The Lies We Believe

by Dr. Chris Thurman

  Before I give you your next assignment, I want you to stop for just a minute and ask yourself if you believe what Epictetus wrote almost two thousand years ago. Do you really believe that how you think about something determines how you react to it, or do you still tend to believe that events can cause you to feel and act the way you do? Spend a couple of minutes chewing on that.

  If the A-B-C model is correct, far more important than what happens to you is how you choose to think about it. Using our previous example, much more important than whether or not your child spilled grape juice on your new carpet is how you mentally evaluated it.

  If we think about events unrealistically, our lives will be in constant turmoil. The idea of “garbage in, garbage out” comes into play here. If our self-talk is “garbage” (faulty, irrational, untruthful, distorted), then we can’t help ending up with “garbage” emotionally and behaviorally (depressed, enraged, worried, addicted, phobic). Since we can’t totally control what happens to us at “A” each day, our only real hope for achieving emotional health, intimate relationships, and a meaningful life is having the “right” tapes in our minds ready to go for whatever life may throw our way.

  Now, to get you started down the path toward developing the “right” tapes, I want you to do the following growthwork. For one week, I want you to keep an A-B-C journal. In your journal, make as many entries as you can from your life where you break things down into the three parts of the model.

  Here is an example of how you could do this:

  “A” (Event) “B” (Self-Talk) “C” (Response)

  Late to work because of an accident on the highway. Why aren't people more careful! Now I am going to be late because some idiot wasn't watching what he was doing! Muscles tensed; felt angry and anxious; honked my horn and bit my fingernails.

  Spouse forgot to pick up dry cleaning, left me without any clean shirts for important meeting next day. Why can't she ever remember stuff like this! I can't depend on her for anything! If she cared about my needs once in a blue moon, I would die of a heart attack! Breathing got shallow; became irritated and frustrated; slammed my briefcase down and stomped off.

  Neighbor complimented me on how nice my yard looks. That was nice of her to say that. All the hard work I have been doing is paying off! Physically relaxed; felt proud and happy; patted myself on the back.

  Friends couldn't meet me for lunch as we had planned. I was really looking forward to seeing them. Well, maybe next time. No noticeable physiological response; felt disappointed; got lunch at a fast-food place.

  The purpose of this assignment is to get you to use all three parts of the model and become more aware of how they are connected. Specifically, I want you to become more conscious of the fact that what you tell yourself at “B” plays a significant role in how you react at “C.” As you do your assignment, pay special attention to the events that you become upset over or feel that you mishandled. These are the scenarios where your tapes are most likely to be faulty, something we will work on in future chapters.

  6

  RELIGIOUS LIES

  Our minds are stuck in a rut, a pattern of thinking that is antagonistic to the will of God. Successful Christian living depends on getting out of that rut and establishing another one that is characterized by biblical values and ways of thinking.

  —Doug Moo1

  Diane is an “average” Christian. When she was a child, her parents took her to church every time the doors were open. She accepted the “do’s and don’ts” of Christianity, learning her Bible lessons well. As she grew older, though, she found church less uplifting, more like a duty. Sometimes she even wondered if she was really saved. When she came to me, she wanted to talk about God.

  “God feels pretty far away,” she said during our first session.

  “Tell me more,” I said.

  “Well,” she said with a frown, “I don’t feel very close to Him or that He really loves me.”

  “Have you ever?” I inquired.

  “When I was a little kid, maybe. As I have gotten older, less so. I know I don’t always live my life the way that I should, the way that He wants me to. I’m sure that’s a large part of it. But His love for me doesn’t seem as real anymore,” Diane admitted.

  “Sounds like there is a connection between how you are living your life and how close you feel to God.”

  “Well, yes, I guess so,” she said. “I know that when I do things right, I feel closer to Him and that He loves me more.”

  “How do you feel when you aren’t living right? Do you feel that He hates you?”

  Diane didn’t answer for a moment, then she mumbled, “Hate is probably too strong for it. But, yes, I do feel He loves me a lot less. When I feel that, I run from Him, I guess.”

  I looked at her a bit quizzically.

  Diane knew she’d have to explain, but she looked as if she didn’t really want to. Finally, she said, “I mean, I run by not going to church, not reading my Bible, not praying. I avoid being around all my Christian friends, especially the gung-ho ones.”

  “You try to hide from God—is that it?” I said.

  “Yes,” she admitted.

  I thought a second, then asked, “Do you feel any better when you do that?”

  “No, not really. In fact, I end up feeling worse.”

  I paused. She looked uncomfortable. “Diane, has being a Christian ever felt good?”

  She looked surprised for a second. Then with a pained look on her face, she answered, “No, not really. Many times I find myself wishing I had never become a Christian. If anything, my life seems more unhappy and troubled since I became one.”

  Diane is suffering from one of the most resilient types of lies we tell ourselves—a religious lie. Somewhere along the way, she’d been taught a destructive view of God and Christianity, and it had stayed around to haunt her to the point of making her wish God had never become part of her life. The sad thing is, her experience is too common. Too many Christians end up holding unbiblical beliefs that ruin their spiritual lives.

  Why are religious lies perhaps the toughest of all lies to let go of? First, like most lies, they are usually taught to us when we are quite young. We accept more readily anything that we are told early in life, and letting go of it later in life is more difficult. Second, these lies are taught to us by people we trust, so we don’t typically feel much freedom to doubt them. If you can’t trust what your parents, pastor, or Sunday school teachers say about God, who can you trust? Finally, these lies are taught to us as what “God says,” and who has the nerve to question something if God said it? Not many of us are willing to disagree with God.

  Whatever factors make religious lies hard to let go of, we end up in a classic catch-22 because of them. If we dispute these lies, we fly in the face of things “God said,” which we learned from people we trusted and we have believed for years. If we continue to believe these lies, our spiritual lives die. Either way, we lose.

  Religious lies make us spiritually ill. Without spiritual health, none of us can be whole. Whether it feels good to do so or not, we have to overcome these lies in order to have a healthy faith. The first step, as always, is to see these lies for what they are, so let’s look at the most common religious lies people believe.

  “God’s Love Must Be Earned.”

  “Diane,” I said, “why do you think you’ve never found your faith in God to be a source of comfort or joy?”

  “Would you if you always felt you were trying to measure up and never making it?” she challenged me.

  “No, I wouldn’t. You know, what you are describing is something a lot of Christians seem to struggle with, and it stems from their view of God. How do you view God?”

  “I see God as a harsh judge with all these rules who loves to punish people when they break them,” she shot back.

  “Where do you think that view came from?”

  “I guess my parents and even my preacher back home. All they seemed to focus on about God
was hellfire and damnation. I think my image of God must come from that.”

  “Was God’s kindness or grace ever mentioned?” I asked.

  She laughed. “If it was, I can’t remember. I just remember being very frightened about God.”

  “Any other images that pop into your mind?”

  “Well, yes,” she said. “Of me as a kid, getting punished. My father was strict. He yelled and screamed at us a lot. He showed little, if any, compassion. He’d spout the Bible at us fairly often and then proceed to verbally blast us if we messed up.”

  “And do you see God that same way?”

  “Yes, I guess to some degree I do. Isn’t that what God is like? Isn’t He all about keeping us on the straight and narrow path?”

  You probably see the problem in Diane’s thinking. She has been conditioned to think that God is a mean-spirited Father who just loves to beat His children when they break the rules of the house. Maybe her parents, even her pastor, taught her that about God in subtle and not-so-subtle ways in their efforts to make sure she never did anything immoral, and the teaching stuck.

  In our counseling sessions, Diane and I uncovered many instances when her parents withheld their love after she made mistakes, but interestingly enough, Diane could think of no specific time they overtly taught her that their love was conditional. What parent would? Perhaps she saw such an attitude in their actions, and she ended up seeing God the same way—God loves me only when I am living right.

  Diane believed that her actions affected whether or not God loved her. The worse the sin, the more God hated her. And you can guess the next step. If her sins were ever bad enough and frequent enough, God would hate her intensely and forever. He would wash His hands of her, and she would be forever grounded.

  When I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas, I was convinced of the very same lie. My on-again, off-again relationship with God was based on whether or not I sinned. I never felt secure in His love since hardly a “sinless” day went by. God rarely seemed close or real. Soon, my unbiblical version of religious faith led to burnout, and I backed away from God altogether. I didn’t go to church; I didn’t study the Bible; I didn’t pray. When you believe that God’s love has to be earned and that it takes being perfect to earn it, giving up altogether seems the only viable option.

  About a year into my efforts to run from God, He found me in the laundry room of the dorm where I was living. I was doing my laundry one evening, and a guy I had never seen before came into the room. He asked if I would be interested in hearing a talk about God in one of the study lounges a little later that evening. I said yes more out of trying to please him and not wanting to look like a complete heathen.

  The talk that night introduced me to a God I had never known before as well as people who believed in God that were different from other Christians I had grown up around. I heard about a God who can’t not love me. I heard about a God who wants me to live a righteous life but who doesn’t withhold His love when I don’t. I heard about a God whose love for me wasn’t so shallow that it depended on my actions in order to be there. I met some Christians I really liked and could identify with. They were different, and I wanted to be like them. Even though I had been a Christian since I was eleven, God used that evening to give me a whole new view of Himself and what it really means to follow Him. It was truly a life-changing night, one for which I will always be thankful.

  Can God’s love be earned?

  Absolutely not.

  Do many Christians feel and act as if it has to be earned?

  Absolutely!

  The primary challenge for the Christian battling this lie is to confront it, not with feelings, but with what the Bible says about the issue. Christians in Ephesus were obviously living this lie when Paul wrote them, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.”2He wrote Timothy that God called us to a holy life—not because of anything we have done but because of “His own purpose and grace.”3And if we think God turns His back on us because we sin, we only have to look at Paul’s words to the Romans about God’s love: “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”4

  Memorizing—and then meditating on—these biblical teachings that are so contradictory to the “God’s love must be earned” lie is the first step toward overcoming it. The second step, I believe, is becoming involved with a community of mature Christians so that God can help you experience His love through them. Apart from intimate relationships with other committed Christians, it is doubtful that any of us will ever come to fully understand and appreciate how much God loves us. The third step to defeating this lie is noticing how often God does loving things, even when we are not living our lives properly. The job He helped us find, the illness He helped us heal from, the traffic accident He protected us from, the vacation He enabled us to take—these all have God’s fingerprints on them as ways that He expresses His love for us.

  One of my favorite songs as a kid attending Sunday school is pertinent here. However embarrassing it might be, I want you to sing it to yourself every day if you have to, but make sure you don’t get too far from its truth: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” God loves you unconditionally. Nothing you can do will ever change that. Set your mind on this, and don’t let yourself ever think otherwise.

  “God Hates the Sin and the Sinner.”

  A second cousin to the lie that God’s love must be earned is that God not only hates sin (which He does) but also hates the sinner for committing the sin. In other words, God isn’t deep enough or smart enough or wise enough to separate who we are from what we do. He equates the two.

  When we buy into this lie, we make turning away from sin more difficult. Why? Because the energy it takes to turn from our sins is used up by all the self-hate we waste on ourselves. It’s like an athlete being so self-condemning about the play he just messed up that there is no energy left over for doing any better the next time.

  Janice struggled with this lie. She is a married mother of three and has been a Christian a long time. She and Dan had been dating for several months when she became pregnant. She felt extremely torn about what to do. Her Christian values and beliefs told her to keep the baby and marry Dan. Yet neither of them felt certain they should marry.

  Janice, with Dan’s urging, decided to have an abortion. Having an abortion so violated her conscience, though, she became guilt ridden and depressed. And she remained that way for years. She and Dan did finally marry and began having children. But Janice still hated herself for what she had done years earlier.

  She could not shake the guilt she carried from having an abortion and was convinced that God would never forgive her or love her again. On top of believing that God hated her for having an abortion, she believed that she should hate herself.

  During our sessions, I found it painful to watch her struggle. She had buried so many feelings, and she suffered from so much self-hatred.

  “I can’t forgive myself for what I did,” she said on more than one occasion.

  “You feel you don’t deserve to get on with your life—is that right?”

  She nodded, then looked down at a crumpled tissue in her hand. “I don’t deserve to be let off the hook for it.”

  “So,” I answered, “you keep punishing yourself with guilt and depression.”

  “Surely God doesn’t want me to act as if nothing happened!” she exclaimed. “I can’t believe that He wants me to forget this.”

  I stopped for a moment, letting her think about it. Then I asked, “Do you really think that putting a destroyed life on top of an aborted one is what He wants?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, starting to sob.

  “Do you believe in a God who wants you to throw your life away because of a grievous sin you committed years ago?” I replied.

  “Well, no,” she cried, “but it seems too e
asy. Somebody has to pay for what I did, and that’s me.”

  “Christ paid for what you did, Janice.”

  “What?”

  “Christ paid for your abortion with His life. You could never do enough to make amends to God for what you did, so Christ made amends for you. Now, are you willing to let what He did be enough?”

  She shook her head and continued to sob. “What I did was so wrong! I hate myself for doing it! God hates me for it!”

  “Janice, God doesn’t hate you. It isn’t in Him to hate you. He hated what you did, but it was forgiven when you turned your life over to Christ. God wants you to be thankful for that rather than reject it. He wants you free from self-condemnation. He doesn’t want you to spend your life making yourself pay for something that has already been paid for. Are you willing to accept that?” I pressed.

  She turned her head toward me with the same blank look on her face. “It sounds too easy. I will never be able to forgive myself for what I did.”

  Janice wouldn’t let go. She chose sackcloth and ashes over grace and forgiveness, and I’m sad to say she still hates herself for what she did. With freedom from guilt and self-hate there for the taking, she settled for being in bondage to both.

  The biblical story of the woman caught in adultery is a powerful example of God’s thoughts about “the sin versus the sinner” issue. You’ll recall that the Pharisees and teachers of the law were acting as religious cops for God, rounding up moral lawbreakers. They grabbed the adulterous woman and dragged her before Christ, whom they probably saw as some kind of morals sheriff.

  According to Jewish law, the woman should have been stoned to death for committing adultery. Knowing this, the teachers and Pharisees asked Christ what should be done—a trick question if there ever was one. His reaction: “He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first.”5Of course, no one dared move, though I would guess a few of them wanted to. What was Christ’s point? All people sin, and we don’t help sinners by beating them up or putting them to death. When He spoke to the woman, He responded with grace and then a challenge: “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.”6