse help, and thus to isolate yourself and feel worthless.

Defeating Shame

The truth that explodes the lie of shame is that God made you not to go it alone but to be seen, known, and loved. The fact that God made you for community reaches back to his own nature. Because of the Trinity, God himself is intrinsically a community. When we’re saved through Christ and receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, we are adopted into this community. We can also see God’s design for community in the workings of our brain. The need for community is neurologically and psychologically hardwired into us, as evidenced by our “mirror neurons,” which fire when we interact with others, enabling us to share their feelings.

Your weapon against shame is community, a relationship of open, heartful connection with God and other people.

You use this weapon by choosing community, choosing to know and be known by others. You can choose community by seeking to embody Paul’s description of it, which shows itself in such things as comforting others, being kind and forgiving, being grateful, and denying your own sinful desires so that you can serve others.

To choose community, find and connect with emotionally healthy Christians. Confidently ask others for human connection. Learn to say “yes” to people. Show your real self early, “warts and all,” to find out who your real friends are. Learn to “bother” others with offers for help and a listening ear, and let them bother you. Be the friend you wish they’d be for you. Risk getting hurt. And be sure to share “the last 2 percent,” the final, deep thing that you tend to hold back from family and friends. Airing such things brings healing.

The Battle Against Fear

Your enemy in this third battle is fear, which leads you to believe that God isn’t actually in control of the world and your life. Fear’s lie is that you can’t trust God to take care of your future. This lie is fueled by the question “What if?” What if this person hurts me? What if my children die? The stress brought on by this fear is both psychologically and physically debilitating.

Defeating Fear

The truth that explodes the lie of fear is that God controls every day of your life. He always gives you what you need, when you need it. Some fears do come true, but this doesn’t change God or the fact that he’s your unfailing hope.

Your weapon against fear is surrender, an attitude of total trust in God’s goodness, power, and provision.

You use this weapon by surrendering your fears to God. Follow Paul’s detailed advice in Philippians 4:6-7 by replacing your anxieties with grateful prayers throughout the day. Choose to focus your thoughts on what’s true, noble, pure, and lovely. When you feel insecure and afraid, keep asking yourself, “What’s really real?” Keep returning to the fact that it’s God. Pay attention to your body and note any signs of anxiety, and let these guide you to the fear that you need to release.

You can also use the tool of the mental story map to uncover and identify your fears. For every one of the enemy’s lies, find a scripture that directly contradicts it and replaces it. Then ask yourself: Who am I going to believe? God or the lie?

The Battle Against Cynicism

Your enemy of cynicism makes you pessimistic about people and life in general. The enemy’s basic lie in this battle is twofold: that you can’t trust people and that life won’t work out. Below this lies a deeper lie: that you can’t trust God. The enemy attacks with this lie by flooding your mind with thoughts about everything that’s wrong with our broken, fallen world. Cynicism perverts your view of God and wears down your ability to see him correctly. Its source is emotional pain from your wounds and disappointments.

Defeating Cynicism

The truth that overturns the lie of cynicism is that you can trust God without reservation. He will work all things together for good in the end.

Your weapon against cynicism is delight, an awe-filled appreciation of God, his goodness, and the beauty of his creation.

You use this weapon by learning to delight in God and his goodness. You cultivate awe and appreciation of beauty. You meditate on the truth that all beauty—in nature, in art, in human relationships—speaks of God’s own beauty, power, and goodness. Doing this tears down your wall of cynicism and allows hope, trust, and worship to flood your life.

The Battle Against Self-Importance

Your enemy of self-importance or self-inflation tells you that you’re awesome, and that it’s important to dwell on this. The enemy’s basic lie in this battle is that self-esteem is your life-compass, your primary tool for navigating and achieving a good life. We’re easy prey for this lie, because in our fallen state we’re naturally self-absorbed, and our surrounding culture of narcissism caters to it.

Defeating Self-Importance

The truth opposing the lie of self-esteem is that real and lasting joy only comes from choosing God and other people over yourself. God didn’t create you to be the center of your own world.

Your weapon against self-importance is humility, a proper estimation of yourself through recognizing that only God is awesome and that your calling on earth is to serve other people.

You use this weapon by embracing humility through the choice to value and serve God and others instead of yourself. Emulate Christ’s servanthood. Replace the lie of your awesomeness with the truth of God’s. Ask God to kill your self-centeredness, realizing that you’re unable to become humble under your own power. Humility is a gift of grace.

The Battle Against Victimhood

Your enemy of victimhood traps you in an unhappy state of mind centered in self-pity over your painful experiences. The enemy’s basic lie in this battle is that you’re a victim of your circumstances. It tells you that you’re doomed to a life of misery because of the negative things that have happened to you or because of what’s been withheld from you.

Defeating Victimhood

The truth that overturns the lie of victimhood is that your circumstances, far from being a trap and making you a victim, provide all the opportunities you need for experiencing God’s goodness. The Spirit enables you to acknowledge your frustration and pain without losing peace and joy. In Christ, you can fight pain and injustice from a place of reconciliation and confidence instead of outrage and insecurity, affirming God’s commitment to redeeming all things.

Your weapon against victimhood is gratitude, an encompassing attitude with an accompanying practice of thankful appreciation, no matter what happens.

You use this weapon by choosing to be grateful no matter what life brings. You can implement this strategy by meditating on scriptures about gratitude, practicing looking beyond your immediate situation to God’s long-range purposes, and looking for unexpected gifts in difficult circumstances. You can also learn and receive the neurological benefits of gratitude, including improved relationships, increased empathy, improved sleep, appreciation of other people’s achievements, and increased mental strength for overcoming trauma and enduring hardship.

The Battle Against Complacency

Your enemy of complacency traps you in a state of listless passivity in which you find comfort in mediocrity and the status quo while you indulge your own whims and lose your passion for God. The enemy’s basic lie in this battle is that you’re free to live for yourself, to do whatever you want to do. It leads you to focus on your needs, desires, and reputation, resulting in a dangerous addiction to your own comfort.

Defeating Complacency

The truth opposing the lie of complacency is that God has saved you and set you free not to indulge yourself but to serve others, to elevate them over yourself and seek their good. Jesus has saved you and set you free so that your life can point others to the joy found in him. Your purpose in this life is to steward the work God gives, which is to serve others for his glory.

Your weapon against complacency is intentional service, a choice to work for the good of other people instead of fixating on your own contentment.

You use this weapon by choosing others over yourself, by seeking their good over your own comfort. You do this by setting your mind on heavenly things instead of earthly things, and by surrendering to God’s will and obeying him at all times. Choosing others over yourself sets in motion the ultimate positive, upward spiral. When you choose to serve, you take risks for Jesus and begin to see other people’s needs, which leads you to do things for God’s glory and lean on his strength, so you long to worship him more, and your enhanced worship makes you want even more of him, so you take more risks, and the spiral continues.

Winning the War

Having learned to fight these seven battles, let’s zoom out again to consider the entire war and learn the most important lesson of all: what we’re actually fighting for. Winning the war for your mind requires following certain overarching principles that preside over the individual battles.

First, Jesus himself illustrates our way to victory in each battle. The Bible shows how he chose stillness over distraction, community over shame, surrender over fear, delight over cynicism, humility over self-importance, gratitude over victimhood, and service over complacency. The same Holy Spirit that empowered him empowers you, which means you can study and follow his example in each battle.

Second, always remember who God really is, who you really are as a Christian, and the stupendous implications of both. Depend on the “secret weapon” of Christ’s pre-existing victory in all battles and the war as a whole.

Third, train yourself rigorously, then trust your training. Practice the disciplines and strategies you’ve learned in this book. Learn the principles of interrupting downward spirals and reprogramming your mind with Godly thoughts. Do the work of reshaping your heart-mind.

Becoming Dangerous for Christ

This book has a double bottom line: Receive the mind of Christ. Then pass it on.

First, have a singular focus. Have your mind entirely consumed by the mind of Christ. Second, always remember that this wonderful freedom of a sanctified mind isn’t for your private enjoyment. God sets us free in our minds so that we can transmit the same freedom to others. It’s a contagious freedom. Make yourself a conduit for liberation. Spread it to others. Become dangerous for Christ.

Part 1 | Chapter 1: The War for Your Mind

Many people live as victims of their own minds, consumed with negative thoughts that seem to control them. In this book, Jennie Allen, founder of the influential IF:Gathering discipleship conference for Christian women, presents a comprehensive strategy for winning the war for your mind.

Starting from the apostle Paul’s instructions to “take every thought captive for Christ” and “be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” Allen uncovers Satan’s master plan for trapping you in a life of defeat by poisoning your mind with self-reinforcing cycles of toxic thought. She then teaches you to escape from these cycles by using your spiritual ability as a Christian to consciously choose your thoughts and replace ungodly ones with scriptural truths, resulting in a spiritually victorious life.

This book follows a three-part plan. In Part 1, we’ll learn about the war for the mind. We’ll uncover the enemy’s basic strategy for attacking you through your thoughts, and we’ll gain knowledge and tools for defending ourselves. In Part 2, we’ll study detailed battle plans for defeating the specific mental enemies of distraction, shame, fear, cynicism, self-importance, victimhood, and complacency. In Part 3, we’ll learn how to become “dangerous for Christ” by using all of these weapons, tools, and tactics to establish Christ’s mind within us and spread it contagiously to others.

The Problem: Your Thoughts Are Thinking You

Many of us are consumed with negative thoughts, and we’ve bought into the lie that we can’t control them. We live as victims of toxic thinking, trapped in depression and defeat.

This is the spiritual war of our generation, a battle between you and the enemy of your mind (and soul). Your enemy in this war is Satan, whose objective is to prevent you from learning to take your thoughts captive. He wants you to waste your God-given life in feelings of helplessness, because this inner defeat will accomplish his overall goal: to prevent you from doing and becoming all that God wants.

The battleground is your mind. Satan attacks you there because he knows your thoughts determine how you live. This means the stakes are high, since taking control of your mind is the key to finding peace in other parts of your life as well. A famous line from the great Puritan theologian John Owen brings this home: “Be killing sin or it will be killing you.” Applied to the mind, this could be refashioned as, “Control your thoughts or they (and through them, the enemy) will control you and your life.”

Negative Spirals

The enemy’s attacks show up as negative mental spirals. Many people’s lives work like this: Emotions → Thoughts → Decisions → Behaviors → Relationships. Emotions drive everything else down the chain, with end results feeding back up the chain when consequences reinforce emotions and thoughts. When you live like this, your life is on autopilot, spiraling ever downward into dysfunction.

get-out-of-your-head-spirals.png

Here are some examples of negative spirals in action, to illustrate their deep grip on us:

The Solution: Take Charge of Your Thoughts

Your victory in this war comes from the fact that, contrary to popular belief, you can take charge of your thoughts and stop your negative spirals. The key to stopping negative spirals is to interrupt them by thinking about your thoughts.

You must realize that emotions are not primary. Instead, they’re a by-product of thoughts. Therefore, interrupting your thoughts turns off the autopilot and allows you to intentionally reprogram your mind for creating positive spirals. (We’ll look more deeply at creating positive spirals in Chapters 4-6.)

Taking charge of your thoughts is in fact biblically commanded—which reinforces that it’s actually possible. This comes out clearly in the apostle Paul’s exhortations to “take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5) and to “be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). When you act on this biblical command, you give God so much space in your thinking that your negative thoughts shrink by comparison.

Make no mistake, taking charge of your thoughts is challenging. At times it may feel like trying to catch a sparrow that flew into your house and is now flitting madly about. But you must catch your thoughts if you want to break free of negativity and lead the life God wants for you.

For deeply entrenched negative thought spirals, healing may take time. For other spirals, healing may be instantaneous. In either case, the applicable principles are still the same.

Brain Science and the Biblical Heart

Modern brain science can help you to better understand and harness the power of changing your thoughts. You can employ your brain’s plasticity in the service of molding your brain, and therefore your whole life, to reflect the divine mind.

21st-century advances in our knowledge of the human brain have shown that, contrary to former beliefs, our brain is changing constantly throughout our lives. Neuroscience calls this phenomenon neuroplasticity and informs us that our thoughts critically impact its workings. We average 30,000 thoughts per day. So it’s critical that we learn to harness our thoughts to positive purposes, for producing positive brain change.

Research shows that our thoughts may be the greatest determiner of physical, mental, and behavioral health. Thoughts produce concrete physiological effects, such as the well-known negative effects of mental-emotional stress on the body (headache, adrenal fatigue, and more).

These neurological facts mean that through disciplined effort, you can actually reshape your “heart-mind.” You can choose who you will become by choosing to think God’s thoughts. You can literally, physically grow more fully into the mind of Christ, since our brain-based thoughts and emotions may well be what the Bible means by “the heart,” the center of personal being.

You’ll learn more about how to take control of your thoughts, and reshape your heart-mind in the process, in Chapters 4-6.

Exercise: Recognize the War in Your Own Mind

Jennie Allen says today’s primary spiritual war is taking place in our minds. One of the first steps to victory is to recognize the way this battle is currently active in your own life and self. This means you have to begin reflecting consciously on your own thinking.

Chapters 2-3: How the Enemy Traps You: Self-Lies and Toxic Thoughts

Chapter 1 introduced the mind war that envelopes us all. Chapters 2 and 3 identify the enemy’s basic, interlinked attack strategies, exposing their nature and impact.

Self-Lies and Their Deep Source

Satan attacks your mind by convincing you to believe lies about yourself, which are rooted in a lie about God.

Your self-lies resolve into three general categories:

The fundamental lie about God that lurks behind your self-lies is the unconscious belief that God’s love isn’t for you. The source of these lies is both spiritual and practical. As stated in Chapter 1, the ultimate source of all such lies is demonic. On the practical level, painful life experiences generate self-lies, which then become part of you when engraved in your brain through toxic thoughts.

Toxic Thoughts and Their Toxic Effects

Toxic thoughts, arising from self-lies, have devastating effects on your life.

For one thing, toxic thoughts shape your mind, emotions, and responses, creating their own alternate reality, a false mental state in which and from which distorted reasoning seems true. They blind you to the real truth by trapping you in negative cycles that you build whole chunks of your life around.

For example:

Allen has also experienced toxic thoughts that have had long-lasting effects on her life. For instance, she describes the diminishment, shame, and insecurity that she felt when a fellow student in her high school biology class called her dumb. She also describes the residual, lurking thought that her husband didn’t love her after their first fight as newlyweds.

A Demonic Attack and a Downward Spiral

The author’s most striking personal example is her account of a demonic attack that launched her into an 18-month dark night of the soul. It began when she told a women’s gathering that there’s a real spiritual enemy opposing them, served by demons, who wants to steal their faith and make them useless to God. During a break, a woman approached her with a dark expression and said, “We’re coming for you. Stop talking about us.” Allen told one of the security guards.

Partway through the author’s final talk, shrieking erupted in the hallway outside. She later learned it was both the strange woman and her daughter. Then the church’s power went out. It was the most undeniable manifestation of spiritual attack the author had ever seen.

Initially, she wasn’t terrified but on fire with faith. The day’s events overwhelmed her with their confirmation of the reality of God, Satan, and spiritual warfare. That night she told everybody she ran into about Jesus.

But immediately afterward, a downward spiral caught her off-guard. Starting that night, she woke up regularly every day at 3 a.m. in a panic, wondering about the laundry, her kids’ safety, and other things. This anxiety rapidly progressed to bigger fears about whether she was wasting her life serving a God who might not exist.

She remained outwardly faithful and productive, but inside she felt caught up in a war for her mind. When she tried to lean into her lifelong relationship with God, she found her very passion for God eroding under the weight of her toxic thought-spiral. She felt as if her life were crumbling to ash and blowing away like the characters in Avengers: Infinity Wars. She feared she and her life’s work would all vanish and be meaningless because if there’s no God, then nothing matters, and when you die, it’s the end.

She later realized that the whole crisis was an attack by the enemy, but in the midst of it, she couldn’t see that.

Chapters 4-6: How to Break Free From Mental Strongholds

The distorted thought life described in Chapters 2-3 is the deepest, darkest stronghold inside you. The devil wants to keep you locked up in there, all alone, forever. In biblical idiom, the term “stronghold” frequently refers to a nexus of sin and dysfunction inside your heart-mind that’s sealed up and walled off from God’s healing grace.

Satan’s evil intention for our minds reflects a psychological fact: Research has found that up to 70 percent of spontaneously occurring thoughts are negative. Negativity appears to be our default setting.

The author found this confirmed at another women’s church meeting when she asked attendees to identify the thoughts playing in their minds as they arrived. Negative thoughts (worries about finances, feelings of low self-worth, and so on) dominated.

Negative thinking produces a destructive chain reaction:

The Key to Freedom

The key to freedom from negative thoughts is another thought, the “interrupting thought.” It is simply this: “I have a choice.”

Making skillful use of the interrupting thought short-circuits any negative spiral and its accompanying mental chaos and imprisonment because it reminds you that you aren’t really at the mercy of your thoughts at all. You can actually choose the mind of Christ over toxic thoughts. This interrupts the negative spiral at its origin point, reverses the polarity, and starts an upward spiral toward health.

We can take a lesson about this from the way we deal with our children. We teach our children to interrupt their downward spirals all the time, as in a parent disciplining a toddler throwing a fit in public. We remind our children that we love them and that they can choose other thoughts and behavior, that they’re not victims of their negativity. Why not apply this to ourselves?

Crucially, this “art of interruption” doesn’t just give you better thoughts, it gives you more of God.

Also crucially, this ability to use the interrupting thought is ultimately for Christians. As a Christian you have God’s power to choose your thoughts, focus, and purpose. You’re not a slave to sin. Consider:

Below is a visual showing the interrupted and reversed thought spiral. Now starting from the bottom of the chain, you disrupt and change the toxic emotion-thought relationship by choosing the mind of Christ.

get-out-of-your-head-disrupted-spiral.png

Using the Key

Remember, the origin and power of negative spirals goes back to self-lies and toxic thoughts. To break free, use the key of the interrupting thought (“I have a choice”) to identify, reject, and replace the specific toxic lie (about yourself and God) that’s keeping you imprisoned. This may come to you through other people’s help.

How the Author Used the Key

The resolution of Allen’s dark spiritual crisis illustrates this principle. With the help of a friend, she finally recognized the lie that had ensnared her: that she had lost her faith. In fact, such a thing had never happened.

This resolution occurred in connection with a trip the author took to Uganda with two friends to observe a hunger relief organization. At a devotional meeting, one of the Ugandan leaders of the relief organization read aloud the passage from Psalm 139 about God’s inescapable Spirit that Allen had been repeating to herself as a lifeline for months during her crisis. This astonished Allen and reconfirmed her faith that God has to be real. But it also shattered her and brought on an emotional meltdown.

She later told her two friends (who witnessed her meltdown) about her months-long spiritual struggle. Her friend Ann responded with an observation that created a breakthrough: “This isn’t who you are.” Ann told Allen she hadn’t lost her faith at all, that the whole thing was actually an attack by the enemy. The statement pierced through Allen’s emotional chaos and set her free because it made her realize that she had a choice to disbelieve the lie and believe something different.

When the three women got back from Uganda, Allen’s two friends staged a 24-hour vigil to fast and pray for confidence and faith in Allen’s life. Her 3 a.m. wake-ups into panic stopped immediately afterward, when she became vigilant about minding her mind. She realized that she had never actually lost her faith. She had just stopped feeling it.

How the Apostle Paul Used the Key

The apostle Paul’s conversion experience also illustrates the use of the interrupting thought, to break free. Fasting and trapped in blindness after his traumatic Damascus Road encounter with the risen Christ, Paul recognized, with the help of Ananias, the lie that had ensnared him: that Jesus was not the messiah, and even more, that it was his (Paul’s) God-given duty to persecute Jesus’s followers and stamp out this new faith.

Formerly a persecutor of Jesus’s followers, Paul now recognized Jesus as the messiah and experienced a total spiritual transformation that changed the course of his life. His post-conversion life centered on a new reality. He felt himself to be a totally different person (Philippians 1:21, Ephesians 4:24, Colossians 3:10, and more). He was no longer a slave to thoughts, emotions, or circumstances. He chose to live in awareness of Christ’s power working in him through the Holy Spirit. He made the Christian believer’s power to destroy strongholds, arguments, and opinions that oppose God, and to “take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:3-6), one of the keynotes of his preaching and teaching.

How You Can Use the Key

Use the interrupting thought to choose the mind of Christ and escape the devil’s strongholds. Some specific techniques for doing this include the following, all of which you’ll study in more detail in Part 2:

It can be helpful to remember again that this “discipline of interruption” uses what we know about how the brain works, as you learned about in Chapter 1.

You can reimprint your neural pathways. New thoughts physically alter the brain by blazing new neural trails. Your brain becomes what you think about.

The specifically Christian implications of these things are staggering. You can choose to create healthier neural connections that are more conducive to joyful, Christ-empowered living instead of anxiety, depression, and defeat. God can heal even a lifetime’s worth of toxic thought grooves. This positive Christian brain change simply requires a combination of your disciplined effort and God’s grace.

Create a Mental Story Map

To do the work described in these chapters, one useful and practical tool is a “mental story map.” Evil never wants you to notice it. It prefers to sneak in and hijack your mind. A mental story map provides a specific technique for shining light on these unwanted intruders.

Here’s how you make one:

(Shortform note: To learn a similar approach to “minding your mind,” read our summary of Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Basics and Beyond.)

get-out-of-your-head-map.png

The Far Goal: Beyond the Daily Battle

The discipline involved in interrupting your negative spirals, changing your brain, and renewing your mind will likely require a daily battle at first. See Paul’s description of the battle between the Spirit and the flesh, the Christian’s “new self” and old sin nature, in Romans 7:22-23.

But the ultimate goal goes beyond having to fight every day. What we’re after is a new baseline, a new default setting for “normal” in our minds that’s positive, healthy, and God-directed instead of negative and infested by the enemy’s thoughts. The goal is to keep “minding your mind” and practicing Godly thought patterns until this becomes automatic. In other words, the goal is to do what Paul referred to in Romans 8 as “setting the mind on the spirit.”

More Than Self-Help

Importantly, this is not about “self-help” but about a whole new self. Self-help offers a better version of yourself, whereas Christ wants a whole new you, a new creation.

Self-help can be useful to Christians on a limited scale because it recognizes and encourages the necessity of “working on yourself.” But on its own, self-help always comes up short. Toxic spirals don’t just need to be stopped, which self-help may partially accomplish through affirmations and such things; they need to be divinely redeemed, which requires Christian faith and your disciplined cooperation with the Holy Spirit.

Your purpose as a Christian isn’t to think more good thoughts about yourself but to think less about yourself and more about God and others (Matthew 6:33, Matthew 22:37-39).

Exercise: Make a Mental Story Map

Allen’s mental story map exercise brings out the current contents of your mind for evaluation. It provides a useful tool for taking the first step toward controlling your thoughts, which is to become aware of them.

Part 2 | Chapter 7: Heading Into Battle

Part 1 introduced you to the war for your mind. It identified your enemy (Satan) and exposed his strategies (self-lies and toxic thoughts). It also taught you the basic strategy for escaping his mental strongholds. Part 2 builds on this by teaching you how to fight specific battles in this war.

Remember, the battleground is your mind, not individual problematic actions or habits. You are what you think (see Proverbs 23:7). Satan knows this and wants you to believe lies about God and yourself. What you need to do is to shift your mental focus from the flesh to the Spirit.

The Awesome Power of Thought

Every great and awful act in history and in our lives starts with a thought. A single thought that honors God can change the course of history and eternity. A single uninterrupted lie in your mind can produce inconceivable havoc in the world.

Negative biblical examples of this truth in action include Eve’s sin in the garden (which began with Satan’s implanted thought that the fruit was good and beneficial) and David’s sin with Bathsheba (which began with lustful thoughts).

Positive biblical examples include Mary’s submission to God’s plan for using her to bring his Son into the world (her submission began with thoughts of obedience and faith) and Jesus’s choice to go to the cross (which was centered in his thought, “Not my will, Father, but yours”).

Because thoughts are so powerful, it’s important to learn how to become aware of your most commonly recurring toxic thought, to recognize that thought as the enemy’s attempt to imprison you and shut you off from God and other people, and to replace and reprogram that thought with God’s thoughts.

An Otherworldly Way of Life

As a Christian, you belong to an entirely separate reality. You must learn to think like it. This entails a shift away from the rampant consumerism, narcissism, and noise of contemporary culture toward transcendent peace, love, and truth.

This work isn’t about improving your outer circumstances. You’ll still encounter difficulties. It’s about choosing to believe God loves us and is with us and for us even amid hellish circumstances. It’s about experiencing peace and joy that transcend circumstances and come from the higher realm that you inhabit as a child of God.

Your Mission

Part 2 of this book identifies seven enemies of our minds (all lies), names the truths that oppose them, and equips you with specific weapons and interrupting strategies (all derived from the master interrupting thought, “I have a choice”). It’s a course in retraining your mind.

Your mission is to learn to spot the enemy’s lies, recognize when and how they’ve trapped you, and fight effectively against them to achieve freedom in Christ.

Three Barriers to Victory

Surmounting these barriers and winning your battles requires a targeted strategy. That’s what the following chapters, combined with the general instructions in Part 1, all provide.

Your Secret Weapon

Always remember and depend on this, because it’s your guarantee of victory: Because of Jesus’s sacrificial death, all your battles are already won. You simply have to claim the victory and learn to fight from the knowledge and security of it at the start.

Chapter 8: The Battle Against Distraction

The first battle we’ll study is foundational to fighting all the others. The weapon you’ll learn to use in this battle is the basis for all other interrupting strategies and the foundation for all other spiritual weapons and tools.

Your Enemy and Your Weapon

Your enemy in this first battle is distraction, which keeps you from seeking God’s help to quiet the chaos in your mind.

Some typical thoughts associated with distraction include the following. Look for these in your own mind:

Your weapon against distraction is stillness, a state of silent rest in God’s presence from which you can recognize and combat your negative spirals.

The Lie: Distraction Makes You Feel Better

The enemy’s basic lie in this battle is that you’ll feel better if you remain distracted.

The distraction in question is a perpetual inability—or rather a decision not—to spend time in silence and solitude with God. There are many ways to keep yourself distracted, including (but certainly not limited to):

The enemy’s lie is fueled by our fear of facing ourselves and being “found out” by him. There’s an irony here, because God actually wants to be with you in your fear and shame, but these are the very things that make you run from him.

This fear of facing ourselves and God breaks down into three different sub-fears:

The lie behind all these fears is the idea that you can’t face God as you really are. Satan’s hand in establishing such an idea, and also his motivation for doing it, is clear. The enemy hates your time with God because it heals you and makes you dangerous to him.

The author gives many real-life examples of distraction from God, and of its seductive gravitational pull:

The fundamental danger of distraction is that you’re never actually “in neutral.” You’re always moving toward or away from something—if not toward God, then away from him.

The Truth: Only Stillness With God Will Satisfy

The truth that explodes the lie of distraction is that God specifically built us for silent communion with him. As in the example of Paul regaining his sight after the light of Christ had blinded him and then spending an extended time fasting in silence and solitude, stillness with God enables you to see reality as it truly is.

Scriptural Support for Stillness

You can find scriptural support for both the importance of stillness and your ability to practice it in various passages, including James 4:8 (“Draw near to God…”), Galatians 5 (flesh vs. spirit), Psalm 46:10 (“Be still and know that I am God”), Psalm 8:10 (“Better one day in your courts…”), and Matthew 11:30 (“Come to me...and I will give you rest”).

The only way you can consistently bear Paul’s “fruit of the spirit” (joy, kindness, peace, patience, self-control, and so on) instead of manifesting it only intermittently because of toxic thought spirals is to consistently “walk in the Spirit” (Galatians 5:25). And the only way you can do this is by embracing and practicing stillness with God.

Scientific Support for Stillness

There’s also scientific support. Neurological and psychological studies have discovered many benefits that come from quiet meditation and focused attention. These include:

The neurological and psychological benefits for a Christian manifest as a shift in perspective toward God’s point of view. You can see these in the paired items below. Notice that they’re all mutually exclusive. You can’t focus on both sides at once, so shifting to one automatically rules out the other.

The Strategy: Choose to Be Still

The way you defeat your enemy of distraction is by learning to practice stillness deliberately. Such communion with God really is available to you. Remember the master interrupting thought: “I have a choice.” You can choose to be still with God.

Reframe Your Negative Thoughts

A primary way to choose to be still with God is to reframe negative thoughts. The skill has a reciprocal relationship with stillness, in that stillness enables you to do it, while doing it is a strategy for reaching stillness.

The core strategy for reframing negative thoughts is as follows:

First, learn the basic negative thought pattern, which keeps you trapped in negativity: [negative emotion] because [reason]. Consider these examples:

Next, contrast the negative thought pattern with the alternative empowering rewritten pattern: [negative emotion] and [reason], so I will [choice]. Consider these examples:

Then use this knowledge to 1) identify and understand a negative thought, and 2) replace it with a rewritten, empowering thought. The exercise following this chapter will give you an opportunity for practicing.

Reverse the Spiral of Distraction

Here’s a visual that shows how you can reverse the negative spiral of distraction by choosing stillness:

get-out-of-your-head-distraction.png

Exercise: Reframe a Negative Thought

Chapter 8 lays out a practical strategy for reframing negative thoughts by exposing them, deconstructing them, and replacing them with positive thoughts from God.

Chapter 9: The Battle Against Shame

In this second battle of the war for your mind, you’ll face an enemy that wants to shut you off from relationships with other people. Even more, it wants to shut you off from a relationship with God himself.

Your Enemy and Your Weapon

Your enemy in this battle is shame, which leads you to behave self-protectively by generating an illusion of self-enclosed autonomy.

Some typical thoughts associated with shame include the following. Look for these in your own mind:

Your weapon against shame is community, a relationship of open, heartful connection with God and other people.

The Lie: You Don’t Need Anyone

The enemy’s basic lie in this battle is that you can “do it on your own,” that you can live your own life and solve your own problems. This lie is generated and fueled by the shame described above. We’re each burdened with a deep-seated fear that our true selves are shameful, that other people would reject us and abandon us if they really knew our thoughts, actions, and true identities

Shame produces a dysfunctional behavioral pattern:

Ironically, the current generation has actually made an idol out of this dysfunction. We worship and promote absolute independence from others as if it’s a virtue, when in fact it’s the very thing God is calling us away from.

The Truth: God Made You for Community

The truth that explodes the lie of shame is that God made you not to go it alone but to be seen, known, and loved.

A key scripture highlighting this truth is 1 John 1:7: “If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.”

The author learned a critical lesson about God’s plan for community when she and her husband went through the process of adopting their son Cooper from an orphanage in Rwanda: For children to thrive, you have to make them feel seen and loved. Moreover, this insight applies to all of us. The old saying “it takes a village” applies to more than raising a child. We’re “village people,” built to thrive in communities that gather together and share each other’s lives.

God’s Intrinsic Community: The Trinity

The fact that God made you for community reaches back to the nature of our creator himself. God is intrinsically a community because of his triune nature. The Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exists for all eternity in an internal community of loving relationship. It’s the primal template for human relational needs. We need community because God made us that way.

Through Jesus, God provides community by inviting us into his family. When we’re saved through faith in Christ, we become God’s children, and he becomes our loving father. We receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, and we’re adopted into the eternal loving community of the Trinity.

The whole Bible supports the irreducible need for human community. It assumes that those who follow God will live in community with other God followers.

Wired for Community

We can also see God’s design for community in the very workings of our brain. The need for community is neurologically and psychologically hardwired into us.

“Mirror neurons” fire when you interact with others, enabling you to feel what other people are feeling. In other words, our very heart-brains are designed for empathy. This also works negatively, in reverse: Disconnection and isolation alter our brains in negative ways. For instance, severed relationships literally hurt, as feelings of rejection activate the same brain area as physical pain. The popularity and effectiveness of group therapy speaks to this as well, as research shows that such therapy doesn’t just provide emotional comfort; it actually heals.

The Strategy: Choose to Know and Be Known

The way you defeat your enemy of shame and its lie that you don’t need others is by choosing community. In other words, choose to know and be known by others. In this endeavor, it’s important to remember that God’s Spirit lives in you. Trust the Spirit to be with you in reaching out to others.

To illustrate this last point, the author relates a painful past experience from when she started her IF organization. A misunderstanding about her motivations brought public criticism from prominent women whom she admired. She reached out to them by phone, forged a relationship, apologized, and asked for their wisdom. They proved open and accepting. Allen’s risk in reaching out ended up bringing healing and new friends and allies.

You can also find vivid descriptions of ways to achieve real community in Philippians 2 and Colossians 3. According to Paul in those books, creating real human community may look like:

Awareness and Courage

Along with the Holy Spirit’s help, you require two additional things for successfully reaching out to others for community: awareness of what you need and the courage to seek it out. Here’s some specific advice for these:

Find and connect with healthy people. Look for emotionally healthy people, those whose lives show they’re truly following Jesus. See Paul’s exhortation in 1 Corinthians 11:1 to “follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ.” Look for people who show authenticity, openness, peace, and a willingness to share, listen, and grow. Remember that you’re called to cultivate this kind of emotional health in yourself, too, and to share it with others.

Confidently ask for human connections. Drop the discomfort of thinking you’re bothering people. Practice asking until it doesn’t make you cringe. Examples include:

Learn to “bother” others, and let them bother you. Be the friend you wish they’d be for you. For example, if you notice that a friend or family member seems “off” or not herself, straightforwardly “bother” her until she opens up. Offer to pray, ask her to lunch. “Bug” her into community.

Once when the author’s daughter Kate traveled out of town with a friend and the friend’s family, she called home, and it was obvious that she was upset about something. She said she wanted to enter counseling when she got back. Her mother affirmed this over the phone but also talked at length with her daughter, emphasizing her motherly love for her and drawing her out into healing conversation. This is an example of lovingly bothering someone to maintain community.

Also learn to accept the same bothering from others. Open up. Risk getting hurt. Allen says her closest girlfriends at various stages of her life have shaped her, elevated her goals, refused to let her “settle,” and helped her in all kinds of ways through their friendship.

Learn to say “yes.” Say yes to requests for companionship, help, and so on, even if they’re inconvenient or unexpected. Also remember to retain your wits. Learning to say yes isn’t about flinging the door wide open for toxic people but about welcoming healthy friendships.

Show your authentic self early—including, especially, your annoying quirks and weaknesses—so that your real friends will become evident. Doing this and refusing to make yourself look “better” will scare off the wrong people (those you don’t need) even as it brings in the right people (your true tribe of friends and allies). The author describes some aspects of her own “messy” personality as examples of what to share early: She’s forgetful, she’s flighty in conversation, she laughs at inappropriate moments, she asks intrusive questions.

Finally, share “the last 2 percent.” This refers to the final, deep thing that you tend to hold back from family and friends even when you’re otherwise being open and authentic. It could be a long-ago mistake, anger issues, or something else that you feel you need to conceal. Airing and sharing such things creates healing. Bringing your dark struggles into the light breaks their power.

A Christian friend of the author’s demonstrated this principle when she confided that she had been strongly attracted to another man (not her husband) at work and had even started texting him. She told Allen that when she shared that “last 2 percent” at an IF:Gathering, the attraction immediately evaporated.

Here’s a visual showing the negative spiral of shame and how you can reverse it by choosing community:

get-out-of-your-head-shame.png

Beyond the Book

As an important proviso or disclaimer, remember that reading about community isn’t the same as experiencing community. You can’t choose to know and be known in loving relationships simply by reading this book or any other.

The same warning actually encompasses this book as a whole. You have to cultivate the discipline of a healthful and godly mental life in relationship with others, not as a solo act.

Exercise: What's Your “Last 2 Percent”?

In Chapter 9, Allen talks about the liberating value of sharing things that you hold back from others in an attempt to protect yourself from shame. You don’t really help yourself through this act of concealment. Instead, you actually empower the hidden things to poison you and dominate you. It’s only when you bring them into the light of community that they can be healed.

Chapter 10: The Battle Against Fear

In this chapter, you’ll learn to fight an enemy that’s dedicated to making you live your life in a perpetual state of anxiety, robbing you of peace and poisoning your view of God’s providence and goodness.

Your Enemy and Your Weapon

Your enemy in this battle is fear. More specifically, it’s the fear that God isn’t actually in control of the world and your life.

Some typical thoughts associated with fear include the following. Look for these in your own mind:

Your weapon against fear is surrender, an attitude of total trust in God’s goodness, power, and provision.

The Lie: God’s Not in Control

Fear’s lie is that you can’t trust God to take care of your future. This lie is fueled by the question “What if?” There are infinite variations on it. For instance:

The effects of believing this lie aren’t just psychological. We actually suffer a negative, stress-filled physiological response to these mental-emotional “what if” fears, such as the panic attack that the author once experienced when she was safely at home with her family. To defeat it, she paid attention to her body (see the strategy section below) and let its distress—her chest felt so tight she couldn’t breathe—lead her to the buried “what if” from the enemy that was driving it: What if I fail in my ministry? What if I’m not enough?

The Truth: God Controls Your Every Moment

The truth that explodes the lie of fear is that God controls every day of your life. Jesus tells us that “the very hairs on your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are more valuable to God than a whole flock of sparrows” (Luke 12:7).

God always gives you what you need, when you need it. You can see this in Jesus’s parable of the flowers: “Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass, which is alive in the field today, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith!” (Luke 12:27-28).

The huge majority of what we worry about—90 percent or more—isn’t even real. Most of our fears are simply reflex actions by our minds, which exaggerate and misperceive things to weave a fog of baseless anxiety.

Corrie ten Boom’s classic book The Hiding Place tells of how the author and her family hid Jews from the Nazis until they themselves were sent to a concentration camp. At one point in the book, ten Boom recalls how when she was a girl and traveling to Amsterdam with her father, he always waited until right before they boarded the train to hand her ticket to her. She said he once told her that this was like God, who always supplies our needs at the right moment. He told her that even though some of the family would inevitably end up dying, God would provide the strength she would need at the very moment when she needed it. (Shortform note: To learn more about how ten Boom’s unshakeable Christian faith compelled her to rescue her Jewish neighbors during the Holocaust, read our summary of The Hiding Place.)

As the case of ten Boom highlights, we should bear in mind that God’s control doesn’t mean nothing bad will ever happen. Sometimes your fears may come true—illness, betrayal, financial crisis, and so on. But this doesn’t change God or the fact that he’s your unfailing hope.

The case of the author’s friend Jackie, who tried unsuccessfully for years to get pregnant, also illustrates this point. Jackie was profoundly encouraged in this trial when the author and other Christian friends began praying, supporting, and believing for her—not believing specifically that God would give her a baby, but simply believing God on Jackie’s behalf regardless of what might happen.

The Strategy: Choose to Surrender

The way you defeat your enemy of fear and its lie that you can’t trust God is by surrendering your fears to God. The core tool for defeating “What ifs?” is simply the answer “Because God.” God trumps every fearful speculative “what if.” You literally don’t have to worry. God provides for us (Matthew 6:25-34), loves us (Romans 5:5), and chooses us (Ephesians 3:16).

Here are some specific strategies for surrendering your fears to God:

Follow Paul’s detailed advice in Philippians 4:6-7. Refuse to be anxious. Instead, choose to be grateful. Pray to God throughout the day for what you need. Choose to focus your thoughts on what’s true, noble, pure, and lovely.

When you feel insecure and afraid, keep asking yourself, “What’s really real?” Keep returning to the fact that it’s God, which means any apparent threat is ultimately unreal. Dwell on the fact that when you let yourself “spin out” with fear, you’re unconsciously vying for God’s role. Remember: You aren’t omniscient or omnipotent. Refuse to fall into the trap of stressing over what to actually do, how to solve a situation. You aren’t in control. God is. And this is wonderful! Your job is simply to use his power to tear down mental strongholds in the form of lies about yourself and him.

Pay attention to your body, just like the author did to defuse her panic attack. Notice your body’s current state, especially any symptoms of anxiety, such as tension, a tight chest, a headache, or a racing pulse. Carefully trace these in your subjective experience to see if toxic thoughts might be causing them. Use any of the strategies and tools described above to reprogram these thoughts.

Use a variation on the mental story map tool that you learned in Part 1. This variation combines that tool with the strategy from Chapter 8 for reframing negative thoughts.

get-out-of-your-head-grid.png

For every one of the enemy’s lies, find a scripture that directly contradicts it and replaces it. This strategy can be especially effective when combined with the strategy directly above. For example, if you’re afraid of everyone abandoning you, then you could replace this with God’s promise in Hebrews 13:5-6 that he will never abandon you. If you’re afraid of failing publicly, you could replace this with God’s promise in 2 Corinthians 12:9-11 that he takes weakness and uses it for his glory. (Shortform note: Many modern editions of the Bible contain a listing of scripture verses and passages grouped by theme. You can use this to identify biblical thoughts for replacing the enemy’s lies.)

Here’s a visual showing the negative spiral of fear and how you can reverse it by choosing to surrender to God:

get-out-of-your-head-fear.png

Exercise: Analyze a Fear

Chapter 10 presents several strategies for surrendering your fears to God. This exercise leads you through practicing one of these.

Chapter 11: The Battle Against Cynicism

In this chapter, you’ll learn to defeat an enemy whose goal is to rob you of joy and bury you under a mountain of pessimistic gloom.

Your Enemy and Your Weapon

Your enemy in this battle is cynicism, which makes you pessimistic about people and life in general.

Some typical thoughts associated with cynicism include the following. Look for these in your own mind:

Here are some other signs of cynicism. Use them in tandem with the thoughts listed above to assess whether you’re infected:

Your weapon against cynicism is delight. More specifically, it’s awe-filled delight in God, his goodness, and the beauty of his creation.

The Lie: You Can’t Trust People, Life, or God

The enemy’s basic lie in this battle is twofold: that you can’t trust people and that life won’t work out. Below this lies a deeper lie: that you can’t trust God. The enemy attacks with this lie by flooding your mind with thoughts about everything that’s wrong with our broken, fallen world.

This lie is generated and fueled by emotional pain. It’s a self-protection reflex based on wounds—and accompanying anger—from your past experiences, plus fear of the future. You project your woundedness and fear onto the world and refuse to let yourself hope for good things. You come to see hope and optimism as naivete and vulnerability. You emotionally interpret God and the world through the distorted lens of your personal wounds and disappointments. (Shortform note: Observe how cynicism is related to the fear that you learned how to fight in the previous chapter. Both battles involve fear of the future and the suspicion that God is not in control.)

The Effects of Cynicism

The negative effects of cynicism are devastating—primarily to those who buy into it!

Most hurtfully, cynicism perverts your view of God. It wears down your ability to see him correctly. The root of cynicism is a refusal to believe in God’s goodness and his control of things. Cynicism takes away your ability to delight in the world and engage fully with other people. It robs you of joy. And it usually does this on the subconscious level, without your being aware of it.

Note that cynicism is active, not merely passive or receptive. It doesn’t simply receive or perceive gloom, it actively reads it into your life. Imagine going to a party and sitting next to people who complain all night about the food, the music, and the hosts. Now imagine the opposite: the same party, but now the people next to you rave about how wonderful everything is. In either case, your party companions would probably affect your subjective memory of the event’s quality—for the worse in the first case, for the better in the second case. To some irreducible extent, the “goodness” or “badness” of the party resides in your choice (perhaps unconscious) of how to regard it. Cynicism sees only the bad. And it does this not just with parties but with everything and everyone.

Allen illustrates cynicism’s negative impact with a personal story. Not long after the end of her 18-month crisis, she attended a weekend leadership retreat. The leader, a psychiatrist friend, noted the author’s self-protective and unfriendly vibe: Allen held back emotionally, brushed off questions about how she was doing (“I’m good!”), and was generally distant. Over the weekend, her friend gently pressed her about this, but Allen didn’t see it and wouldn’t own it. She had become unknowingly infected with cynicism. The root of her cynicism, as she only recognized at the end of the retreat, was a lingering sense of estrangement from and mistrust of God because he had allowed her to hurt so badly for so long.

The Truth: God Is Trustworthy

The truth that exposes and overturns the lie of cynicism is simply this: that you can trust God without reservation. He will work all things together for good in the end. A key scripture supporting this truth is Romans 8:28: “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

The Strategy: Choose to Delight

The way you defeat your enemy of cynicism with the truth of God’s trustworthiness is by learning to delight in God and his goodness. You implement this strategy by cultivating awe and appreciation of beauty.

More specifically, you meditate on the truth that all beauty speaks of God’s own beauty, power, and goodness. It speaks of a world yet to come, a world beyond this one, a world more spectacular than you can imagine, but that you’ll one day see and know and enjoy fully.

There are various ways of practicing this. One is to seek out beauty and grandeur in nature, art, and human relationships.

Examples in nature might include snowy mountain peaks, sunsets, scenic vistas, seashells, thunderstorms, beautiful animals, the intricate structure of the human body, or whatever moves you personally. As Psalm 19:1 famously proclaims, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.” The author used this approach once in college when she led a Bible study for fellow college sophomores and noticed that they were all discouraged and exhausted. She scrapped her prepared lesson, went outside, and brought back a leaf from a tree. Then she instructed her friends to pass it around and examine it closely to note God’s careful design.

Examples in art could include a beautiful song, painting, film, or play, or the sight of beautiful architecture, such as a lovely old church with stained-glass windows. The author describes her first time attending a professional stage musical with her husband in her early twenties. It was Les Misérables, and it overwhelmed her to the point of tears with its beauty. The experience amplified her ability to appreciate God.

Examples in human relationships might be the simple delight of watching your children play or the sense of being deeply moved by acts of human kindness.

In all these cases, your overarching goal is to cultivate the discipline that Paul described (and that the previous chapter employed in the battle against fear) of filling your mind with everything that’s true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, and praiseworthy. Cynicism can’t coexist with such thoughts.

The Effects of Delight

The result of choosing to delight is that it tears down your wall of cynicism and lets in hope, trust, and worship.

As with so many spiritual experiences, this one has a verified brain-based component. MRIs of the brain show that the experience of awe shuts down brain activity associated with selfishness while increasing a sense of connection with others. Awe-filled delight thus breaches one of the major self-protective barriers that cynicism erects around you.

The Bible also powerfully describes and confirms the effects of delight. See, for example, Paul’s description in 2 Corinthians 3 of how we become like Moses beholding God on the mountain whenever we come “face-to-face” with God in delight and worship. Our own lives become brighter and more beautiful, just like Moses’s glowing face. We become more like God.

The ultimate scriptural illustration of this principle is God’s very Son, Jesus, who explodes any real basis for cynicism because his story and reality literally embody our deepest yearning. They provide the divine truth, beauty, redemption, and connection that we long for. As stated in Chapter 1, Jesus is the whole reason why we have the choice to interrupt our downward spirals in the first place, including the one into cynicism.

Here’s a visual that shows the negative spiral of cynicism and how you can reverse it by choosing to delight in God:

get-out-of-your-head-cynicism.png

Chapter 12: The Battle Against Self-Importance

In this chapter, you’ll learn to fight an enemy that wants to distort your relationship with others by distorting your estimation of yourself.

Your Enemy and Your Weapon

Your enemy in this chapter is self-importance or self-inflation. This is the idea, rampant in 21st-century consumer culture, that you’re awesome, and even more: that fixating on your own awesomeness is a great thing.

Some typical thoughts associated with self-importance include the following. Look for these in your own mind:

Your weapon against self-importance is humility, a proper estimation of yourself through recognizing that only God is awesome, that you aren’t even all that great, and that your calling on earth is to serve other people.

The Lie: Your Self-Esteem Is Everything

The enemy’s basic lie in this battle is that self-esteem is your life-compass, your primary tool for navigating and achieving a good life.

The lie of self-esteem has several sources. In our sinful state of fallenness, the automatic trajectory of our thoughts is toward ourselves. Self-importance sneaks into our minds so easily because we’re naturally inclined toward self-gratification and pride.

On top of this, or rather because of it, our culture of narcissism cooperates fully with this self-obsession. Ads, movies, music, social media, and even self-help and religion all chant and rave about how great we are, and about how important it is that we recognize this. A continual cultural drumbeat of praise for “accomplishment” and “success,” for talent and “being special,” surrounds you. This attitude has even invaded the church, where it may appear as the desire to “do great things for God’s kingdom.” In all cases, the focus is really on achieving your goals, realizing your dreams, and enlarging your influence.

The Negative Effects of Wrongful Self-Esteem

Obsession with self-esteem results in impaired relationships. For instance, the author once spoke sharply to an IF:Gathering colleague but then held off on apologizing because her mind rationalized away the sin. (“I wasn’t wrong. She probably didn’t care.”) Later it turned out the colleague did care, and so there was a fence to mend. The seductive desire for preserving her own self-esteem had prevented the author from remedying the situation by apologizing sooner.

Taking self-esteem as your life-guide also results in a life, both inner and outer, that’s based on egocentrism. The author’s ten-year-old son Cooper, for example, became obsessed with getting Air Jordan shoes because, as he put it, he “needed” them. What he actually needed them for was to look awesome to his middle school peers. His case calls out an important truth: We’re all a bit like middle schoolers. We’re all naturally obsessed with ourselves and inclined to do all we can to impress others and make ourselves the object of admiration and envy. This is a spiritually bankrupt way to live.

The Truth: Joy Comes From Valuing God and Others

The truth opposing the lie of self-esteem is that real and lasting joy only comes from choosing God and other people over yourself. God didn’t create you to be the center of your own world. What’s important isn’t for you to be empowered but for you to rest in his power.

A key scripture supporting this truth is Paul’s exhortation in Philippians 2 for us to share Christ’s attitude in our interpersonal relationships. Just as Jesus humbled himself as a servant of everyone and became the ultimate example of humility by willingly suffering crucifixion for our sins, so we should humble ourselves and devote our lives to serving others. The instructions in 1 Peter 2:21 for us to take Christ’s suffering and service as our example, and to follow in Christ’s steps, reinforce the same point.

Brain research also illuminates the importance of esteeming God and others by showing that a focus on your own importance actually impairs the action of the mirror neurons talked about in Chapter 9. Self-centeredness physiologically reduces your ability to feel empathy with others.

Also notice the connection between all this and Chapter 11’s focus on cynicism. Self-importance and cynicism both put you at the center of your own world and build up a wall between you, God, and other people. In both cases, the way out involves recognizing that your life isn’t actually about you, but about God.

The Strategy: Choose to Serve God and Others

The way to defeat your enemy of self-inflation is to choose to value and serve God and others instead of yourself. Embrace humility.

Bear in mind that although “serving others” may sound clear enough, as a strategy for defeating self-importance it’s inseparable from choosing others over yourself, which is a subtler thing. There are various ways to make this choice.

Accept Other People’s Attacks

Remain silent and just take it when people speak against you. In doing this, you directly follow in the footsteps of Christ and take him as your model. When he was accused and attacked, he didn’t defend himself (see, for example, 1 Peter 2:23 plus the gospel accounts of Jesus’s legal trials).

Soak in Scriptures on Humility

Soak yourself in scripture passages about humility, service to others, and denying yourself. Consciously emulate Christ’s servanthood. The following are some good examples to get you started:

Dwell on God’s Awesomeness

Replace the lie of your awesomeness with the truth of God’s. Here are several practical and spiritual ways to do this:

Here’s a visual showing the negative spiral of self-importance and how you can reverse it by choosing humility:

get-out-of-your-head-humility.png

Chapter 13: The Battle Against Victimhood

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to fight effectively against an enemy whose goal is to convince you that you’ll never be happy because life is against you.

Your Enemy and Your Weapon

Your enemy in this chapter is victimhood, a state of unhappiness centered in self-pity over your painful experiences.

Some typical thoughts associated with victimhood include the following. Look for these in your own mind:

Your weapon against victimhood is gratitude, an encompassing attitude with an accompanying practice of thankful appreciation, no matter what happens.

The Lie: You’re the Victim of Your Circumstances

The enemy’s basic lie in this battle is that you’re a victim of your circumstances. It tells you that you’re doomed to a life of misery because of the negative things that have happened to you, because of your situation, because of what other people have done to you or withheld from you, because of what you lack or can’t do, and so on.

This lie can use circumstances both major and relatively minor to perpetuate itself. The author shares several stories about people in her life who have encountered serious troubles, ranging from racism to terminal illness to disability, that presented potential points of access for the lie of victimhood. The next section below describes some of these stories.

A friend of the author’s actually bought the lie. This young woman worked as a clerk at a retail clothing store, and since the job didn’t line up with her ambition to use her skills and her college degree for something “better,” she was caught up in frustration and disillusionment. The circumstance was less serious than, say, a terminal illness, but it was still sufficient to allow the lie of victimhood to worm its way into the woman’s mind.

The Truth: You Can Find God’s Goodness in Your Circumstances

The truth that overturns the lie of victimhood is that your circumstances, far from being a trap and making you a victim, provide all the opportunities you need for experiencing God’s goodness. A key scripture supporting this truth is Paul’s exhortation in 1 Thessalonians 5 to “rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”

The pain you experience from your circumstances doesn’t have to become your identity. It isn’t your master. The power of Jesus enables you to acknowledge your frustration and pain without losing peace and joy.

Count It All Joy

The author’s youngest daughter, Caroline, is dyslexic. This causes Caroline exhaustion and sometimes frustration. But she’s also persistent and tough. She hasn’t let her disability con her into adopting a victim identity.

Paul had more reason than most to consider himself a victim. He suffered threats on his life, beatings, imprisonment, shipwreck, betrayal by friends, and many more such things, any one of which might be enough to throw many of us into spasms of self-pity and victimhood. But Paul told the Philippian Christians that his difficulties were all joy to him (!) because they had served to advance the cause of Christ. He saw his trials as opportunities for experiencing and sharing God’s goodness.

After a time of frustration, the author’s friend at the clothing store began to learn from Paul’s example. She realized that she could choose her attitude toward work. She began praying during her commute, using her interactions with customers and coworkers as opportunities to serve others, and recognizing her circumstances as a chance to advance God’s kingdom. The result? She came to love her job.

A married couple named Roddy and Dee experienced heartbreak when Dee was diagnosed with ALS, which is fatal. His condition rapidly degenerated until he could only communicate through a speech synthesizer. After he died, when the author asked Roddy if she had felt any anger toward God, Roddy found the idea unthinkable and said she and Dee had both viewed his illness from the start as something that God could use for good.

This principle also enables a powerfully God-affirming and life-affirming response to injustice. Christ enables us to call out and oppose real oppression—racism, sexism, cruelty toward women and children and minorities and immigrants and unborn children—without defining ourselves by other people’s wrongdoing. In Christ, you fight from a place of reconciliation and confidence instead of outrage and insecurity. You affirm God’s commitment to redeeming all things.

The Strategy: Choose to Be Grateful

The way to defeat your enemy of victimhood is to choose gratitude. Be grateful no matter what happens, no matter what life brings.

You can implement this strategy in various ways.

Meditate on scriptures (such as Isaiah 41:10) that teach and reinforce the truth that God holds you and keeps you secure in all circumstances.

Practice looking beyond your immediate situation. Fix your mental gaze on God’s infinite goodness and long-range purposes. Follow Paul’s instruction in 2 Corinthians 4 to look not at the temporary things you can see with your physical eyes but the eternal things that you can only see with your eyes of faith.

Look for the unexpected gifts that difficult circumstances may bring. You may find that you and your loved ones grow the most in your faith because of hard times. Bank on Paul’s description of some of these benefits in Romans 5: “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”

Learn and receive the neurological benefits of gratitude for improving your life. Science has identified several of these and found that—to put it in Christian terms—gratitude contributes to the transformation of your mind and life in a Christlike direction.

Use the techniques and strategies you learned in earlier chapters to identify victim thoughts and replace them with thoughts that thank and honor God and enable you to recognize his goodness coming to you in all circumstances, even the hard ones.

Here’s a visual showing the negative spiral of victimhood and how to reverse it by choosing gratitude.

get-out-of-your-head-victim.png

Exercise: Practice Gratitude

The most difficult time to practice gratitude is when you’re faced with challenging and painful circumstances. Ironically, this is also the time when practicing gratitude is most necessary. This exercise will help you to get started.

Chapter 14: The Battle Against Complacency

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to battle an enemy that tries to seduce you into a useless and ultimately soul-killing life of self-indulgence and mediocrity.

Your Enemy and Your Weapon

Your enemy in this chapter is complacency, a state of listless passivity in which you find comfort in mediocrity and the status quo while you indulge your own whims and feel your passion for God fade away.

Some typical thoughts associated with complacency include the following. Look for these in your own mind:

Your weapon against complacency is intentional service, a choice to work for the good of other people instead of fixating on your own comfort and contentment. Clearly, this relates to Chapter 12’s battle with self-importance, but the focus here is different. In the battle against complacency, the enemy isn’t self-inflation (although it’s related to it) but self-indulgence.

The Lie: You’re Here to Do What You Want

The enemy’s basic lie in this battle is that you’re free to live for yourself, to do whatever you want to do. This lie comes out in thought patterns that say things such as:

Complacency becomes a dangerous addiction. This relates back to a danger noted in Chapter 8’s battle against distraction: Spiritually, you’re never in “neutral gear.” You’re always moving one direction or the other. So if you’re not becoming holier, which takes effort (enabled by grace), then you’re automatically drifting toward wordliness, which becomes a self-reinforcing spiral. Allen’s own experience illustrates the point. During her spiritual crisis, she traded her passion to serve others for epic binges on Netflix, social media, sugar, and dark emotions. These distractions blunted her spiritual zeal even as she craved more of them.

The Truth: You Weren’t Built to Live for Yourself

The truth that overturns the lie of complacency is that God has saved you and set you free not to indulge yourself but to serve others, to elevate them over yourself and seek their good.

Saved From and Saved For

We all know that Jesus saves us from sin, but the truth we’re examining here tells us what we’re saved for. And it’s all about giving and serving: He saved us, set us free, so that our lives can point others to the joy found in him.

The Bible talks about this in various ways. In his parable of the wedding feast in Luke 12, Jesus calls us to be perpetually prepared for service. He also indicates the reward for this: Those who faithfully serve will end up being served by their master himself, who will meet their needs.

As the Genesis creation story clearly indicates, God loves work. The practical upshot is that we are stewards of the work he gives us. This work all involves serving others for his glory.

Our inbuilt purpose for service is also evident in the way our brains work. According to neuroscience, our brains thrive when we serve others and seek their good over our own. Service to others reduces stress-related and threat-related brain activity while also engaging the brain’s reward system, providing us with pleasure.

The Strategy: Choose to Seek the Good of Others

The way to defeat your enemy of complacency and its lie of self-indulgence is to choose others over yourself, to seek their good over your own comfort. See Jesus’s words: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23).

There are two primary ways to implement this strategy, one spiritual, the other practical.

Set Your Mind on Things Above

The primary spiritual way you implement this strategy is to follow Paul’s exhortation in Colossians 3:2 to “set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.” Go “all in” with God. Then you’ll be able to see life on earth correctly as your focus on eternal realities conforms your heart-mind to the truth that you’ve been “crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:20) and now live this bodily life entirely through faith in Jesus, for the purpose of serving other people.

Surrender and Obey

The primary practical way to implement this strategy is to surrender and obey at all times. (Not incidentally, this is also God’s ultimate will for your life.) Surrender your whole life to God. Obey him where you are, in whatever circumstances he places you. Go where he says, do what he says, serve whom he brings. Concretely, surrender plus obedience might look like any number of activities. It could look like:

It is only by surrendering and obeying in the details of daily life that your gaze will shift and enable you to catch a vision of God’s greater plan.

The Ultimate Positive Spiral

Choosing others over yourself sets in motion the ultimate positive, upward spiral:

Here’s a visual showing the negative spiral of complacency and how to reverse it by choosing others over yourself.

get-out-of-your-head-complacency.png

Part 3 | Chapters 15-16: Winning the War

In Part 1, you learned about the war for your mind and what it entails and involves. You learned about toxic thoughts spirals, mental strongholds, and the basic technique for escaping from these strongholds by replacing toxic thoughts with Godly ones. In Part 2, you learned how to engage in specific battles against specific mental enemies using specific weapons. Now let’s zoom out again to consider the entire war and learn the most important lesson of all: what we’re actually fighting for.

Winning the war for your mind requires following certain overarching principles that preside over the individual battles.

Victory in Jesus

The first and most important of these principles is that Jesus himself illustrates the victory in each battle. The same Holy Spirit that empowered him empowers you.

Who You Are and Who God Is

The second principle is to remember at all times who God really is, who you really are if you love and follow Jesus, and the stupendous implications of both. Learn to draw on these truths, especially when you’re upset or destabilized. Pick from the plethora of biblical thoughts about who God is and who you are in him. Use the techniques and tools in this book to reprogram your mind with these thoughts. For example:

Trust Your Training

The third principle is to train yourself rigorously. Then, in the heat of battle, trust your training. Practice the disciplines described in this book. They really work. Remember the author’s 3 a.m. panic attacks? After learning to mind her mind, she actually wrote most of this book between 3 and 5 a.m. At the very hour of the early morning when she formerly woke up in a panic during her spiritual dark night, she now experiences peace.

Use the strategies in this book. Fight the battles. Identify your areas of weakness and vulnerability, and reprogram your thoughts. Do the work of reshaping your heart-mind. Remember and take encouragement from the fact of your brain’s plasticity. Consider learning more about this so that you can better appreciate its encouraging implications, and also the dangers of allowing unchecked negative thought spirals.

For example: Inside your neurons are tiny structures called microtubules. They’re the neurological scaffolding for your thoughts, which lead them in a constant activity of building, deconstructing, and reshaping. It takes only ten minutes for them to build new scaffolding in response to a thought. In other words, you can literally change your brain in minutes. With each positive or negative choice of thought, you both bring about and contribute momentum to positive or negative brain change.

Think of it this way: Your goal and calling is to be like an astronaut whose entire life is built around perpetual training for their next mission. Every day, week, month, and year revolves around a training schedule. The missions themselves are grueling and demanding. Blasting into space and staying there for extended periods is hard on the mind and body, and also on human relationships. Only those who believe deeply in the value of such work and are totally committed to it can last. And only the rigor of their training enables them to carry it out.

Becoming Dangerous for Christ

This book has a double bottom line: Receive the mind of Christ. Then pass it on.

First, you must learn to have a singular focus. Have your mind consumed entirely by the mind of Christ. This is God’s desire for you. It’s also your escape route from self-imprisonment in perpetual misery. Think of Peter’s singular focus in Matthew 14 when Jesus invited him out of the boat during the storm on the lake. Peter successfully walked on water as long as he looked at Jesus, but when he lost focus and noticed the surrounding tumult, he sank.

Second, this wonderful freedom of a sanctified mind isn’t meant for your private enjoyment. God sets us free in our minds so that we can transmit the same freedom to others. It’s a contagious freedom.

There’s actually scientific evidence that our minds are contagious. In a real sense, your thoughts shift reality for the whole human species. With your thoughts, you add either to the world’s sum total of kindness and compassion or to its sum total of negativity.

The capacity of a Christ-formed mind to broadcast God’s goodness and power to others, and to replicate its own divine freedom in their minds, is almost indescribably powerful. The father of one of the author’s friends is a good Christian man, but he has also suffers from a substance abuse problem. After a stint in rehab, he started leading Bible studies for other men in the program. This developed into a strongly supportive group of diverse men who share not just Bible studies but meals together. The mind of Christ was moving contagiously among them.

You become dangerous for Christ when you receive and share his mind. By maintaining the Christ-centered focus described above in the middle of the enemy’s clamoring lies, you maintain your status as an effective soldier and servant of God. You make yourself a conduit for his liberating grace, mercy, and peace—including peace of mind—to spread to other people.

Exercise: Battle in the Spirit

Part 2 of this book detailed seven battles in the war for your mind (the battle against distraction, the battle against fear, and so on). Part 3 gave thumbnail sketches of how Jesus demonstrated and illustrated victory in each of these battles. It also pointed out that you have the same Spirit in you that empowered Jesus.