Spiritual warfare — it’s all in your head. How you feel about good days. What you think when you have bad days. Your response to circumstances is a choice. It’s all in your head. You can choose to be a glass half-full or a glass half-empty type of person. You can choose to look at things in the best possible way or find some reason to be grumpy. It’s all in your head. The apostle Paul recognized this simple truth centuries ago:

“I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am. I know both how to have a little, and I know how to have a lot. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being content — whether well fed or hungry, whether in abundance or in need.” – Philippians 4:11-12

What a movie taught me about marriage

Leonardo DiCaprio taught me the importance of mastering your own mind in the blockbuster movie, Inception. In that film, characters embark upon a mental odyssey by experiencing layers of dreams (dreams within dreams) to unlock information and explore new possibilities. Unfortunately, some characters lose a grip on what is real and what is mere fiction. As DiCaprio’s character, Cobb, explains: “Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.” The solution, according to Cobb, is to maintain a totem (a unique object with a particular size, shape, and weight) which keeps you grounded, knowing which world you are in.

 

Are our lives so very different? Don’t we have trouble maintaining our grasp on what is real and what is an illusion? The enemy is cunning and will attempt to distort your view of reality. Paul cautions the church at Corinth:

“For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” – II Corinthians 10:3-5 

Indeed, we must be on guard and “take every thought captive” by testing it’s origin. Is this thought holy or harmful? Is this thought consistent with what I know to be TRUTH? It’s a mental battlefield out there and it’s so very easy to run away with our thoughts.

 

Six ways to equip your mind for spiritual warfare

In our up-coming book, The Phoenix Marriage: God creates beauty out of ashes, I acknowledge the importance of preparing yourself to combat the enemy’s lies against your marriage:

“The renewal of your relationship depends upon your ability to reject the lies of the enemy and hold firm to the truths of your marriage.” – Kyle Gabhart, The Phoenix Marriage p125

In chapter 8, I go on to describe the value of creating reminders or cues to maintain a vigilant grasp on the reality of spiritual warfare. I offer six ways to establish mental reminders:

1. Memorize scripture.
2. Keep scripture and encouraging quotes on note cards and keep them in places you will see them.
3. Christians have used physical reminders for centuries (prayer beads, prayer bracelets, some even feel comfortable getting tattoos).
4. Set visual reminders such as pictures of armor or weapons.
5. Find encouraging songs and listen to them repeatedly.
6. Engage social media for reminders and tips. Join marriage-building Facebook groups and follow pro-marriage feeds on Twitter.

Victory goes to the prepared. If you are going to withstand the constant onslaught of doubts and fears that will invade your brain, you must feed your mind a steady diet of optimism and biblical wisdom.

Trust your path

Hindsight is not always 20/20. Sometimes as you reflect on past decisions, you start to second-guess yourself. Distanced from the particular circumstances, facts, and emotions you felt at the time, you can begin to question your own judgement. So when you hit a rough season in your marriage, it can be easy to think back and be unable to clearly recall why the two of you got together to begin with. Or you might reflect on other pivotal points in your relationship and lose confidence that it was handled properly or even fairly.

 

To survive the mental quagmire, you have to trust the path that God has walked you down. 

• Trust God’s ability to bring you the right person, no matter how long ago it was. (Proverbs 18:22, Psalm 103:19, Matthew 10:29)
• Trust your decision to marry that person. (Proverbs 3:6)
• Trust that any difficult times the two of you experience are part of God’s refinement of you both through your marriage. (Psalm 66:10-12, James 1:2-5)
• Trust that God has a plan and a purpose for your marriage. (Romans 8:28, Jeremiah 29:11)

In this week’s podcast, The Creep and The Cougar, Tammy and I reflect on our own courtship. We note how God brought us together and confirmed his intention for us to be together. When we met years ago, this was crystal clear! It was so obvious how God was moving in our hearts and lives. But as we point out in the podcast, we lost sight of these truths as our relationship stretched from weeks to months to years. In time, it became easy to lose sight of these fundamentals and start to question God’s plan. Holding firm to the path God set you on and trusting in that path and that process is essential. When patience wanes and stress is applied in your relationship, you have to lean on God’s wisdom, not your own.