The Lies We Believe: Renew Your Mind and Transform Your Life

By Chris Thurman

In a world that is veering dangerously off course from what it calls “truth” comes a classic work that unmasks the lies we unwittingly believe, lies that destroy us and ultimately damage our emotional health, relationships, and spiritual life.

In this completely revised and updated edition, psychologist Dr. Chris Thurman guides the reader through the lies we believe about ourselves, relationships, life, men, women, and, most important, God. He then unpacks the twelve essential truths for emotional health and the truth about God—the ultimate source of Truth.

This easy-to-follow guide to renewing the mind helps identify problem areas and the midcourse correction needed in how we view ourselves and our world. With discussion questions and biblical support, this timeless classic is required reading to help develop the mind of Christ and be able to experience the abundant life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9780785226345

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

I AM SO GRATEFUL The Lies We Believe has made it to its thirtieth anniversary. When I first wrote this book, I was afraid no one other than my family would read it, and that it would sink like a rock in the literary world of Christian self-help projects. It is incredibly humbling that it has been around for three decades and that God has used it to help so many people.

I believe God gives us counselor types specific areas of interest when it comes to helping people who are struggling with emotional and relational problems in life. My passion has been to introduce clients to the biblical challenge in Romans 12:2, Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. As a psychologist, I have always had a strong interest in how faulty ways of thinking—lies, if you will—get in the way of living life in a healthy manner and how the truth can set us free to live life the way God intended. What you hold in your hands is the culmination of what I have learned over the last thirty years on this essential teaching. I hope you will be pleased with what you read and that you will find it helpful.

Some anniversary editions of self-help books just slap a new coat of paint on what the author said before. I want you to know that this isn’t the case with this special edition of The Lies We Believe. The content has been significantly improved, with twelve new chapters included, plus, every chapter that made the cut from the previous edition has been completely rewritten. To put it metaphorically, I tore this house down to the studs and have done a complete remodel to make it new and fresh from the inside out.

If you are a former reader of The Lies We Believe, you will recognize a lot of things from before, but you will also learn a lot of new things that can help you even more. Also, I have completely revised and updated The Lies We Believe Workbook to be a companion to this book. I strongly encourage you to go through both books at the same time by reading a chapter in The Lies We Believe and completing the corresponding chapter in the workbook. I also encourage you to go through the book and the workbook with others so that you can support and challenge one another to stay the course in finishing both books. The Enemy wants you to get discouraged about overcoming the lies you believe and hopes that along the way you will grow weary in your efforts to let the truth set you free. If you commit two hours a week to systematically go through both books and do it with other people, God can renew your mind and transform your life in ways that you never thought possible.

A quick caveat about the book: Far too many Christian self-help books are reductionistic in that they zero in on one thing about human beings and act as if it’s the only way to help them improve their lives. I want you to know that I don’t think this way. Human beings are far too complex and nuanced to reduce them to if you work on this one issue, you will solve all your ills. We are created by God with a physical body, we have emotions, we have a will that can choose a course of action, we thirst for meaning and purpose in life, we are wired by God for relationships with others, and we are spiritual beings who are meant to have an intimate relationship with our Creator. All of these areas and many more are in the mix when it comes to what to work on if we want to improve our lives. In this book, I’m not reducing you to only a thinker; I’m simply zeroing in on that particular area and trying to give you as much help as I can when it comes to renewing your mind and improving your life.

Growing up, most of us were told that lying to others was a bad thing to do. It was one of the most grievous wrongs we could commit as a kid, and sure to get us in a lot of trouble if we got caught. While lying to others is undeniably wrong, not many of us were raised to believe that one of the biggest mistakes we can make in life is to lie to ourselves. We lie to ourselves every day, multiple times a day, when we tell ourselves things that are inaccurate, distorted, untrue, irrational, mistaken, and most important, unbiblical. The lies we tell ourselves cost us dearly. They cost us good relationships with others, a sense of meaning and purpose, emotional health, well-lived lives, confidence that we have worth, and an intimate relationship with the God of the universe, who created us in His image.

Truth matters. It matters not just in our relationships, in what we say to others, but inside each of us. When we tell ourselves a lie, we poison our own souls and end up living lives we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemies. When we tell ourselves the truth and allow God to help us internalize it in the deepest part of our being, we nourish our souls and can more fully experience the abundant life. The amazing thing is, we have a choice in the matter. Each day we decide whether to believe lies or the truth. That one choice determines how meaningful our time on earth turns out to be. It determines our ability to offer and receive love and the overall quality of our spiritual, psychological, and even physical health. In other words, the choice we make about the thoughts we carry into each day determines everything of true importance in life.

The psalmist said, Guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long (Psalm 25:5). We live in a world where truth has stumbled in the streets (Isaiah 59:14) and, for the vast majority of humankind, their thinking [has become] futile and their foolish hearts [are] darkened (Romans 1:21). That is why we desperately need to turn back to God to guide us in His truth and not listen to the world’s distorted and destructive version. That is our only hope.

PART 1

YOUR BELIEFS MAKE OR BREAK YOU

CHAPTER 1

OUR MINDS ARE UNDER ATTACK

As we first turned away from God in our thoughts, so it is in our thoughts that the first movements toward the renovation of the heart occur.

Thoughts are the place where we can and must begin to change.

—DALLAS WILLARD

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

—ROMANS 12:2

THERE WAS A TIME IN human history when the thoughts of men and women were aligned with the thoughts of God. During that brief but idyllic period, they experienced an intimate closeness with each other and their Creator. They deeply enjoyed the life that had been laid before them, and they were fully alive in body, soul, and spirit. It was truly a time of heaven on earth. But then, a lie was introduced.

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?

The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’

You will not certainly die, the serpent said to the woman. For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. (Genesis 3:1–7)

It was a malicious attack by spiritual forces of darkness. Adam and Eve’s ability to see God for who He is, themselves for who they were, and life for what it is fractured into a million pieces. Adapting a popular nursery rhyme, humankind sat on a wall, humankind had a great fall, and all our horses and all our men couldn’t put humankind back together again. At that catastrophic moment, the first two people ever created died in spirit, became sickened in body and soul, experienced a crippling sense of shame, and disconnected from each other and God. Life on earth went from being heavenly to being hellish.

We would all be in a truly hopeless situation were it not for the appearance of a man from Nazareth two thousand years ago. When Jesus declared, I am the way and the truth and the life, He was either being delusional or making the single greatest statement of fact the world had ever heard (John 14:6). Jesus Christ boldly and confidently asserted that if we want to live life and live it fully, we have to view reality the way He does.

Christ didn’t come to make minor changes in what we believe. He came to turn our view of reality upside down and inside out. By what He taught and how He lived, Christ let us know we have it all wrong when it comes to the way we see things. In fact, as the Son of God, He was the only person ever to view reality in a completely accurate manner. As popular as it has been for so long, the acronym WWJD (What would Jesus do?) is somewhat limited as far as I’m concerned. The more important acronym is WWJT (What would Jesus think?) because how He viewed reality kept Him from doing anything unloving or immoral.

You’ve heard the expression, Garbage in, garbage out. This is one of the most significant of all truths. We cannot go any higher in life than our thoughts take us. Benjamin Disraeli once wrote, Nurture your mind with great thoughts.¹ Why is that so critical? Because you will never go any higher than you think. More importantly, the Bible says, Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things (Philippians 4:8). If you want to experience a fuller taste of the abundant life, you need to view reality on a higher, more Christlike level.

The vast majority of us go through life unaware that the way we view things is significantly at odds with how God views reality. Like Neo in the movie The Matrix, a few of us, on occasion, experience a haunting sense that our lives are not right, that we don’t see things as they truly are, and that the lives we are living are not as meaningful and fulfilling as they are supposed to be. As C. S. Lewis put it, We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink, sex, and ambition, when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.²

God meant us for so much more than what we settle for. Yet when the first two human beings dared to doubt the love of God and pulled themselves out from under His authority, they gashed a hole in humanity’s ship—and that ship has been sinking ever since. We now live in a world where, as they say, the lunatics are running the asylum. We are currently reaping all the deadly consequences of being at odds with God’s view of reality.

This book is about the lies we believe that ruin our lives—and the truths we must believe to live truly healthy and abundant lives. As a Christian who happens to be a psychologist, I am passionate about this particular issue. In this book, I am going to walk you through what God has shown me over the last thirty years about the toxic and life-crushing beliefs we hold and how we can experience personal transformation by the renewing of [our] mind (Romans 12:2).

I write this book with great fear and trembling. Even though I have been at this a long time, there are many ways in which I still don’t see reality accurately myself. There are so many things I still don’t understand about how God co-labors with us to renew our minds. So, I humbly pray and trust that God will guide us each as we begin the process of seeking and finding His truth amid the lies of this world. We cling with hope to His promise, You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart (Jeremiah 29:13).

Where Do the Lies We Believe Come From?

It’s important to understand where our faulty views of reality come from. This is not a blame game or a process of finding fault. At the end of the day, we are responsible for what we believe. Nevertheless, our wrong beliefs didn’t come out of nowhere. Let’s explore where they came from.

Our Parents

I’m not throwing our moms and dads under the bus here. In general, our parents do the best job they can to raise us properly. Nevertheless, all of us are raised by imperfect parents, and the way they treated us growing up and what they told us was true shape our view of reality, for better and for worse.

Let me give you an example from my own life. My parents, who have both passed away, were genuinely caring and decent people. They spent their lives lovingly and sacrificially looking out for my three brothers and me and did the best job they could to raise us properly. But as all parents do, they made some mistakes along the way. From my perspective, they unintentionally put too much emphasis on right behavior and not enough on right relationships. That approach paved the way for me to become a person who focused too much on acting right and too little on loving right.

Given that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, I turned around and raised my kids the same way (I hope to a much lesser degree). The view of reality our parents teach us can be a good and a bad thing in every family. As adults, we are responsible for overcoming whatever negative impact being raised by imperfect parents had on us. As the apostle Paul put it, "When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me" (1 Corinthians 13:11, emphasis added).

The World

The world we live in shapes how we view reality. Every day, we go out into a world of seven and a half billion people, each of whom has his or her own take on what is true. The way the human race has viewed reality, especially spiritual and psychological reality, has been all over the map throughout human history. It is never to be blindly trusted.

The Bible says, The time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear (2 Timothy 4:3). I think we are in those times. Every day, the nonbelieving world presumes to tell us how to think about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. While most of these people strike me as well-intentioned, and they have some valuable things to say, they often mix in what our itching ears want to hear and lead us down the wrong path into a distorted view of reality.

The world we live in has a mind-set not only opposed to the viewpoint of God but actually hostile to it (Romans 8:7, The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God). The bottom line here is that what they say always needs to be put under the highest-powered biblical microscope possible. Don’t automatically reject what the nonbelieving world says, but don’t automatically accept it either. Always filter it through what God says in His Word.

The Church

I’m not throwing pastors or ministers under the bus here either. I think it’s fair to say that ministers do the best job they can to correctly handle the word of truth in their efforts to foster our spiritual growth (2 Timothy 2:15). I can’t imagine the pressure they must be under given that those who teach from the Bible will be judged more strictly (James 3:1). I wouldn’t want that guillotine hanging over my head every week. Would you?

Nevertheless, every pastor brings a fallen view of reality into his or her study of God (as do we Christian counselors!). Those of us who grew up going to church assume our pastor told us the whole truth and nothing but the truth about God. It’s inconceivable to our young minds that a spiritual authority would do otherwise. Nevertheless, no minister perfectly understands or interprets the teachings of the Bible. Humans—including pastors—are not all-knowing, like God, the One who breathed Scripture into existence (2 Timothy 3:16).

I grew up in churches that, like my parents, spent too much time focusing on acting right and avoiding sin and not enough time on having an intimate relationship with God and my fellow human beings. God clearly hates sin, so teaching that He wants us to keep our noses clean is certainly appropriate. But focusing on keeping the rules more than loving the Ruler and my neighbor was damaging in how it shaped my view of reality. Keeping the law rather than loving the Lawgiver coats you in shame, and as we will discuss, we often cope with shame in destructive ways.

Our Broken Minds

Our minds are incapable of perceiving reality accurately from the day we’re born. Because of our fallen bent, we end up believing all kinds of lies as we grow up.

The Bible is rather critical about the mind-set of the unbelieving person:

•Their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools. (Romans 1:21–22)

•They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. (2 Timothy 4:4)

•The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. (2 Corinthians 4:4)

•Just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. (Romans 1:28)

It may be an affront to secular humanity’s pride, but God doesn’t have a very high opinion of how the nonbeliever views reality.

We believers are not out of the woods, though. Even after we are born again (John 3:3), our faulty ways of thinking don’t go away. After we become Christians, there is a civil war going on inside of us between the wrong beliefs we held before conversion and the right beliefs in our new, spiritually rebirthed self. Second Corinthians 5:17 tells us, If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come (NASB). The Holy Spirit now lives inside us. We have the mind of Christ as a result, and the lies we believe are no longer the only mental game in town. Each day, we decide whether to listen to and nurture the old ways of viewing reality that used to dominate us—or the new ways of viewing reality that align with the mind of Christ.

The Enemy

While some people make fun of the notion of Satan, he is no laughing matter. The Christian view is that Satan was the highest of all the angels, the first one to rebel against God. He was expelled from heaven with all the angels who sided with him in opposing God. The Bible says Satan is always on the prowl, looking to steal and kill and destroy, and that we human beings are his main target (John 10:10). It also says that Satan has always hated the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, it is consistent with his character; for he is a liar and the father of lies (John 8:44 NLT).

We make two major mistakes when it comes to how we think about Satan. One is to see him under every rock and overinterpret his involvement in our lives. The other is to underinterpret Satan’s activities by thinking that he has little to do with us and leaves us alone. Somewhere in the middle is the truth: Satan and his forces of darkness roam the earth each day, looking for anyone they can devour. They want to deceive us into believing things that are untrue, as he did with Adam and Eve, so we will disobey God’s commands and ruin our own lives in the process.

These five factors mean we have a battle on our hands in going from a distorted view of reality to seeing things the way God does. But we can all rest easy—God exists, He is Truth, and He has all the power in the world to help us overcome the lies we believe.

Catching the Third Wave in Renewing Your Mind

The area of secular psychology this book originally grew out of is called cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). There have been three waves of cognitive behavioral therapy since it first appeared as a way of helping people with emotional and behavioral problems.³ Allow me to give you a brief history lesson. I do this not because I think you will remember these people but to respectfully acknowledge and thank all the insightful theorists and clinicians who have shaped my own understanding of renewing the mind and how to help people live healthier lives as a result.

The first wave of CBT was behavior therapy. It was led by Arnold Lazarus’s Behavior Therapy and Beyond,⁴ B. F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity,⁵ Hans Eysenck’s Behavior Therapy and the Neuroses⁶, and Joseph Wolpe’s The Practice of Behavior Therapy.⁷ These approaches attempt to strengthen positive behavior and modify problematic behavior through the use of operant conditioning (reward and punishment) and classical conditioning (systematic desensitization, flooding, and aversion therapy).

The second wave of CBT was cognitive behavioral therapy. These approaches focused on directly altering the faulty beliefs and thinking patterns underneath emotional and behavioral problems. Cognitive behavioral therapy was led by Albert Ellis’ A New Guide to Rational Living (with Ron Harper),⁸ Donald Meichenbaum’s Cognitive-Behavior Modification: An Integrative Approach,⁹ Michael Mahoney’s Cognition and Behavior Modification,¹⁰ and Aaron Beck’s Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders.¹¹ I first wrote this book, The Lies We Believe, in the late 1980s in an effort to approach cognitive therapy from a biblically solid point of view. All the approaches above make the grave mistake of leaving God, who is truth, completely out of the picture, placing the emphasis on human reasoning and rationality, and putting the focus on personal happiness and well-being rather than growth and development. The serious flaws of secular cognitive therapy prompted me to develop a Christian approach to renewing the mind given what I understood at the time.

The third wave of CBT involves a wide variety of views and approaches. This wave is still a movement in progress but has gained a great deal of credibility over the years and is widely used among practitioners. Among the most prominent works of this movement are Steven Hayes’s Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change (with Kirk Strosahl and Kelly G. Wilson)¹² and Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (with Spencer Smith),¹³ Paul Gilbert’s Mindful Compassion: How the Science of Compassion Can Help You Understand Your Emtoions, Live in the Present, and Connect with Others (with Choden),¹⁴ Marsha Linehan’s DBT Skills Training Manual,¹⁵ Daniel Siegel’s Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation,¹⁶ and Zindel Segal’s Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression (with J. Mark G. Williams, and John D. Teasdale).¹⁷ Here are the most important distinctives of the third wave approach:

•being more aware of how you think rather than suppressing or criticizing your thoughts,

•being more aware of what you feel rather than suppressing or criticizing your emotions,

•accepting that life involves suffering rather than trying to avoid the painful things that happen,

•accepting that you think and feel the way you do and that these thoughts and feelings are never going to fully go away but don’t have to control you or your life,

•looking at your thoughts rather than through your thoughts and not allowing your thoughts to dictate how you view reality,

•focusing on emotional health and well-being rather than emotional dysfunction and distress,

•having compassion for yourself and others given how hard life is and that most of us are doing the best we can to cope given the tools we have at our disposal,

•improving skills in managing your symptoms more effectively rather than trying to eliminate or fix your symptoms,

•practicing mindfulness by being more aware of the here and now, and

•moving in the direction of your core values in life through committed action.

These are some of the significant differences between the cognitive behavioral therapy approaches we second wavers offered in the 1970s and 1980s and what has been developed by the third wavers in the last fifteen to twenty years. I’m going into detail about all this because I want you to know that there have been important changes in our understanding of how to renew the mind, given what we now know about the way the brain works that we didn’t know three decades ago when I first wrote The Lies We Believe. I also want you to know that I have tried to incorporate many of these changes into the thirtieth anniversary edition of this book while remaining committed to a thoroughly biblical approach.

In the section to come, I want to offer you a model for working on the renewal of your mind that I hope you will find helpful. I’m putting this model in the first chapter because not all of you are going to do The Lies We Believe Workbook along the way, and I want you to have something you can put to use from the start of the book.

The TRUTH Model

The latest generation of cognitive behavioral therapies cuts across numerous practitioners and perspectives. As I read through various people’s work, I have to admit that I often felt overwhelmed by trying to understand all the different points of view, much less pull them together in a reasonably coherent manner. For better or for worse, I came up with the TRUTH Model to do just that. As you read this book, I want you to keep a daily journal using the TRUTH format. Let me walk you through each part of the model and how I want you to journal your day-to-day experiences.

T: Trigger Event

Every day we step out into a world where good, bad, and ugly external events are headed our way. In this column of your journal, I want you to write down the most important trigger events that happen during a given day, the size of the event using the monetary scale of five cents (miniscule) to five hundred dollars (major), and whether you viewed the event as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.

Far too often, we think that life shouldn’t be difficult or involve suffering at the trigger event level. Current cognitive behavioral approaches encourage us to accept the biblical notion in this world you will have trouble (John 16:33) rather than be at odds with adverse events or run from facing them directly. Also, third wave CBT