Dwight Fletcher | Change your way of thinking

STRONGHOLDS ARE why some of us never achieve God’s best for our lives. These are defence mechanisms that the enemy of our souls use to control our lives. They are the patterns of thinking programmed into our minds from living independently of God. Here are a few common ones that we encounter frequently:

* Learned dishonesty — lying to hide the truth about ourselves.

* Denial — consciously or subconsciously refusing to accept the world the way it really is.

* Fantasy — escaping the real world to live in one’s imagination. Some people watch pornography, for example, to relieve stress and ‘escape’.

* Emotional insulation — withdrawing from others to avoid rejection.

* Regression — reverting to safer, less threatening times or retreating to ungodly behaviour because it’s less threatening.

* Displacement — taking anger and frustration out on others.

* Projection — blaming others for our problems.

* Rationalisation — making excuses for what we say or do.

Strongholds are not the random thoughts or occasional sins that we deal with; they are our thoughts, attitudes, and perceptions that we justify. For some of us, we can’t think in any other way. Some of us have lived our lives with these false thoughts for so long that even when Christ shows us the truth and we become saved, we still don’t want to let go of the false, and prefer to live in an almost dream world. We defend these thoughts (strongholds) with the same degree of intensity with which we justify and defend ourselves, and they become part of the way we operate. “As [a man] thinketh in his heart, so is he…” Proverbs 23:7 (KJV).

In other words, the essence of who we are is in our thought life. To live right, have victory, and be set free, we must destroy the strongholds that we have built in our lives that are so hidden in our thinking patterns, that we don’t recognise them nor identify them as evil.

Strongholds can be broken, and these patterns of thinking change. The Word of God tells us, “For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. 4 The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. 5 We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” 2 Corinthians 10:3-5 (NIV). The weapons of our warfare have divine power to demolish strongholds, but we cannot pull down what we don’t know. Strongholds can be destroyed, but first we must identify the thought patterns.

We develop strongholds in various ways, one of which is through the tutoring of the world system that’s attempting to train us in how to think. There’s a steady stream of information and experiences from the world that are continually shaping our perceptions, and this is most pronounced when we are children. The strongholds formed in our childhood are the hardest to break, and often direct our lives.

Many of our opinions about life were formed in our childhood, and are ours only because we know no other way to think. We defend and protect our ideas and justify our opinions as though we formed them on our own. Many persons in Jamaica, for example, grew up knowing about their zodiac sign. The horoscope was on radio and in the newspaper, but it is demonic.

As Christians, though the Bible teaches otherwise, that pattern of thinking is still in our heads, and we still make decisions based on the month someone was born.