Hey guys, welcome back to week 22 of the Restored Discipleship series. I sure hope that you're enjoying it. Hey, if you're really receiving freedom in some things, learning some things, I would sure love to hear from you and hear your testimony, hear all about what God's doing, not just as a result of this teaching, but just overall what Jesus is doing in your life. So you can reach me at the email that's on the, I think it's on the YouTube page there, and I would love to hear from you. Last week, we started looking at spiritual warfare. And we talked about the warfare, really the war that's all around us, principalities and powers and how to wear the armor of God, as the scripture puts it, to protect ourselves from those external forces that really the whole goal of it all is to rob us and keep us away from the love of God in Christ.
That's always been the enemy's goal from the beginning, ever since the Garden of Eden, is to separate us from the love of God in Christ. You know already from ruminating with me that it's impossible. Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ. But we can walk away from it. And that's where spiritual warfare really comes to play. Because all of hell is desiring to tear us away. But we also have things on the inside of us. We have a war that's going on on the inside as well.
And we peeked into this war a little bit when we looked at Romans chapter 7. So just to refresh us in this, Romans 7 verse 15, if you open up your Bible to there, it says this, For what I'm doing I don't understand, for I'm not practicing what I would like to do, but I'm doing the very thing that I hate. But if I do the very thing I don't want to do, then I agree with the law. I confess, yeah, the law is good. So now it's no longer I who am doing it, but it is sin that dwells in me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is my flesh.
For the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. So in me, there's something alive on the inside of me that's contrary to who I actually am right now. Kind of like a disease. We looked at that a little while ago. That sin that dwells in us is not who we are, but it sure can wreck our lives and make us miserable. And sometimes even make us feel like, what was the point of even starting this journey with Jesus? Because it's harder now than it was before.
Why? Because now I'm resisting things that I used to give into. And that's the first thing I'd like to remind you about, is that if you're struggling against sin, you are born again. There's some people who believe that, oh, I'm still struggling with sin. Maybe it didn't work for me. No, no, no. The fact that it bothers you is evidence. You have something alive on the inside of you that is not like those things that you're being tempted to do. So what we need to understand about this, we're going to talk about spiritual strongholds today.
You can turn to 2 Corinthians chapter 10 if you want while I'm sharing just a couple of thoughts. And the first thing to remember about spiritual warfare is that the enemy has no authority. Absolutely no authority over us on his own. When Jesus rose from the dead, he came back and he told his disciples when he gave them their great commission, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given unto me. So if he has all authority, that means there's no authority left for the devil. That's just point one. And that's the foundation for all spiritual warfare.
The devil has no actual authority. Jesus gave us authority back, not only over the earth, not only over our lives, but over our own heart. We now have authority over everything that happens from head to toe in our lives. The devil cannot do anything to us unless we give him permission to. And that's the second thing to understand about spiritual warfare. The only authority the devil ever has over us is when we let him borrow ours. So you have authority now. You can determine your course. You can determine your life in every way.
You're no longer a slave to sin. Now we're willing subjects to sin if we continue in it. And that's where the warfare begins. We're back struggling with this thing. Why do I keep doing the thing I don't want to do? Why do I not do the thing that I want to do? That's warfare. So what a stronghold is, and I'll read the scripture in a moment. A stronghold is a place where we permit demonic authority or activity in our lives by agreeing with lies. Everything the devil has to do with us always comes from a lie.
And the most effective lies, of course, are the half-truths. When he told Eve in the garden that God didn't want them to eat from that tree because it would make them wise. And he basically convinced them that God was holding out on them. Almost everything the devil said about that fruit was accurate. It was the way in which they'd be eating from it and the result of it that he lied about, that this would make them wise. They would become like God. All of those things were true in one aspect of it.
But God's intent was eat from the tree of life, not from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And remember, that's what that tree was called. And so now, ever since Adam and Eve, we have a war going on in our mind. And if we really want to get down to it, spiritual warfare happens in the activity of the mind. It's rooted in the heart. It affects our soul. It affects our physical body or our flesh, as the scripture calls it. But it's really in the mind. And that's where the war is on and why we have arguments with ourselves and ultimately arguments with God.
And that's what strongholds are. Having a spiritual stronghold or a demonic spiritual stronghold, I should say, in our heart is like having an open door in the front if you live in a dangerous neighborhood. I grew up in a neighborhood where there was violence. It was inner city New York. And we locked our doors at night because there were people prowling the neighborhood looking to see if they could come in and steal from you and maybe even rob you at gunpoint. And it was a dangerous neighborhood. But we wouldn't dream of going to bed at night with our door left wide open in the front.
And we'll talk about in future ones and in your devotions some specific open doors. But suffice for now to say that a demonic stronghold is a place in our lives where we believe something that's not true. And in doing so, we agree with the devil and his plans for us. So let's get into it. 2 Corinthians 10, verse 3. Let's turn there. And it goes like this. For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh. Let me stop right there and just point out once again that this is not now to introduce another way that we can strive to overcome sin.
We don't war according to the flesh. Warring according to the flesh would be to use some discipline, get our lives in order, pull up our bootstraps and just resist and, you know, just knock it off. Stop doing that already. Well, we all know that doesn't work every time. Warring according to the flesh means it's all on us to do the work. Warring according to the spirit is when we say, Jesus, I need your help. And that's what Paul goes on to say here. For the weapons of our warfare, they're not of the flesh, but they are divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses.
And that word can be translated strongholds as well. These weapons that we have are designed for tearing down strongholds. And what are those strongholds? We're destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against what? The knowledge of God or another way of translating that would be exalting themselves against God's knowledge or God's way of knowing. God's, in other words, the truth, the truth about life, the truth about you, the truth about everything. We're tearing those things down and we're taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. You notice all of the words here, we're talking about spiritual warfare, but all the components of spiritual warfare and the things that are in us that cause us to resist God and make life miserable and cause this war in us doing the thing that we don't want to do.
They all have to do with patterns of thinking. So let's dig in and talk about what those are. So strongholds are ways of thinking and interpreting life based on agreement with the lies that we have believed. And now we actually protect our beliefs to avoid the pain of change. If you want a simplified understanding, what a spiritual stronghold is, is it's something that will cause us to argue against God because the pain of changing seems to us to be too great. And somebody said people change when they realize that the pain of change is far less than the pain of staying stuck the way that we are. And unfortunately for many of us, that is the case.
But if we want to take up supernatural weapons of warfare and overcome these things so that we live the abundant life of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost, we're living in the presence of God at whose right hand is fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore. Then we take up our weapons of warfare and get rid of these ways of thinking. When I used to be a children's pastor, we would teach the kids about this kind of stuff and say, it's time to end that stinking thinking because it's just ruining everything and it's making life miserable. So let's enter the path of joy. So he says, we walk, though we walk in the flesh, we don't war according to the flesh. These weapons are divinely powerful.
If you remember what we learned from reading Romans 7, there are issues in our lives. I mean, nobody would sin if they could just overcome all sin, just like that. There's a great old skit that I encourage you to go and look up on YouTube. It's called Stop That. And it's a really hilarious skit about a woman who comes into a psychiatrist's office and the psychiatrist keeps telling her, all you really got to do is just stop that, stop that. And if it were that simple, everybody would stop sinning the day they got born again. But it's not.
And there is spiritual warfare involved. This time it's uprooting things from the inside of us while learning not to take new lies in from the war on the outside. So let's talk what that means. How did these strongholds come down? First of all, by submitting to the open heart surgery of the Spirit of God. It's confessing and saying to Jesus, I need your help. It's never trying to do it on our own. All strongholds come down or they begin to tumble down the moment we confess, I need you. I'm coming boldly before the throne of grace.
I'm obtaining grace and mercy to help me in my time of need because I confess, apart from you, I can do nothing through Christ. I could do all things. These come down by submitting and recognizing there is a power in the gospel. Remember Romans, if you've read that book, as I recommended to do, at least the first eight chapters for now. I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the good news of Jesus Christ. Why? For it is the power of God unto salvation for all who believe. Salvation doesn't just mean, hey, I got my ticket to heaven.
As you know, salvation means I'm getting set free from everything that made my life miserable and everything that made me miserable toward all the people around me. That's what salvation means. The phrase used in the book of Hebrews is he's able to save to the uttermost, which means he finishes what he starts. He doesn't leave us halfway there. He wants to bring us all the way to the place where everything that was lost is restored. And our lives are exactly what they were made to be when he first dreamed of us in his heart before he laid the foundations of the earth. The gospel has power.
And as we'll look into a little bit more detail next week, being transformed by the renewing of our mind. So we are, we come into the kingdom of heaven. We get saved. We have a certain way of thinking. We have some experience and we have some habits. The title of this, this week's lesson is old habits die hard. And the reason why I call it that is because the fact that we still do things that are wrong, that we disobey God, or we don't step out in obedience to God. It's not because we have a bad heart and we just, we're stuck with this bad heart.
It's that we have a new heart that's stuck in an old body that's been trained in a certain way, certain habits. And you may have heard this already, but they say it takes about 21 days to build a new habit in your life. So if you want to change something to do with your diet or exercise or something like that, if you can do it consistently for 21 days, as a rule of thumb, you're now set out into a new habit. Now, if you've done New Year's resolutions, you know that that may or may not work every time for everybody. But determining what new habits are going to be is what spiritual warfare is all about. Transformed by the renewing of our mind is when we learn that Jesus knows how to build strongholds too. He knows how to build things on a rock that can't be torn down.
There is no weapon powerful enough to tear down a stronghold built by Jesus. So what we want to learn how to do is tear down the old strongholds, first recognize them, then tear them down, and then build righteous strongholds on top of them. Okay? So it says they're divinely powerful for what? The destruction of strongholds or fortresses. That word literally means, from the original language, which was ancient Greek, any strong point or argument in which one trusts. So in other words, it's a rationalization for something. And we're all masters at rationalization.
We all find ways to protect our current beliefs, and even in the face of contrary evidence, we'll argue against it because we hold it so deep in us. You might use another word like a belief system or a worldview is what a stronghold is. It's a lens through which we interpret all the events of life. So for example, maybe if we've had a life where we've been betrayed multiple times, or we've been left to our own devices, or left to fend for ourselves, we may have a belief in us that says you can't trust anybody but yourself. And there's a good reason why we came to believe that in our past life, from the disappointments, the betrayals, the letdowns that people have had.
And that becomes such a strong belief that now we come into the body of Christ, and we're in a family now where all of the word of God and all of the thing that Jesus is doing in the church is to teach us how to open up, be a member of the body that doesn't say to the other members, I don't need any of you, but to become mutually dependent on the rest of the body. And if we continue to believe, well, I can't trust anybody but myself, and maybe now I could trust everybody and Jesus in that, we'll never be a member of the body of Christ. And that's a major part of what it means to be born again, as we'll look into in a couple of weeks.
So that's a stronghold of belief. It was based on a lie that because somebody betrayed you, nobody can be trusted. That's a lie, and it's rooted in. And intellectually, we probably know, I know that this probably isn't true. We say things, a stronghold could be identified by when we say things like, I know I shouldn't feel this way, but, and you could fill in the blank on that one. And that's how you know that there's something at work. The heart knows how to think, just like the mind does. In fact, if you look, search the scriptures on all the verses about what it says about the heart, you'll find that the heart thinks about a dozen times.
As a man thinks in his heart, so is he, the scripture says. And our heart actually retains knowledge. There's no such thing as a difference between somebody who thinks rationally and somebody who lives from their heart. You can live from your heart and be perfectly rational as well. The heart believes the way it does because it's interpreted life's events. So things have happened, for example, here's an example of how a stronghold can be built because of a life event. Let's say you have two sons who grew up in an alcoholic father's home.
And this father was abusive when he got drunk. He would hit the mother. He would hit the kids. The kids would hide under the bed. One of those sons grows up to be an alcoholic who abuses his wife and his kids as well. The other son grows up and he becomes a successful lawyer with a loving wife and loving kids and a great atmosphere in his home. What's the difference between the two of them? They both grew up in the same household. But one of them allowed demonic strongholds to be built that took such control of his life that he rejected any light of truth and rejected the Lord's change in his life.
The other one allowed the Lord in and allowed the light of truth to come in, allowed himself to be transformed by the renewing of his mind. So he took down those strongholds which have been probably for many generations in his life. Strongholds are a way that we create a bias and it reinforces itself by making us perceive things that may or may not be true. If you're married, you probably noticed within your first couple of years that there were moments that you just overreacted to something that your husband did or that your wife did. It wasn't a really major offense, but your reaction to it was much stronger than the actual offense. Well, probably what you were dealing with was some heart memories of the house you grew up in or some events that happened in your life of somebody who's been abused.
Maybe somebody comes and just touches you gently on the shoulder, but you jump. Why? It's not because the person touching you gently on the shoulder is unsafe. It's because your heart has retained some knowledge. Strongholds coming down is when we say, I confess, I've got a belief in my heart, and it's not. Ultimately, what strongholds do is they try to convince us that we are not safe in the loving embrace of a God in heaven who loves us and gave himself for us. And so that's how strongholds work. The next thing we want to say about these, excuse me one second.
The next thing it says about strongholds is we're taking out speculations. Speculation is a reckoning or a calculation of some sort. And it's a reckoning or calculation that causes us to behave in a certain way. So our heart responds to something going on around us. We react in a certain way to protect ourselves usually. And because we know already how this is going to end. How many times have you said in your own heart, oh, I know exactly how this is going to turn out. Now that may or may not be true.
Or may say the Lord or our heart says, I want you to go and I want you to forgive such and such a one. I want you to go and talk with them about it. And our heart says, no, I already know they're not going to listen to me anyway. That's a speculation. We're called to a life of love. We're called to a life of forgiveness. So if we have these things and beliefs in our heart that prevent us from stepping out in love, then what we have is a stronghold at work, all fear works out this way.
We don't step out to do something because our experience in life has taught us this is not going to end well. Well, that makes walking in faith very difficult, doesn't it? Because God will step us out into situations and call us into things that are rather scary to the natural mind. By faith, they're going to turn out awesome. And so that's how strongholds work because they are every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God. Once we've agreed with the devil's perspective on life events, no matter what's happened to us, even the most extreme kinds of abuse or whatever things have happened that made us believe things contrary to what the Word of God says, no matter how they got there, our beliefs and our actions can resist God's will and purposes.
And we end up literally arguing with God. The truth is that God has an amazing plan for us. God has purposes and he has a destiny for us that's unfolding before our eyes. And it's going to turn out amazing. Are there going to be some walks through the valley of the shadow of death in the meanwhile? Sure. Is it going to be a bumpy ride sometimes? Oh, yeah. Especially when we resist the good shepherd along the way. But when we give ourselves over to God's will and purposes, life does turn out exactly like God intended it to.
So what strongholds do is they prevent us from viewing our lives as protected in the hands of a sovereign God and a loving God who has great plans and purposes for us. They also prevent us from getting to know him and his ways. As Mark Twain famously said about the Bible, it's not the parts of the Bible that I don't believe or that I don't understand that bother me. It's the parts of the Bible I understand that bother me. Why? Because they're challenging him. And the scriptures and God's revealing of himself to us will be constantly challenging our way of thinking and our way of living.
And so if we learn to argue with God, we stay stuck as we are. Or if we learn to say, I love you, I trust you, and I want you to deal with this belief in me that's contrary to how you see things, that's how we begin to grow. We grow in our experiential knowledge of God, and that's how we become willing and able to see things the way that he sees them. The final thing is take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. It's when we find thoughts in our mind that are contrary to what we know to be true, especially as we start reading the Bible, talking with other believers, listening to the preaching of the Word.
When we find in ourselves saying, I've got thoughts in my mind that seem to want to argue, and I even get mad sometimes. I preached a series on forgiveness one time, and after the first week that I preached it, a really dear brother who's been in Christ for decades came up to me and he said, I was really mad at you while you were preaching today. And all I was doing was quoting Scripture, the things that Jesus said about forgiveness and unforgiveness, and I didn't say anything offensive on purpose. I didn't even meddle, which I often do from the pulpit that week. But he came up to me and he said, I was really mad at you, but then I realized it's because you were telling me the truth I didn't want to hear.
And that's what, when we bump up against a stronghold in life, we find that these thoughts are spinning around in our head. Next week, we're going to look at how to overcome those strongholds is what Jesus said. If you continue in my word, he told his disciples, then you will know that then you are my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. The fact is, every stronghold is built on a foundation of lies and wrong beliefs. How do those strongholds come down? Well, in part, it's by learning the truth and absorbing the truth. And it's like the stronghold gets displaced.
You know, if you have some kind of nasty stuff in a cup and you want to rinse it out, you can rinse it out by just putting gushes and gushes of water until finally it overwhelms it and floods it out. And it's kind of works that way with truth. Sometimes a matter of simply obeying the word of God without always needing to understand why is an order. There's some people who walk with God, and they never have to deal with any of the things that I'm going to teach you in your devotions about how to deal with strongholds. Why? Because they just said, God said it. I believe it.
That settles it. I don't understand why God's asking me to do this. And in my mind, I'm struggling to understand why God would require this of me. But he loved me. He gave himself for me. And I'm just going to do it. Sometimes it's that simple. Now, lest we stay in the spot of just stop it, but let's also look at there may be actual demonic activity going on in your life. And I'm going to just share this very briefly for a moment, and we'll dig in on it in a supplemental lesson in the future.
But there's always a question, can a Christian have demons? Can a Christian be demonized? Can he be possessed by a demon? And I'm going to recommend some resources for you if you want to learn more about that. And I'll do a short teaching myself. Jake Kail, K-A-I-L, is my favorite writer on the subject. Look up anything that he's written. And I can tell you, I know him personally. And I love his teaching on the subject. And I commend any of his writing to you without hesitation. But suffice to say that no, there's for one thing, there's no such thing in the Bible as possession by a demon.
There's some people that are demonized is one of the words used, which means so overcome with demonic thoughts and so overwhelmed with evil in their minds that it's like they have no control any longer. Well, you have the Holy Spirit in you. The fruit of the Holy Spirit is self-control. There's no such thing as you having no control over yourself anymore. That being said, if we leave open doors in our lives through these strongholds, some of the strongholds could be unforgiveness. That's the number one answer. The most common stronghold I've dealt with with people that have genuine demonic oppression in their lives.
And that's what a Christian can have, demonic oppression. A Christian can have demonic agreement. You can agree with doctrines of demons and beliefs that demons have. Absolutely. But unforgiveness would be the most common one. Sometimes just the plain anger. It's a refusal to give up on certain practices of the flesh. Like you may have an addiction in your life and there's nothing shameful about coming to Christ with an addiction. But it's dangerous to say, well, I'm just going to have to learn how to live with this addiction because alcohol has a voice.
There's a reason why they're called spirits. It came to be called that for good reason. It can affect the way that you think and be an open door for demonic activity in your heart and in your life. So take those addictions seriously enough not to learn to live with them, but to get some help and to go after freedom from those things. Pay attention to any of those thoughts, anything that comes from a deep place of hurt and a behavior that can open the door. When you find yourself wrestling with really serious thoughts, I really urge you to get some help. You're walking with somebody already.
If you're using this discipleship series, we have people here at Hillside that can help you and discern is this demonic activity or is this something I just need to be healed of and I need the Lord to set my mind free from these old ways of thinking because you can't cast out something that needs to be healed and you can't heal something that needs to be cast out. And so, yeah, there is such a thing as demonic activity, but you also have authority over your own heart. So I'm going to leave you with that for now. If you have questions about that, that's something for you to talk with the one who's walking with you.
And I pray that next week as we pick up where we left off on this, you're going to see some ways that you could begin to just renew your mind. Most Christians don't need extra special help, but a handful do. And if you've been seriously abused in some way or gone through some kind of trauma, maybe you've had some even occultic activity in your life, take that seriously. Don't just brush it off and say, oh, one day I'll be free from that. Get some help and get somebody who can walk with you and help set you free from that. And the Lord will. God is faithful to do that.
Whom the Son sets free is really, really free. And that's exactly what His goal and plan is for you. So may the Lord give you wisdom right now and discernment to understand as strongholds of thinking and strongholds of the heart come to your mind. May you have the courage to deal with them and take them at face value, only built on lies, so that you can now build on the rock of truth, which is Christ Jesus. Amen. I love you. I'll see you again next time.