I wanted to share these insights in relation to last week’s ‘strongholds’ topic in our small group. Quoting from the ‘Freedom in Christ’ book, “A stronghold is a belief or habitual pattern of thinking that is not consistent with what God tells us is true”. Psychologists might call them ‘defense mechanisms’. An easy way to understand a stronghold is allowing the devil to build a mansion in our hearts and minds and dwell there. A stronghold is not built by him overnight in anyone’s mind. He builds it brick by brick without catching our attention. Hence, we need to be very careful about anything we do that might give him the foothold to start building – anything that is against what God says in the Bible. Unforgiveness, pride, ego, jealousy, selfishness – these are just a few examples. Hence, the verse says, in 2 Corinthians 10:5 – “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”. Most of the time, the root source of a stronghold is some kind of hurt. To avoid any further hurts, or to soothe ourselves from the past hurt, we raise defense mechanisms. Anything that we do by human nature is against God’s Word, because of our fallen sinful nature. A spiritual walk is done intentionally with effort, while human nature comes naturally with no effort.
Some of the strongholds start with vows and pacts that sound like this, “I will never do this … “. I would like to share this from my life. As I might have mentioned before too, I grew up as the only child and whenever Appa was angry, he would threaten me and Amma that he would throw us out of the house. I grew up with the fear of landing on the streets and so much bitterness and anger towards Appa. When I got married, I felt secure in Suresh’s parent’s house. And I said to myself, “I will never stay at my parent’s house again, because now I have a safe place”. In 18 years of marriage, I never stayed at my parents’ house for even a night. Though at the time, I did not know that these were strongholds, God in His mercy broke them. The first and the only time I stayed in that house after my marriage was on the day when Amma went to be with the Lord. The reason why I am sharing this is, that even though we claim to be believers, we lack understanding of God’s ways and are clueless of the devil’s tactics. Devil does not come up with new strategies, because most of them we are not even aware of his usual schemes. Hosea 4:6 “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge”.
Think of any deep hurt that has happened to you, any criticism, any inferiority complex, and see what survival skill you developed to defend yourself. That has a great chance of being a stronghold unless it aligns with God’s Word and You let God be your defender. To help understand better, I can share one more thing. Initially, I could not work for many years and we all know the taunts that we hear from people whenever we visit India. Finally, when God gave me the job, I became a very arrogant person. “Look at me, God is on my side”. All the hurts that I kept bottled up came out as arrogance. And again, God in His good mercy took me through some paths of humility, humbled me, and reminded me that if He could give me the job, He could take it back too, unless I fix my attitude 🙂 Of course, that puts things in perspective. The reason I share these insights about strongholds is if we do not even know that there is a battle that is being waged at us constantly, we are defeated already. One prayer I learned to do is to constantly check for strongholds and ask God to show them to me and break them in the Name of Jesus. No stronghold is built overnight. Once the devil builds a stronghold in you, it is like he has a strong hold on you. Unless you take that space back and give it in Jesus’ control, you become his slave. Remember Jesus’ words – John 14:30 “I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming. He has no claim on me.” This is how Jesus expects us to live, by giving no room for the devil to have any claim on us.
