Can You Boss Your Own Brain?

With codebreaking in mind (pun intended), here’s your Biblical Big Picture. In the war for purity, there’s a constant stream of coded messages, words whose decryption will help turn the tide of your personal battle. I refer to your self-talk, the messages you’ve been sending yourself inside your own brain. Many of you have been transmitting the exact same messages for 20, 40, and even 60 years, and yet you remain clueless to your own internal code. These coded messages are vital to your relapse process. Indeed, they are integral to everyone’s relapse process—because, as you’ll discover in these pages, everyone is selling themselves with the same old Lame-Ass Excuses. If we never excused and justified and defended our addictive behaviors, we’d never do them!

In other words, all addicts are con artists at heart, because the first person you must con is always yourself. This is precisely why Scripture commands us to take every thought captive to obey Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5)—or in my warfare parlance, why you must decrypt your own self-talk so you can finally hear your own addictive excuses. Mental self-awareness always precedes the destruction of stinking thinking strongholds!

Demonic propaganda and addict excuses come directly from the devil’s own arguments and lofty opinions (2 Corinthians 10:5, ESV) raised up against the knowledge of God, with the end game of controlling (read “devouring”) your life. You don’t really believe you can see 280,000 erotic images (see the previous chapter) over the course of 20 years and remain unaffected?! What we see, hear, read, and absorb by media osmosis is imbibed and internalized over the years, and when combined with our own innate Adamic tendency to whine and justify, you get the creation of demonic strongholds (10:4). This devilish propaganda is literally waging war (10:3) against the truth of God. But if you don’t know you’re regularly repeating demonic lies to yourself, how can the truth ever set you free?

The fact that Scripture commands us to take our own thoughts (read “excuses”) captive obviously implies that we don’t control them initially. We addicts can’t even boss our own brains; our brains boss us! Even worse, thanks to denial and the general lack of self-awareness, we can’t hear our own brains playing the drill sergeant.

How is it possible that we can’t hear our own internal voice? Great question. Are you old enough to remember the day when you’d enter an elevator only to hear the syrupy elevator music playing in the background? I’m not sure when or how it happened, but the Elevator Powers That Be must have gotten together and voted to can elevator music, because you never hear it nowadays. The point is, in the olden days, you’d enter the elevator and hear the music playing in the background. For a moment your brain would contemplate the fact that violins and disco music are a match made in hell. But then you’d turn back to conversing with your friends, the tune quickly forgotten. Indeed, within moments you literally no longer heard the music. The orchestra was still playing, the Bee Gees were still Staying Alive, but you managed to tune it out completely. Our brains have an amazing ability to turn off the voices and sounds and noises we don’t deem important.

Herein lies the problem. Your use and my use of internal excuses, justifications, defensive mechanisms, rationalizations, and plain old human stupidity has become so routine that, like elevator music, we just don’t hear it anymore. It’s a secret code beep-beep-beeping in the background even as it determines the course of the war, and yet we don’t even know it’s there.

So it’s high time you break your own code, identify specifically your primary excuses, and then take them captive—execute them via your own mental firing squad.

Your Brother in the Battle,

Timothy

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Excerpt taken from Pureheart Ministry’s Basic Training! Stage 2: Bootcamp

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