6 Core Areas to Explore in Christian Counseling … Parts 1 and 2: What’s the Lie, and What’s True?
Identify the lie(s) you struggle with on a regular basis
We all believe lies. Maybe they are half truths, but they are still technically lies.
I’ll be stuck in this feeling forever if I don’t find a solution
I’m not capable of doing anything that matters
Everything I do will fail
I need just a little more money, acclaim, control, power, to be happy
I have to be perfect to feel peace
Work success defines my worth
I’m unworthy of the love I desire
I’ll always be single unless I settle
God is not actually good or actually involved in my life
Good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people
Fortunately, our conscience often screams out at us that something isn’t quite right when we start believing these types of things. If we dig long enough without distracting ourselves with more busyness, we often find the lie or lies that underpin our distress. Often we avoid the stopping, the looking, and the digging because it’s frightening to even say the lie out loud. But naming it is the beginning of addressing it with truth.
Living Lies Can Have Terrible Consequences
Quote by John Mark Comer, Live No Lies
“As the psychologist David Benner put it, It is not so much that we tell lies as that we live them.
For example, suppose you believe the lie that you are unlovable—wherever you picked it up in your life journey, be it a broken relationship with your parents, a breakup, a failure, a demonic deposit into your mind, or anywhere. Then, if you let that lie into your body, into your neurobiology, you let that lie give shape to your behavior. Because you don’t believe you are worthy of love, you let people treat you in ways that are disrespectful or demeaning. Or you act in ways that are disrespectful or demeaning. If you live into this lie long enough, tragically, what was false starts to become true. You eventually become the kind of person that is not worthy of love and respect, and you alienate yourself from the very relationships you crave.
I do need to say, like all wounds to the soul, this can be healed—through loving relationships and truth. Ideally, through loving relationships with the God whom Jesus called Father and his family, the church, and through the truth of your identity as a daughter or son of God.
My point is this: lies distort our souls and drive us into ruin.”
2. Name what’s true in response to those lies
Some people can name the lie. They know how they’ve been hurt, but they don’t know where to find hope for recovery. Is it exacting justice? Is it coping skills? Is it in being understood? Lies must be fought with truth if we are to ever truly overcome them.
What Is the Ultimate Hope?
Quote by Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor
“Everyone knows that things in this world are seriously out of whack. No one claims that his or her own life is as it should be, let alone the whole world. There is something wrong within us. Nothing ever seems to make us happy or fulfilled except in the most fleeting way. There is also wrong among us. The world is filled with poverty, war, suffering, and injustice. Something seems to have knocked the whole world off balance. But what is it? Who deserves the blame? And what is the solution? As soon as you begin to answer these questions, you arrive at a story that you will begin to live out. We are wired to move through our lives chasing and rehearsing narratives that will promise to bring the world back into balance.
We have said that any worldview consists of posing and answering three questions:
1. How are things supposed to be?
2. What is the main problem with things as they are?
3. What is the solution and how can it be realized?
…The Christian story line works beautifully to make sense of things and even to help us appreciate the truth embedded in stories that clearly come from another worldview. The Christian story line, or worldview, is: creation (plan), fall (problem), redemption and restoration (solution):
The whole world is good. God made the world and everything in it was good. There are no intrinsically evil parts of the world. Nothing is evil in its origin. As Tolkien explained about his archvillain in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, in the beginning “even Sauron was not so.” You can find this “creational good” in anything.
The whole world is fallen. There is no aspect of the world affected by sin more or less than any other. For example, are emotion and passions untrustworthy and reason infallible? Is the physical bad and the spiritual good? Is the day-to-day world profane but religious observances good? None of these are true; but non-Christian story lines must adopt some variations of these in order to villainize and even demonize some created thing instead of sin.
The whole world is going to be redeemed. Jesus is going to redeem spirit and body, reason and emotion, people and nature. There is no part of reality for which there is no hope.”
How Do We Name What’s True Day to Day?
Quote by John Mark Comer, Live No Lies
“The key is not just to think about Scripture, but to think Scripture.
This simple practice has transformed my mind and, with it, my life. I was so impacted by reading Evagrius’s take on the story of Jesus in the wilderness that I made my own monastic handbook for combating demons. Don’t worry; this one won’t see publication. It’s not for others; it’s for me. I spent months writing down in my journal every thought or emotion that came into my conscious awareness. I identified repeating thoughts that were lies from the devil.
Then I asked the Spirit to bring to mind a specific scripture to combat each lie. Sometimes a scripture would come immediately to mind; other times, I had to wait on God for days or weeks for just the right verse. Once I had it, I wrote it down beneath the lie, just like Evagrius.
Against the thought, Stepping out in faith to start this nonprofit will end in disaster for my family…
“The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.”
Against the thought, My wife and I are a bad fit, and I would be happier if we got a divorce…
“What God has joined together, let no one separate” and “Husbands, love your wives” and “be considerate as you live with your wives… heirs with you of the gracious gift of life.”
Against the thought, I want to buy that new thing I don’t need or If I had that thing, then I would be happy…
“Be content with what you have, because God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.’
Then I put each scripture to memory.
That was the easy part.
The harder challenge is the ongoing war to combat lies and curate my thoughts. Every time an identified lie comes into my conscious awareness, I don’t fight it head on; I just change the channel. I bring the corresponding scripture to mind and direct my attention to truth. Then I go about my day. If the thought comes back three seconds later, I simply turn to the same scripture, again and again.
It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in decades of following Jesus.
And it has changed and is changing my life.”
Next Up: Working truth into your life and letting go of what’s blocking it…
3. Behaviorally align yourself with what’s true via repentance and a rule of life
4. Grieve the wounds that have amplified those lies that are in your mind and body via lament and forgiveness
