Taking Thoughts Captive
October in New York City is beautiful. The tree canopy in Central Park is a blanket of orange, red, and yellow. The humidity fades and the temperature is perfect for taking long strolls through the city instead of cramming into public transportation.
But there’s another side to October in New York City that isn’t so lovely for mothers of very observant young children. New Yorkers go all out decorating for Halloween. Yes, there are beautiful displays of fall foliage and pumpkins of every color climbing the steps of brownstones. There are also horror movie advertisements on almost every bus and taxi, gory figures hanging outside brownstone windows, and skeletons dangling from trees. When my daughter was almost three years old, October felt like the entire city was a haunted house and I was trying desperately to shield my small child from all of the scary images around her. I was also praying every single day for God to show me how to explain these images to her but was equally nervous about messing up those conversations.
One day she was in her stroller and we were waiting to cross the street when a bus pulled up right in front of us with a graphic horror movie ad plastered on the side. Norah immediately looked up at me with fear in her eyes.
“What is that mom?!?!? It’s so scary!!” I was so thankful that I had been praying, because God walked me right through the conversation. I angled her stroller away from the bus and bent down next to her.
“You’re right Norah, that is really scary. And when we see scary things, our response is ‘God is bigger than that monster!’ We can yell it as loud as we want or say it quietly in our hearts. Scary monsters are nothing compared to our God. God is bigger and He protects you. The God who loves you is bigger than that monster. So every time you see something scary, you yell, “God is bigger than that monster!!”
And she did. Scary images became a trigger for her to reorient her thoughts to something else. Instead of seeing those images and being triggered to fear, she saw those images and was triggered to proclaim how big God is. So we would be walking down the street and from her stroller I would hear her say, “God is bigger than that monster! God is so big! God loves me and He is bigger than that scary monster!”
What I didn’t realize at that moment is that I was giving Norah her first lesson on taking her thoughts captive.
2 Corinthians 10:3-6:
For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, being ready to punish every disobedience, when your obedience is complete.
I think it’s important to note that this passage is talking about a battle. Taking our thoughts captive is not something we can do passively or easily. It takes work, obedience, discipline, and a power that is not our own. This passage uses words like waging war, weapons, divine power, destroying strongholds, and punishing disobedience. We can’t go into the battle of taking our thoughts captive unarmed or unaware of the true enemy.
We can arm ourselves with Truth – specifically Scripture – because our weapons are not our own, or as the passage above states, they are “not of the flesh”. Instead, our weapons have divine power. We cannot destroy strongholds on our own, but when we take our thoughts captive it’s like we build a fortress around our mind and don’t allow the thoughts of the enemy in. My friend Julia once shared that God gave her a vision of that fortress being a ring of fire. I love this because the fire not only protects us outwardly against the enemy, but it also sanctifies and refines our minds on the inside.
The Truth of who God is scares the enemy.
My daughter was able to proclaim how big God is, because that was a truth that her 3-year-old mind needed when being triggered by a scary image of a large monster. What are your triggers? What are the images or words or people that trigger your heart to beat faster, your shoulders to raise, your mind to race with lies? Because there are scary things in this world. There are places that bring traumatic memories and people’s words that have burrowed in your mind and monsters on the sides of buses.
Taking our thoughts captive means feeling that fear or anxiety start to rise up and proclaiming truth right over it. It means retraining our brains to think new thoughts.
There is a whole body of fairly new research about this even outside of Christian circles. It’s called neuroplasticity and it shows that our brains actually do have the capacity to create new pathways of thinking. For a long time scientists thought our brains were pretty locked in after childhood, but now they know that’s not true – our brains are adaptable. Over time as we think, feel and do things our brains create pathways that make those things habit. Those paths are well traveled and the roads look that way with deep wheel wells and easy on ramps. But if we try to change habits or thoughts, we actually create brand new paths in our brains. At first, it takes effort to choose the new path, but if we consciously choose it over and over, that new path becomes the stronger one and the old one becomes weaker.
That’s what I was trying to do with Norah – create a pathway in her brain that triggered her to look to God and not to feed that fear.
Sometimes we need something a bit more than just statements though. We need weapons we can pull out to help us take our thoughts captive. My friend Sarah has a great tool for this.
When Sarah was in college she was an RA. One night she busted a bunch of the freshmen in her dorm for drinking. She poured the alcohol out and wrote them up. A short time later they had the opportunity to give feedback on their RA, and needless to say they weren’t happy with Sarah at that point. When Sarah saw the feedback during her meeting with her supervisor she started to let the words they used about her enter her thoughts, and they weren’t kind words. Thankfully, her supervisor knew Sarah and her character, but the feedback was still hard to hear. She left the meeting feeling all those things about herself, “I’m a terrible person. Even my neighbors don’t like me.” She had planned to meet a friend for dinner that night and it was a 20 minute walk across campus to the restaurant. This is when Sarah pulled out her tool. She had spent time previously making an acronym using her name that held True statements about who she is. S – Saint, A – Accepted, R – Righteous, A – Alien & stranger in this temporary land, H – Holy. She repeated these truths to herself over and over again on the walk until she walked into the restaurant not believing the lies of being terrible and unliked, but believing the truth of who she is in Christ.
In order to take our thoughts captive, we have to know the truth. We can’t make it up or look to the world to tell us. We have to know who we are as children of a King.
I asked you what your trigger to anxious thoughts was, so I want to share one of my triggers with you too.
A few years ago I was leading a monthly women’s event at my church called Dwell. This essay you’re reading was originally a talk for one of those events. About a year into leading this event, my trigger became Dwell. I had started to believe that this was something I was forcing on the women of our church. I stopped believing the truth that Dwell was a gift from the Holy Spirit that he kindly asked me to steward. I started to believe that I had to do all the things for Dwell and it depended on my competence and strength. Thankfully, that isn’t true either. If the Dwell gatherings depended solely on my competence and strength they would have fallen apart in the first few months.
But I was getting to the point that any time I got a text or e-mail about Dwell, my heart would race and the enemy would tell me that the email would finally tell me the truth – that I was being laughed at and I was a terrible leader and no one wanted to be a part of it. So I would have to pause and pray before opening any text or email regarding Dwell.
And then I realized where these lies were coming from.
1 Peter 5:6-11
Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you. Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.
My anxiety was a product of my own pride. Before we cast our anxieties on God, he tells us to humble ourselves. Of course I would be anxious about leading Dwell out of my own power. I felt an intense spiritual battle every month the week before Dwell. The enemy did not like Dwell. And I couldn’t fight him in my own power. I have to humble myself before God and cast all of my anxiety on Him. Then he not only takes my anxiety, but he replaces it with peace AND he fights the battle for me.
I want to be careful here. I am not saying that anxiety is always a product of pride. I know that there are people who struggle with diagnosed anxiety disorders. I am not trying to be a doctor here. But this wasn’t me. I was anxious because I thought I had to do things on my own.
And if we keep reading that passage in 1 Peter, we see where the victory lies. Spoiler alert – it’s with Jesus.
Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world. And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. To Him be the dominion forever and ever. Amen.
Christ restores.
Christ confirms.
Christ strengthens.
Christ establishes us.
He has already won this battle. So when our thoughts are making us fearful or anxious or causing us to believe lies, we take those thoughts captive by remembering who He is and who He says we are. Second Timothy says that God gave us a spirit not of fear, but of power. The enemy can’t stand when He’s fighting a battle against us, because if he’s fighting against us, he’s fighting against our God. And I’ll let Norah remind you – Our God is bigger than that monster.