Get Out of Your Head - Part 1

Good evening, ladies.

If I haven't met you yet, my name is Caitlin, and I'm so glad that you have joined us tonight for our first Thrive Gathering online for the summer.

I am so excited about this series.

We're gonna be studying through the book of Philippians, and we're gonna start talking about being intentional, about the way that we think, about understanding how we think, and about taking control of the thoughts that we have.

I learned this week, this is so interesting.

Let's see if you agree with it or not.

I learned this week that women have 50,000 to 70,000 individual thoughts per day.

Do you agree with that?

I can totally relate.

I feel like all the time there's a bunch of different thoughts coming into my mind at once, a lot of times.

We're thinking about the kids, we're thinking about what's next on the to-do list, we're thinking about our futures.

Maybe worrying about them is a better way to put it.

About all of the relationships and responsibilities that we have in life.

More recently, we've probably started thinking some anxious thoughts about germs and about how to be safe when shopping and all of those things.

Maybe even this past week, we've started to think some deep thoughts about what's going on in our world.

But what I want us to think about tonight is the fact that we have bought a lie, that we are victims to the thoughts that come into our mind.

We enter into spiraling thought processes, and we don't take an active role a lot of times in stopping that spiral.

And so here's an important truth I want you to know tonight.

We are not victims to our thoughts.

Let me say that again.

You are not a victim to your thoughts.

You have power and authority over them in the name of Jesus.

He can offer us a new normal.

We don't have to be stuck and spiraling.

But when we understand that we're fully known and fully loved by God, we're able to enter into a new normal where we're running free.

Now let me stop here and take just a second to say that mental health issues are real and that there are lots of different components to them.

And so there is wisdom if you're facing something like anxiety or depression in taking a comprehensive approach to battle that and to dealing with that.

And I would say that a wise, comprehensive approach includes lots of people, lots of wisdom, lots of knowledge.

That you seek out the help of medical professionals, of licensed professional counselors, of trusted pastors, that there is a place and a wisdom in seeking all of those things when you're dealing with issues like anxiety or depression.

There's even wisdom in seeking out help from medicine at times because there are physical, chemical things that happen in the brain that need to be dealt with with medication or by a medical professional, and there's no shame in that.

What I want to say about some of the things that we're gonna talk about tonight is that when it comes to our thoughts and our emotions, there are lots of components that make up the battle that we're gonna talk about.

There's physical components, emotional components, and there's spiritual components.

And that's primarily what I'm talking about tonight.

It's the spiritual component of how to take captive our thoughts to Jesus.

So we have to recognize that there is a spiritual battle of light and darkness going on in our minds.

We're at war with a real enemy who comes at us with lies, with discouragement, with doubt, and seeks to isolate us and imprison us with those things.

And the only way we can do battle against him and win is through a deep rewiring and renewing of our minds, where we focus on the person of Jesus and allow him to change everything.

What I love about this topic is that God built our brains and that science actually confirms the truth in Scripture that tells us that we can interrupt our anxious and negative thought spirals and we can make them captive to Christ.

That's good news tonight.

The Apostle Paul tells us over and over in Scripture that conforming our minds to Christ is not only possible, but it should be the goal for every believer.

We're at the beginning tonight of a new study of the book of Philippians.

And this is a book that Paul wrote as a letter to one of the church churches that he planted.

It was in the city of Philippi.

And in this book, he does an incredible job of showing us what he's trying to teach us.

We see Paul set his mind on Jesus and on the joy and the hope that he has in him despite terrible difficulties and less than ideal circumstances.

He shows us this powerful truth.

And we're gonna go back to this tonight over and over again.

But here it is.

How we think determines how we live.

How we think determines how we live.

In Romans 12, 2, Paul reminds us that we should not be conformed to this world or to the patterns of this world, but that we should be transformed by the renewing of our minds so that we can test what God's will is.

He says that it's possible to renew our minds, and when we do, it transforms everything else.

Because the way that we think determines the way that we live.

Paul also reminds us in 2 Corinthians chapter 10 in verses 3 through 5, he reminds us that we have authority to control our thought processes.

2 Corinthians 10 · chapter mention

Listen to this, so such a powerful passage.

For though we walk in the flesh, we're 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.

See, we have the power in Christ to destroy strongholds.

We are not victims of our thoughts.

We have a choice to interrupt our spiraling thoughts and surrender them to the person and the truth of Jesus.

You know, a lot of times I think we don't intentionally think about the way that we think.

I know that's true of me before I started reading Jenny Allen's book, Get Out of Your Head, and before I started doing her study through the book of Philippians, I just really wasn't intentional about following my thoughts and considering why I was thinking the way that I was thinking.

As women, I think it's a definite truth that we think about how we feel almost every minute of every day.

We think about our feelings all the time, but we don't think about how we think.

And it's important for us to know that our emotions are actually byproducts of how we think of our thoughts.

And so our thoughts drive our emotions.

And then that drives the way that we act and the way that we live.

So we have to think then, if we're gonna be intentional about the way that we think, we can't wrestle down fear.

We can't wrestle down feelings of rejection or negative self-image or anxiety or pride on our own.

We have to fix our thoughts on someone who can, on Jesus, who's our only hope in the battle in our minds.

Jenny Allen says this in her book and in her videos on her study of Philippians, but she she quotes A.

W.

Tozer, and this is such a beautiful quote.

He says, put God in his rightful place, and 1,000 problems are solved all at once.

See, we can radically shift our perspectives from our anxiety, from our negative self-image, from our seemingly helpless circumstances to the majesty and the sovereignty and the power and the sufficiency of God.

Paul lived a powerful story that shows us just that.

It shows this radical shift in perspective.

Paul started out as the bad guy.

He started out as Saul murdering Christians.

He was leading the charge against the early church.

And then he experienced Jesus, and his perspective immediately shifted, and he experienced a radical rewiring and renewing of his mind, and it changed everything.

It changed the way he thought, it changed what he did, it changed the way he lived.

And so tonight we're gonna look at um part of the life of Paul in order to see how he thought and how he lived, so that we can apply his example to how we think and how we live.

We're actually gonna look at a passage in Acts 16 tonight, which seems odd since we're starting um a study of the book of Philippians.

But what I want us to see here before we jump into the book of Philippians is a really important part of the story of how the church began and where Paul was when he was writing to the people in Philippi, because it's gonna be really important for us to understand how he was thinking and why he lived the way he lived.

So look with me at Acts 16, verses 6 through 10.

Acts 16:6–10

It says this and they went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia.

And when they had come to Mycia, they attempted to go into Bithynia, but the spirit of Jesus did not allow them.

So passing by Mycia, they went on to Troaz, and a vision appeared to Paul in the night.

A man of Macedonia was standing there, urging him, saying, Come over to Macedonia and help us.

And when Paul had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go on into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.

So we know Acts was written by Luke, who was part of Paul's missionary journeys, and we see here that he wants us to know that the Holy Spirit forbade Paul from going into Asia.

And I have to think, you know, I wonder if Paul, kind of after the conversion and the call to preach the gospel, if he thought that Asia was kind of the prize, the big, that's where I'm gonna go and accomplish God's big plans for me, and I'm gonna go reach a whole bunch of people there.

And God said, no, no, that's not where you're gonna go.

Um God called him instead to Macedonia.

And I think it's so interesting because Philippi was a leading city in the region of Macedonia.

It was a Roman colony, a power center of the day.

And we see that Paul brings not thousands, not huge congregations of people, he brings three people to know Jesus and Philippi, and that's how the church in Philippi starts.

He brings a wealthy woman named Lydia to know Christ, a demon-possessed slave comes to Jesus, and a jailer.

And that's how that's how the whole church starts.

And we know that Paul was put in prison in Macedonia.

God led him there on purpose, knowing that he would be imprisoned and put in chains.

That was God's big plan for Paul in Macedonia.

Imprisonment.

Now, for being real, and I'm Paul, I'm automatically cranky.

You know what I'm saying?

Like I just, there's these big plans God has, and I've got this big call, and now I'm in prison.

I'm perhaps railing against God or spinning out.

Maybe I didn't understand God completely.

Maybe this is not what I'm supposed to be doing.

How can I be effective for Jesus in chains?

All of those spiraling thoughts kind of coming up.

But in his prison cell, Paul would go on to write almost every letter included in the New Testament.

Throughout the pages of Philippians, we see that there is something about the way Paul thinks, about his life, about his God, and about God's plans for him.

That just all he wants to do is be where God wants him to be.

All he wants to do is be obedient, no matter what the cost.

Actually, in Philippians chapter 1, which we'll study next week, we see Paul praise God for his prison cell because it served to advance the gospel.

Philippians 1 · chapter mention

It would have been so easy, I think, for Paul to allow the enemy to discourage him, for him to pout about being in prison, for him to let thoughts of self-pity or pride or anger distract him from God's call and from God's mission for him while he was in chains.

But he intentionally used his difficult circumstances to accomplish the will of God.

You know, I think back to kind of the beginning of this season with the coronavirus and all that when life kind of changed.

And I know probably many of you can relate just to initial feelings of fear or anxiety or difficulty, not knowing what's gonna happen next.

And I remember one specific night, um, I had kind of walked through the first few weeks in survival mode a little bit.

You know, the kids are home, we got to do homeschool and all that.

Um, we gotta stay at home and you know, not go anywhere and all that.

And I had kind of just walked through that um in quiet uh worry.

You know, I was worried and I was kind of stewing over some things that were concerning me, but I wasn't saying it to anybody out loud.

Not really to God, not really to anybody else in my life.

And I remember one night I was rocking my baby um in his room, and I just I had one thought.

What if one of us gets sick?

And then I just spiraled completely.

Everybody's gonna get sick, we're all gonna die, everything's horrible, just all these completely irrational fears.

But because I had that one thought, the enemy took it and run with ran with it, and I started to sob over my sleeping baby.

But something, a shift happened immediately when I started saying those fears out loud to God.

Instead of just carrying them myself, I started saying, Hey God, I'm afraid.

I'm scared about this, I'm afraid, I'm scared about this.

And as soon as I said them out loud, I could identify very quickly, hey, this is the enemy coming after me in the dark.

It was like I needed to speak those things out loud, bring them into the light, and let God take them from me, let him speak back to me.

It was such a beautiful moment because as soon as I started saying those things out loud, one of the songs that I sing to my babies at night came on about the armor of God.

That his righteousness protects my heart, that his salvation protects my head like a helmet, that I have a shield and a sword in his word, and that from head to toe I'm covered.

And immediately I thought, this is ridiculous.

No virus, no circumstance, nothing that's going on around me or in my life is bigger than the God that I serve.

Nothing.

Nothing can take him out of control in my life, in my family's life, in this world, nothing.

And so I just have to ask you tonight, what is the enemy using to harass you in the dark?

Is it fear?

Is it thoughts that you're less than?

You know, I think at the beginning of this season, it was those kinds of things for most of us, but let me tell you something.

I think there's been a shift in the way that we think as people, as things open up and we're kind of moving around in this new normal, whatever that means.

I think our our thinking is shifting now from the fearful to the prideful.

And the enemy would use thoughts like, hey, I haven't been at church in months and months, I don't really need to go back.

Hey, it's too difficult to meet online with my small group.

That's just I just I don't need community like that.

And the enemy would use prideful thoughts to keep us from what God really wants us to have and to do.

Maybe he'd use thoughts of complacency.

Hey, it's it's real easy for me to be on the outside looking in at what's going on in the world right now and just be quiet.

Because that's safe.

It's not gonna make anybody mad, it's not gonna ruffle any feathers, and the enemy would use that to harass you into silence when God would ask you to stand up and hold the hands of your brothers and sisters who are being hurt and do something about it.

The enemy doesn't just use fear to deter us from what God wants us to do.

He uses doubt, he uses complacency, he uses pride and entitlement to spiral us into thought processes that are not only not healthy, they're lies and they're destructive.

So you're not a victim to your thoughts.

You don't have to be stuck and spiraling.

But if you're not, if you're if you're willing to say, hey, I don't want to live stuck and spiraling, then you have to go to war.

You have to bring these thoughts that the enemy would use to harass you in the dark into the light.

You gotta ask somebody to fight with you for you in prayer, to join you for prayer and fasting in order to break free of what the enemy is using to hold you down.

Say out loud, like I did that night.

Hey, I'm wrestling with this.

Say it to God, say it to somebody else, and let somebody help you carry those things to God.

Let's carry those things together.

A shift happens when we do this.

When we conform our minds to who God really is and to his truth, then that's when our minds are renewed.

In knowing and loving a powerful God, our perspective shifts.

Our lives, our minds, the way that we think, the relationships that we have, the purposes that we're living out, all of that shifts when we know and love a powerful God.

Because we're willing then to follow wherever he leads, to obey him at all costs.

In knowing and loving a powerful God, your perspective on the coronavirus, it shifts.

Because even if the worst happens, there's hope.

Because God is not out of control of what happens to you, of what happens to your family.

He's in control.

And the ultimate destination is to be with him.

To know and love a powerful God means your perspective of justice shifts.

That you don't just want justice for yourself and your family and the people that look like you.

You want justice for all people because all people have been made in the image of God.

And when the world says, I don't fight for people that look different than me, or vote differently than me, or want something differently than me, God's heart says, Yes, you do.

That's who I came to fight for.

And so your perspective of justice changes because it changes into the perspective of Jesus.

We're here tonight because Paul was locked in a prison in Macedonia.

And the gospel advanced for generations because of the letters he wrote there.

Because he focused his mind on Jesus and penned words, challenging us to do the same.

In Philippians 1, he challenged us to be thankful and joyful in all things, especially because of the advancement of the gospel.

In Philippians 2, he said, humble yourself and be like Jesus and put the needs of other people before your own.

In Philippians 3, he said, Don't cling to your own righteousness.

There is no such thing.

But cling to the righteousness of Jesus and press on, keep going.

Press on toward the goal that's yours in Jesus.

In chapter 4, he he told us to pray, to rejoice in the Lord always, and to be anxious for nothing.

Those are some of the things that we're gonna study together.

But they came from a man whose mind was fixed on Jesus, and that changed the way that he lives.

So are you gonna join me in fighting the battle in our minds?

Because as we stand and fight and surrender our thoughts to Jesus, he frees us and he gives us peace no matter what our prison cell is.

I just want to say if you don't know Jesus tonight, you're still in bondage.

You can't be freed from the enemy, from your sin without him.

And he just wants you to surrender your heart and your life to him.

If you want to do that tonight, we have people who are waiting to pray with you.

We have a way for you to choose salvation in the comments at church online.

Um, but you can also text, start to follow, all one word, to 9700.

We just want to connect with you and answer any questions you have about what it looks like to walk with Jesus and give you some resources to grow in your relationship with him.

I'm telling you, there's no way to be victorious in the battle in our minds without the person and the truth of Jesus at the center of everything that we think and everything that we do.

He's the only way that we become free.

And I so want you to know him if you don't.

I also want you to be encouraged tonight that you are not alone in this fight, in this battle of our minds.

And so I'm really excited tonight that my friend Bethany is gonna be sharing with you some of the things that God has done in her mind, in her heart, in this season, and how the Lord is leading her.

Her into freedom.

So I'm really excited for her to join me tonight, and she's just gonna share a little bit of her story and how the Lord is working in her mind.

Thank you, Caitlin.

My name is Bethany, and thank you for allowing me to share tonight a little bit about my life.

So I became a Christian when I was eight years old, and I would not consider my life to have had too many ups or downs as I grew up.

But about seven years ago, after the birth of my first son, I began to experience a lot of anxiousness and a lot of new uh thoughts that I had never had before.

And I honestly thought, well, this is just the new normal of being a new mom, and this is how life is meant to be now.

And what I quickly began to realize is that it wasn't.

That what the Lord had meant to be such a blessing for me was completely being stolen by Satan because my mind began to just spiral out of control.

And this wasn't just a few thoughts here and there.

I physically began to become chained.

And this went on for about four years that I would deal with this.

I would wake up in the middle of the night, absolutely paralyzed by fear and gripping onto my husband, concerned about the what-ifs in life and unable to breathe.

And it began to control every single aspect of my life, how I would do something, when I would do it, if I would do it, every single thing.

And I couldn't breathe.

And I would um I started a Bible study with our pastor's wife called Free Fall to Fly by Rebecca Lyons.

And as I worked through this study, I understood everything that I was reading.

I knew all of the scripture verses, but I didn't know how to get these scripture verses from my head and into my heart.

But I would try to find a breath here and there.

I would get up every day and I would name off everything I was thankful for to the Lord for giving me.

And I would quote scripture verses, and when I would feel an attack begin, I would begin to just quote the scripture verses.

I was doing everything I could to get peace.

I would sit down with my husband and we would literally write down plan A for life, plan B, C, and D, if plan A didn't work out, so that I would have something to lean on.

And still nothing brought relief.

And then one day I was reading a scripture verse that I'd read for so long, 1 Peter 5, 7, that says, give all of your cares and worry to God, for he cares for you.

And I thought, well, I know this scripture verse, and so easily it becomes to just run through your head when you know something.

But that day it meant something so different to me.

And I thought, give.

Well, I tell God all the time what I'm facing in my mind.

But I had never just gotten down and just given it to Him.

And I got down on my hands and knees and I just began to literally just take my hands and say, God, I cannot do this anymore.

There is nothing that I can do anymore because I can't hold on to this.

I just I have nowhere to go.

And let me tell you, to give means to transfer the possession of.

And I did not keep that anymore.

I said, God, you just have to take it.

I'm so heavy.

I don't even feel like I can give it.

Just take it from me.

And I began to practice this over and over again.

I would just stop and I would just release that to him, physically release it.

And I began to be able to breathe for the first time in years.

At first, just a little bit, but after a while it just became normal.

And I would just look around and go, I'm breathing, like I'm walking through life, and I'm breathing, and I'm not allowing these thoughts to control my mind.

And I'm so thankful to tell you that today, the good news is that I still have these thoughts.

I do still have many thoughts, not only about my now precious three children, but in my husband, but also like every other area of my life.

But what is different is that I stop and I just I cast that to Jesus, and I know that He takes that from me every single time.

Sometimes, um, especially during quarantine, I will forget uh to cast it immediately, and it will be about two or three days, and I'm walking or reading my Bible, and I'm just so heavy again, and the joy of my circumstances are gone, and I say, Oh no, no, no.

And I just immediately drop down and I cast those thoughts.

Uh, and it could just be one thought that just began to spiral, as Caitlin's been talking about, and I immediately just give it to the Lord, and I'm just so thankful because Jesus tells us, he says, to come to him who are weak, who are heavy, and he will give us rest.

I'm so thankful that I am able to come to him just as you are able to come to him, and he does truly give us rest.

And I just want to say thank you for letting me share with you, and I hope that this was some kind of encouragement to someone who may be dealing with the same thing, because the reality of this is that people don't see what's going on here, nobody knows it, and that's the scary part is that we can look perfectly fine, but but God knows and he hears your heart and he knows you and he loves you, and he loves me, and I'm so thankful that I was able to release that and that he has taken that from us.

Thank you so much, Bethany.

What an incredible, um, just powerful testimony about how the Lord has moved in her heart and her life, um, how she's been able to surrender those thoughts that plagued her and caused so much anxiety.

Um, what a powerful thing it is to watch somebody, to listen to somebody bring into the light the things that the enemy has been using against them in the dark.

And in this study, we're gonna do that a lot.

We're gonna bring a lot of things into the light.

We're gonna fight for each other.

We're gonna encourage each other as God as um Paul did actually from his prison cell, um, just to be strong and to keep going back to God and surrendering those things that have us bound.

Remember, you are not a victim to your thoughts.

God has given us tools to break down the spirals that we find ourselves in.

And I want to give you one of those.

Um today, just as Bethany was talking about, she she knew the right thing.

She knew that she should surrender to God, but didn't know how to do that for a long time.

And I think um that's the story of so many of us.

I think it would be a disservice for us to talk about surrendering our thoughts to God and not give you a practical way to do that.

And so this exercise comes out of the um Get Out of Your Head study by Jenny Allen.

Um that's what this series is based on.

It's incredible resource, and I would encourage you to get that and to go through it.

But I want to show you a thought bubble exercise.

So if at the beginning you wrote down those top five things that you thought about the most this week, I want you to look at your list.

Um maybe you thought about the kids, you thought about work, um, whatever it was, and then I want you to um consider the most prevalent emotion that came with those thoughts.

So maybe it's worry, it's fear, it's maybe being overwhelmed.

Um and I'm gonna, that's what I'm gonna write for mine.

So I want you to put just get a piece of paper if you can, and just put that prevalent emotion in the center of um your piece of paper.

So whatever those five thoughts were, what what was the most prevalent emotion you felt with them, and then put that in the center of your um piece of paper.

And so if you just circle that, then I want you to consider this is just a really easy, practical kind of process to trace our thoughts.

Um, but what were the contributing factors surrounding this emotion?

So um maybe it's you're overwhelmed with work, that's the kids, that's um relationships maybe that are unraveling or difficult right now.

Um, and you can be more specific than this personally, but you put those out outside, and then you just kind of connect them back to that emotion.

And as you do that, this becomes kind of a map for how to pray.

You talk to God over this, and I think it gives us a great way to analyze what we're believing wrong about God or about ourselves as we look at this.

So at some point, we may be believing that God is not sovereign, he's not in control of what's going on at work.

Um, we know that to be a lie, but we're operating out of the fact that that's true.

If I'm so worried about work, it's because I think it, you know, God's not in control and something's just gonna happen, and I'm not gonna know what it is, and we start to spiral.

Um, maybe you believe something false about yourself.

If if a relationship is bothering you, maybe you feel something wrong like you're not worthy of love.

And so you can start start to identify the lives, the lies that you've been believing about God or about yourself.

And then I want to encourage you just to look for themes, for patterns in the way that these thought processes work.

Maybe there's a pattern of worry or fear, maybe there's a pattern of anger that you're angry about the people who've left you or the people that have hurt you.

Maybe you're obsessed with something and that you've placed something in the position of God in your life where you're worshiping or chasing that instead of God.

Maybe it's shame and you can't get out from under shame from past mistakes.

But what I want you to consider as you think about this activity to do this week is if there were one shift, one shift in the way that you think that you need to make, what would it be?

What's the one shift you need to make in your thought processes and work toward that this week?

One shift.

You can't do it all at once.

You can't shift all the wrong thoughts all at once.

Just choose one.

What is one shift in your thinking that you need to make this week?

What's the prison cell that you're in?

What is it that the enemy is using to harass you with in the dark?

And how can you trace it back to something that you can surrender to God to let him free you?

Let's pray.

Lord, we love you so much.

And God, we thank you so much for the truth that we are not victims to our thoughts, that we are not defenseless in this battle against the enemy in our minds, but that we have power through your spirit.

And God, we have authority in the name of Jesus to demolish strongholds.

So, Lord, I pray that you would help us to walk in that power and victory this week, God, that you would show us the things that we're holding on to that we need to surrender to you, that you would show us incorrect and unhealthy thought patterns that we need to give to you.

God, that you would show us who we need to ask to fight for us in prayer.

And Lord, that you would help us to be bold and obedient, to walk in whatever direction you're calling us to, to do whatever we need to do, to surrender whatever we need to surrender in order to take our thoughts captive and in order to accomplish the mission that you have called us to.

God, we love you, and we're so excited to see the chains that you're gonna break in the name of Jesus.

Amen.

All right, guys, how awesome.