Strongholds Must Fall, Part 1

There's some strongholds in your life that maybe you didn't choose. They were handed down to you. Maybe it wasn't purposeful, but here you are.

There's some thoughts you've been thinking that control so much of who you are—your emotions, your relationships, your spiritual journey in ways that you don't…you don't fully see are being controlled by a stronghold, a lie that you’ve believed and you're living your life by, but because of the power of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit, that stronghold can fall today.

Paul writes about this in 2 Corinthians chapter 10, and he says, “For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does.” (NIV) So, there is a war we're a part of. May not seem like it. It may not feel like it. You might be treating your life like it's on a playground, but it's really on a battleground. “And the weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, the weapons we fight with, they have divine power to demolish strongholds”—these spiritual weapons that we've been given. So, “we demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God.” And here it is: “We take captive every thought and we make it obedient to Christ.”

And so, we're in this series called ‘Every Thought Captive,’ and what we're learning together is that our thoughts shape our lives. They determine so much of who we are, and God will transform us when we align our thoughts with him.

How do we do that? Well, we take our thoughts captive. It doesn't just mean we stop thinking certain things. It means we identify thoughts we've been thinking, and we wrestle them to the ground, and we interrogate them, and we ask ourselves some questions about the thoughts we've been thinking. Where did that thought come from? Why do I think this way? What's the result of this thought in my life? Who do I know that maybe thought this way, where I picked up on it from them?

And we start to interrogate our thoughts so that we can take them captive. Because otherwise, our thoughts form these neural pathways that become strongholds, and that's the word Paul uses here as a word picture, the stronghold. And in ancient days, that word picture would have been immediately understood.

A stronghold in the ancient world was this fortress. It was built on the highest and most defensible point in the city. It had thick walls, reinforced gates. It was designed to be impenetrable. It was considered to be too strong to be brought down. And Paul uses this language to talk about the thoughts that are on repeat in our minds, these lies that we are living our lives by. Strongholds that are so entrenched and so fortified, they seem impossible to defeat.

And so, what we're going to do in the next few minutes is we're going to diagnose some strongholds in your life and in my life. And I'm going to spend a little bit more time doing some diagnostic work than I might usually do. Because the thing about strongholds is they've been a part—for many of us—they've been a part of our lives for so long, we have a hard time seeing them. We have a hard time identifying them. They just feel a part of who we are.

So, first let's talk about some characteristics of a stronghold, how you know you're dealing with a stronghold. One, they feel unassailable. You know you're dealing with a stronghold when you'll use language like this, you'll say, It's just the way I am. It's just how I feel. I've always been this way. It's just how I think.

And when you find yourself using identity language to excuse a behavior or routine in your life, it's a good…it's a good chance you're dealing with a stronghold. So, here's what it looks like. You say, I know I shouldn't worry so much, but you got to understand, I've always been an anxious person. It's just the way I'm wired. Stronghold. I know I shouldn't be so critical. I can't help it. It's just the way my mind works. Stronghold. I know I shouldn't be…I know I shouldn't be such a slave to some of my sexual desires, but I just feel like this is the way God made me. I don't feel like I can really do anything about it. Stronghold.

When you hear yourself making statements like this, you are identifying a stronghold. It's something that's become so entrenched in your identity that changing it feels impossible. It's just who you are.

Second characteristic of a stronghold is they're built on lies. A stronghold is a lie that we live our lives by. And so, every stronghold has at its foundation, a lie that we've bought into. And I'm going to give you just three categories of lies that tend to make up strongholds. These are broad categories, and I'll give you some examples for each category of lies.

There are lies about God. He doesn't really care about me. Look, if you believe this lie, if this thought is a stronghold for you, I mean, it's going to affect your spiritual life in every way. If you were convinced that, yeah, there's a God, but he doesn't care about me. Or if God loved me, my life would be easier. Or I've messed up too much for God to forgive me.

So, there's these lies about God. Another category would be lies about yourself. Just thoughts that you've thought about yourself so much it's created the stronghold. Like, I'm not worthy of love. And maybe that comes from some abandonment or some rejection when you were young, and that got established in your life, and now that stronghold, I mean, you filter almost everything through this lie. I'm not worthy of love, or I always mess things up, or I'm too broken to be used by God. It’s a stronghold of shame.

Another category of lies would be lies about life. I have to control everything or it'll fall apart. Like, if it's not done, my way won't be done, or I've got to be in charge of everything. And the thought of you not controlling something just has created all kinds of anxiety. My desires are meant to be satisfied. I wouldn't have this desire if it didn't have to be satisfied. It's just how I feel. I can't trust anyone. You have these lies that have become a stronghold in your life.

Now, look, the enemy is brilliant at mixing just enough truth with lies to make it believable. So yeah, you've made mistakes. That's true. What's not true is that that means you're worthless. Yeah, life can be difficult. That's true. Life can be really hard. What's not true, is that it doesn't mean God doesn't care about you. And yeah, people will disappoint you for sure. They'll disappoint you. That doesn't mean that nobody can be trusted. And here's what a stronghold will do. A stronghold will take a kernel of truth and then build a fortress of lies around it.

Third characteristic of a stronghold is they resist truth. One of the ways you know you're up against a stronghold is you hear a truth that should be freeing and instead, it feels threatening. And so, you hear these truths about God's provision and you're threatened by it. You're immediately defensive and you're like, Well, that's…that's not how it's going to work for me. That's not going to apply that way in my life.

Or you hear somebody give a testimony about God's faithfulness and you immediately say, Well, he can't work things out for the good in my life; things are too broken. It's too late for that. You hear God’s Word speak on a subject that's really personal like sexuality or money, and you're immediately defensive about it. You immediately resist. That's how you know you're up against a stronghold. Truth…truth should feel liberating. The truth is what sets you free. Truth should feel liberating. So, when truth feels threatening: stronghold. It’s because it's coming up against this stronghold in your life.

Four, they govern our behavior. Strongholds don't just affect how you think, they determine what you do. You'll find yourself acting out in ways that you don't even want to. You're not even sure where it came from. And it's obvious it's against what's best for you, but you're still doing it. And that's because you've got this stronghold that needs to be torn down because it's…you're trying to deal with behavior modification to change your behaviors.

But this stronghold, this way of thinking that has just gotten reinforced again and again is what's dictating the direction that you're going. And so, if you've got a stronghold of rejection in your life, well, you'll end up doing things that make no sense. Like, you'll sabotage really good relationships because you're expecting to be rejected. You're expecting to be abandoned, and you're not going to put yourself in a vulnerable place to be disappointed in that way because of this stronghold.

If you've got the stronghold of control, then you'll micromanage everything and create the very chaos you were so desperate to prevent. If you've got a stronghold of unworthiness, it'll show up in your life by you working yourself to death trying to earn love or by giving up completely because, what's the point? You're just going to blow it anyway.

And Paul, I think, understood all of this. I think it's what he's talking about in Romans 7 when he says, “I don't understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” He's recognizing that sometimes his behavior and his actions go against what he wants. Why? It's because there is this stronghold in his life, in my life, that we are living from without even recognizing it or knowing it.

And neuroscience helps us understand this. So, this is how neuroscience and strongholds and Scripture come together. What Paul calls a stronghold, neuroscience would call a neural pathway. That your mind has some trails that have been established and the first time a thought goes through that trail, it’s knocking away bushes and trees and clearing space.

But every thought you think is like a new hiker going down that trail. And the more thoughts you think, the more times you think it, the more hikers go through that trail and eventually that trail becomes a road, becomes a highway. Because the more a thought is repeated, the more that neural pathway is established or Scripturally, the stronger that stronghold becomes.

Dr. Donald Hebb, a neuroscientist, discovered a principle that's known as Hebb’s law to help us understand this. Hebb’s law would say that neurons that fire together wire together, meaning that every time you think the same thought, you are strengthening a neural pathway, and if you think that thought enough times, it's where almost every thought you have gets sent down that pathway.

So, let's say you have this thought that gets seeded in your mind, maybe before you even remember, that says, I'm not enough. I'm not enough. And you think that thought, and you think it again and you think it 10,000 times, and now that thought has created a highway that is affecting everything you do, every relationship you have. It's affecting all the emotions that you're trying to monitor and understand. It's all coming from this one superhighway that got established. And so, I want to spend some time just identifying some of those strongholds.

And so, as I talked through this next section, what I'd love to do is just challenge you to identify one or two strongholds in your life, some lies that you've believed. Maybe you don't recognize it as such, but just some things that have been determining the direction of your life, some thoughts that you think subconsciously that you're going to really pay attention to. I just want to talk about where these strongholds come from as a way to help us identify them in our own lives.

First, they come from early and frequent thinking, early and often thinking. When you are young, your brain, my brain is when it's the most plastic; it's the most moldable. And there's some strongholds that were passed down to us that we never wanted, and we didn't intentionally choose.

And it helps you understand, like, right now, why you respond the way you respond. Like, why you react the way you react, why anger surfaces the way it surfaces. Why you feel like you're at the mercy of your desires, the way you're at the mercy of your desires. It's because of some ways your thinking was shaped when you were young.

Proverbs 22 verse 6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he's old, he won't depart from it.” It's not a promise; it's a principle that's generally true. And when taught, Proverbs 22 is usually taught—rightly so—in a positive context. But you can flip it and it's also true negatively. Like, that foundation that's built when a child is young has a way of holding it, keeping a grip on that child as they get older.

And so, if when you're young, you're trained and you're taught you can't trust anyone, well, it's going to be really difficult to break that as you get older. You have to be perfect to be loved. You can't control your emotions. This is how you express your anger. Like, all of those things are strongholds that are often times passed down to us when we're young. They literally shape us and structure our brains, and they need to fall.

Second is cognitive reinforcement. This is how some strongholds in your life have been formed. It's your instinct and my instinct to surround ourselves with voices and opinions that reinforce thoughts that we've had for a while. Cognitive reinforcement or sometimes confirmation bias would be another way to talk about this is what we naturally do when we start looking for information and interpretation that reinforces a thought that we've had.

And we stay away from information and interpretation that might challenge a thought that we've been thinking. So okay, let's say the thought that you've had is people always let me down. If that's a stronghold in your life then confirmation bias will lead you to, in a relationship, look for ways that that's true while ignoring ways it's not.

So, if the stronghold is people are always going to let me down and you're married, what you're going to find yourself doing is just subconsciously— you're not doing it on purpose—but you're going to look…you're going to look for ways that that's true. You're going to look for evidence. See! I knew that this was true! The neural pathway in your mind is going to look for evidence that reinforces that thought, and it's going to ignore the examples that would challenge it. And so, part of taking your thoughts captive and my thoughts captive is to recognize how this is happening.

Social media has intensified cognitive reinforcement because algorithms—essentially what they are—algorithms pay attention to what you're thinking and reinforce it. That's what an algorithm does. So, if your thinking is: I am so overwhelmed, the world is falling apart, your algorithm has picked up on that even if you don't know that's what you're thinking, it's picked up on your anxiety.

And you know what it does? It gives you a lot more reasons to think the world is falling apart. It fills…your algorithm gets filled up with evidence that says, Yep, you're right, the world is falling apart. If the stronghold in your life is: Everyone is against me; I'm a victim, everybody's against me, then the algorithm has picked up on that and it's just going to reinforce that thinking. It's going to give you all kinds of evidence of, yep, everybody's against you. And here's communities that you can be a part of where everybody's against them, too. Strongholds only get stronger when we don't pay attention to what our thoughts are thinking about, to the content that we're exposed to.

Thirdly is emotional association. Our thoughts are strongly connected to emotions when it comes to forming lasting patterns. This is why thoughts that you have during a time of trauma or rejection or intense loss or intense grief will create—without you even knowing it—will create a stronghold. That a thought that you have during an intense time of loss or grief or something traumatic will create a stronghold even though you haven't thought it repeatedly, it gets connected to that emotion and that pathway gets established. And so, one painful rejection can create a stronghold that says: I'm not lovable, and it will have a grip on your heart. One traumatic event can build a stronghold that says: People just don't understand me, nobody understands me, and it'll cause you to build walls around your life.

Fourth is generational patterns. Some strongholds are passed down through families, not genetically, but through repeated patterns of thinking, of speaking, of believing. And it just gets transmitted from child to parent, from child to parent. This is why some of you, you said to yourself, I can tell you one thing, I'm not going to handle stress the way my mom does or the way my dad does. And yet when you're stressed, you find yourself doing it.

And I'm not going to be angry. I'm not going to react in anger the way that I experienced it growing up. But when you get angry, that's what you find yourself doing. And I'm not going to turn to some substance when I feel stressed out or overwhelmed. And yet when you feel stressed out or overwhelmed, you find yourself doing that.

These generational patterns… There's an old illustration, it's been around for a while, that I think perfectly illustrates what it looks like when strongholds get passed…strongholds get passed down generationally. Story goes like this, that there was a young couple on their first Thanksgiving together. The new bride was preparing the Thanksgiving turkey, and the husband was watching as she did it.
And he watched as she cut off both ends of the turkey, stuck it in the pan, and then put it in the oven. The husband says to the wife, “Why did you do that? Why'd you cut up both ends of the turkey? It's perfectly good turkey.” She said, “Well, I don't…I don't know. That's just how you do it. That's how you cook a turkey. That's how my mom always cooked a turkey. You cut off both ends, put it in the pan, stick in the oven.”

And the husband thought, Well, that's…well, that's really weird. But maybe he's wrong. Like, maybe that is how you're supposed to cook a turkey. And so, he called his mother-in-law and said to his mother-in-law, “When you cook a turkey, do you cut off both ends of the turkey before putting it in the oven?” The mother-in-law said, “Well, yeah, that's how you do it. That's how you cook a turkey. You cut off both ends.” “Why? Why do you do it that way?” The mother-in-law says, “Well, I don't know exactly, but that's the way my mom always did it.”

So, the next day he calls Grandma. He says, “Grandma, when you cook a turkey, why…how do you cook the turkey? Do you cut off both ends and put it in a pan and stick it in the oven?” And the grandma laughed and said, “Well, yeah, yeah, that's how I cook the turkey because my oven is really small. And so, I had to have a small pan. So, I had to make the turkey fit the pan to fit in the oven.” (Laughter)

And you've got three generations of turkey-cookers wasting all kinds of perfectly good turkey. And this is…this is where some of us are. That you've received some strongholds that are like twisted family heirlooms. Here's grandma's china, here's your dad's watch. Here's three generations of trust issues. Good luck! It's just gotten passed down from one generation to the next.

Somewhere back in your family line, someone started believing a lie. They didn't mean to. They didn't even know they were doing it at the time. They certainly didn't realize they'd transferred it on to you. But maybe it was because of their circumstances, or maybe because of their pain, or maybe because of their limited perspective. But that lie got passed down from one generation to the next.

Ezekiel 18, though, says that these generational patterns, these generational strongholds can be broken. And it's one of my favorite things about being a pastor in this church is almost every week I witness it, of someone saying, By God's grace and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it stops with me. It stops with me. (Applause)

A person recognizes the way their family has operated under a stronghold of fear, under a stronghold of addiction, under stronghold of control or of anger or rejection, and they say, Not…not anymore. It stops with me.

And part of this is understanding the fifth factor and that is, it’s spiritual warfare at its heart. It’s spiritual warfare. The Bible calls our enemy the Father of Lies in John 8. His job from the time you were born is to get you to buy into a few of these lies, because if he can get you to believe this lie and establish a stronghold in your heart by the thoughts you think then his…his job is done. He doesn't really have to do anything else. The stronghold will do what the stronghold does.

If…think about this, if Satan can get you to think, God doesn't really care about me, if he can get you to say that out loud and think that over your own life, then it affects everything. It keeps you from prayer. It keeps you from believing God's promises. It keeps you from having a relationship with God. If he can just get you to focus on a few failures or inadequacies or insecurities and convince you to believe this thought, you're not worthy of love, then he can create a fortress around your life that will sabotage you from all the good God wants you to have in walking with him and sharing life with others.

And so, this is why when we talk about taking our thoughts captive, we're not so much talking about psychology, we're talking about spiritual warfare. So, what is a stronghold in your life that needs to fall? Can you identify it?

I was at a men's conference, speaking at a men's conference a few years ago. And I sat down at a table with a group of men, and we were focusing on this idea of strongholds and trying to identify them specifically looking at these strongholds that we've had since we were perhaps boys that were affecting our lives now as men. And we just went around the table to share the strongholds.

And so, Joe went first and Joe said, “I didn't think it was okay to be sad.” And he grew up in a home where the expectation was to be happy no matter what, all the time. Real men aren't sad. Being sad is for weak people. And so, when his family dog died and he cried, he remembers his dad teasing him.

And now Joe, because of the stronghold of ‘it's okay not to be sad,’ he deals with lots of loneliness in his life. Why? Because when he's sad, it doesn't feel like it's okay to share that with anybody. So, he keeps his sadness to himself, and that's really isolating, and it's really lonely. And Joe deals with anger because of this stronghold. Why? Well, because what he learned as a boy is it's not okay to be sad, being sad isn’t masculine, but it's okay to be angry. And so, every time he's sad, it shows up as anger. And he's been angry a lot.

Around the table we go, Mike identifies his stronghold, “I thought of women as objects.” Mike's parents divorced when he was six, and he would stay at his father's house. He had easy access to his dad's collection of porn. He was hooked by the time he was 11. When he got married, he thought marriage would break that stronghold in his life, but it didn't. Instead, what he did was, without meaning to, is he sent his wife down that neural pathway of objectification, and he looked at her as someone who existed to satisfy him and put pressure on her, was demanding with her. She became bitter and resentful. They divorced after three years.

Around the table, Scott's stronghold: “I thought my worth was determined by how much money I made.” He grew up thinking that success in life was determined by the income he made, the car he drove, the house he lived in, the vacations he went on. And look, he was surrounded by kind of real-life algorithms, real-life examples that reinforce this thinking that the measure of his worth was determined by how much he was worth.
And what he could see now as a man in his mid-50s, is that stronghold has directed every major decision of his life. Like, every major decision has been filtered through this lie that my worth is determined by how much money I can make. He wasn't thinking about legacy or eternity or God's will or God's kingdom.

And on around the table we went, the next one that got identified, the next stronghold that got identified was: “I thought I couldn't ask for help.” And that one was mine. And I've shared this with you before, but I don't remember ever intentionally thinking this, but somewhere along the line, I picked up on this idea and thought it and then kept thinking it that it's okay to help people, but it's not okay to ask for help from people.

My thinking, this stronghold convinced me that asking for help was the same as admitting failure. And so, if I ask for help, I’m calling myself a failure. I didn't want to do that. This thinking, this stronghold convinced me that it's okay to be someone who rescues. It's okay to be a rescuer, but you don't want to be somebody who needs rescued.

And that seemed to work okay. Like, that stronghold seemed to work okay until it didn't. And I can tell you, in our early years of marriage, and we're working through some things and trying to figure some things out, my young wife would say, “Hey, why don't we just ask somebody for help as we navigate this.” And in my mind, that wasn't an option. No, we can't. I got this. I can fix this. We'll figure this out. I'm not going to ask somebody for help.

When we're in the thick of parenting, and we're trying things that just clearly aren't working. And my wife says, “Why…why don't you just…why don't you just ask someone for help? At your job, you're surrounded by people who can help you with this. Why don't you just ask someone for help? I'll figure this out. It's fine. I've got this under control.
And here's what I finally had to recognize is that this thought: I can't ask someone for help, it wasn't just holding me captive, it was holding my wife captive, it was holding my children captive. It was holding people I lead captive. Around the table we go. What's yours? What's a stronghold that has had its grip on your life long enough?

And how do we fight the strongholds? Let’s go back to 2 Corinthians 10, “The weapons we fight against are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, these weapons, divine weapons, have the power, divine power to demolish strongholds.” Okay, what are we talking about, God? You got…you got a nuclear arsenal up there? You've got some weapon that I don't know about where you just push that button and this stronghold just explodes once and for all?

What weapons are you talking about? Well, you keep reading. Weapons he gives us? Thoughts and prayers. Thoughts and prayers. This is the Almighty's strategy for breaking some strongholds in your life: thinking differently. Why? Because he created your brain. He understands concepts of neuroplasticity. He knows that if you can change the way you think, it'll change your brain. It'll position you to experience his transforming power. That when you start to take Biblical truth and Scriptures and replace the lies with his truth, transformation happens.

So, how do we take our thoughts captive? Or to use a…borrow a term from neuroscience, cognitive reappraisal. How does cognitive reappraisal happen? Well, here's how it works.

First, you recognize the lie. You have to identify the lie. Now look, what most of us do is we identify the behavior rather than the lie that's led to the behavior.

Like, even as I've tried to ask you to identify a stronghold in your life, likely—and I…this is what I would do, too—likely, what you've done is you've tried to identify a behavior, a way you react, a way that you respond to people, an addiction that you've been struggling with and you think the stronghold is the behavior. But the Bible would say the stronghold isn't the behavior, the stronghold is the lie that's led to the behavior. It's identifying the lie.

Secondly, replace with truth. You find God's truth that directly contradicts the lie. It’s not about positive thinking; it's about identifying a Scripture that speaks truth into that lie and then aligning your thoughts with God's thoughts. Recognize the lie; replace it with truth.

Number three, you reinforce the truth with community and content. Strongholds are reinforced in isolation. The moment you share your struggle with a trusted Christian friend or in a small group, the moment that stronghold will lose some of its grip on your life. So, you reinforce the truth with community and then with content. You pay attention to what you're thinking about, to what you're exposing your mind to. To the algorithms that are establishing these pathways in your brain.

And so, I just wanted to end by getting real practical. I don't know what stronghold you've identified but I tried to pick a few common ones and walk through what this looks like.

So, let's just start with the stronghold of control. If you're not in control of something, you feel anxious, you feel overwhelmed, you're constantly concerned with the what if and what might happen and all these things you know you don't have control over, whether it's circumstances in life or global events or whether it's the emotions of the person sitting next to you. It's a stronghold of control.

So, recognize the lie. Don't pay attention to the behavior as much as you pay attention to the lie. I believe the lie that I have to manage every outcome or everything will fall apart. And if I don't control it, it won't work out. And I don't know where that lie came from, maybe because of some people who've let you down and you just recognize that unless I…unless I'm in charge of it, it's going to fall apart. But that's a lie.

And so, you recognize the lie and then you replace it with truth. You find a Scripture and whenever that thought starts to take root, you replace it with the Scripture. Proverbs 3:5, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.” 1 Peter 5:7, “Cast all your anxiety on God because he cares for you.” Romans 8:28, “God works all things together for good, for those who love him and are called according to his purpose.”

And then, you reinforce that with community and with content. What's that look like? Well, it means that you share your struggle with control, your anxiety with a trusted friend who can call you on it. When you start spiraling or you start micromanaging, it means that you're going to limit the content that reinforces the idea of all these things that might happen, reinforced with community and with content.

Second stronghold, as an example, would be one that I think almost all of us have, although we're often unaware of it. It's the stronghold of shame. And so, you recognize the lie. I believe the lie that my past mistakes define my worth and that I'm too broken for God to use me or to love me fully. You recognize the lie that says, I'm too broken, and then you replace it with truth.

Romans 8:1, “There's no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins. Isaiah 53, “He took our shame upon himself.” As I told many people who were baptized a few weeks ago, the shame that you've been carrying stays in this water. You don't walk out of here carrying the same shame that you came in here with.

Jesus has taken it upon himself. 2 Corinthians 5, “I am a new creation in Christ. The old is gone, the new has come.” And then you reinforce that with community and with content. That means that you find safe Christian community where you can be honest about your struggles without being…feeling fear of judgement or condemnation. And then it means that you pay attention, maybe to some testimonies. You listen to testimonies of how God has redeemed people's shame and guilt and brought good, and his grace has been demonstrated in the lives of others.

Let me give you one more. It's the stronghold of victimhood where you're at the mercy of your thought that says, “Look what somebody else has done to me.” And you recognize the lie. I believe the lie that I'm powerless to change my circumstances or my responses because of what happened to me. I have no choice but to stay stuck because of what this person did to me or because of life circumstances, and you replace it with truth.

Philippians 4:13, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” 2 Peter 1, “He has given us everything we need for life and godliness.” 1 John 4:4, “Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world.” And again, Romans 8:28, “God causes all things to work together for good.”

And you reinforce that with community and content. You surround yourself with people who encourage you and your growth rather than enable your excuses. They'll challenge you when they hear you start making excuses, and you seek out stories of people who've overcome difficult circumstances because of God's strength. And you remind yourself, That's true for me, too.

Scripture, through the power of the Holy Spirit, will bring down strongholds in your life that seem impossible to tear down. Strongholds are built repeated exposure to lies. They are demolished through repeated exposure to truth. Dr. Caroline Leaf, a Christian neuroscientist, talks about how it takes 21 days-ish to begin breaking down a toxic thought pattern, and it takes about 63 days to establish a new healthy pattern.
God can tear down some strongholds in your life supernaturally, and then, in the days ahead as you take your thoughts captive, he replaces them with new life-giving truths. I believe…I believe God is calling some people in this room to say: It stops with me.

Music begins to play softly.

To be a generation that breaks strongholds… Some of you right now, you don't know it, but you are sitting on the edge of either passing down some strongholds or breaking them. The lies that have held you or held your family captive for generations must fall. Patterns of anger and addiction and anxiety and control, they don't have to be true for you, and they don't have to define the next generation.

So, I just want to challenge you in the next few minutes to identify a stronghold that needs to fall. Write…write it down. Not the behavior, the lie that you've been believing that's led to it. Find one Scripture verse that speaks truth against that lie. Share it with a trusted friend who'll help you fight the battle because that stronghold has had enough time to rule your life. And this morning, by the power of Jesus, and the power of the Holy Spirit, it's time for that stronghold to fall once and for all. Let's pray.

Jesus, this is not a message about the power of positive thinking or… It's a message about surrendering our thoughts to You, of recognizing how the enemy has set up camp and built these strongholds, maybe over the years, maybe since before we can even remember, that has had so much control over our lives and over Your plan for who You want us to be.

So, Jesus, would You give us the humility and the courage? Would you give us the eyes to see these strongholds that have been built? God, if we hear some of this, and we're immediately defensive, and we're immediately feeling threatened, and the things that you've brought to the surface in our minds over the last few minutes, we don't want to think about, would You help us to recognize that that's all the more likely that it's a stronghold that needs to be dealt with?

And so, Jesus, I just ask You that You would work supernaturally in this room over the next few minutes. That we would experience Your power as You break strongholds that have been passed down. And that we find freedom in You, supernatural freedom. We fight with Your divine weapons, and we do it together. We help one another along the way. Would You…would You work in that way through the power of your Son Jesus? In his name we pray. Amen.