Chapter 7

Truth Over Lies

Pulling down strongholds and walking in freedom

I grew up in the 1980s, and one of the biggest household names of my childhood was Blockbuster.

If you are anywhere near my age, the word alone will trigger a memory. The smell of the carpet in those bright blue stores. The walk down the aisle on a Friday night, neck craned, scanning the boxes. The slight panic of getting to the new releases section and realising someone had already taken the last copy of the film you’d been thinking about all week. The little plastic tab you had to peel off the rental sleeve. The grim, faintly ritualistic dread of forgetting to rewind the tape before returning it.

It felt like magic. The idea that you could simply walk into a building, pick up a film, take it home and watch it in your living room — without going to the cinema, without waiting for it to come on television — was, at the time, revolutionary. We didn’t know we were watching the future being born. We just knew we wanted Top Gun by 7pm on Friday.

At its height, Blockbuster was one of the most successful companies in America. Nine thousand stores. Profitable. Influential. Dominant in its market in a way that felt permanent. Walking into one of those shops, you’d have laughed at the suggestion that the whole empire could vanish.

And then, in the space of a few short years, it did.

You may have heard the famous story. In the year 2000, Blockbuster had the opportunity to buy a small, struggling, ambitious little company called Netflix for fifty million dollars. The Netflix founders flew to Blockbuster’s headquarters in Dallas to pitch the deal. Blockbuster’s leadership — and this is well-documented — laughed them out of the room. Couldn’t see it. Couldn’t believe people would ever want to receive films by post rather than walk into a store. Couldn’t imagine, as the world was tipping into broadband, that physical rental had a sell-by date.

Twenty years later, Blockbuster has effectively ceased to exist. One single store remains, in Bend, Oregon, kept open largely as a museum piece. Netflix, by contrast, has become one of the most valuable entertainment companies in the world, worth hundreds of billions of dollars. If you said the name Blockbuster to a child today, they’d probably think you were making up a word.

Now here is the question that has stayed with me ever since I first read that story properly.

Blockbuster’s leaders weren’t stupid. They weren’t lazy. They weren’t even uninformed. They had every piece of data they needed sitting in front of them. They could see the technology shifting. They could feel the customer behaviour changing. They had every reason, on paper, to make the right call.

And yet they didn’t.

Why?

Because they were locked into a way of thinking. A way of thinking so embedded, so familiar, so successful for so long, that even the evidence of its own decline couldn’t get past the walls.

This is what happens to people too. Not just to companies. People.

We know our current approach isn’t working. We can even see, sometimes painfully clearly, the possibility of something better. But we stay stuck — not because we are evil, or lazy, or unaware, but because changing how we think is one of the hardest things a human being is ever asked to do.

It isn’t simply a mental decision.

It is a battle.

And the Bible has a specific word for the kind of fortress we are fighting against. It is a word that, once you understand it, will change how you read your own life. The word is stronghold.

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What is a stronghold?

Paul, writing from somewhere in the middle of his own turbulent ministry, puts it like this:

“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” (2 Corinthians 10:4–5).

It is worth slowing down for that word.

In the ancient world, a stronghold (Greek: ochuroma) was a fortified position. A military hilltop. A walled city. A garrison dug into a place that the enemy could see clearly but could not get into easily. Strongholds were built precisely because they were hard to break. The whole point of a stronghold was that it would hold under siege.

Paul is borrowing the image and applying it to something quieter, something inward, something nobody but you can see. In the language of Scripture, a stronghold of the mind is a pattern of thinking that has been built up so carefully, brick by brick, over so many years, that it now feels like part of the landscape of who you are. You don’t notice it. It just is. And whenever you try to think differently, the walls rise up almost automatically to defend the way you’ve always thought.

A stronghold is what happens when a lie is left alone long enough.

It moves in. It gets comfortable. It builds walls of habit around itself. It paves a courtyard of self-justification. It puts up watchtowers of comparison and shame. It hires a small private army of familiar emotions to defend the gates. And after enough years, you don’t even think of it as a lie any more. You think of it as you.

These mental strongholds shape your behaviour. They filter your perceptions. They quietly dictate your choices. They will tell you who you can be friends with, what risks you’re allowed to take, what level of love you’re allowed to receive, what kind of future is actually available to you. And the longer they have been there, the harder they become to see.

That, in fact, is one of the things that defines a true stronghold. You don’t experience it as a fortress. You experience it as normal.

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Why strongholds are so hard to break

The science, helpfully, agrees with the Scripture here.

Neuroscientists tell us that the brain is, above almost everything else, an energy-conserving machine. It uses about twenty per cent of your body’s total energy supply despite weighing only two per cent of your body weight, which is a remarkable ratio. To keep that consumption manageable, the brain takes shortcuts wherever it can. The technical word for those shortcuts is automaticity. Once a thought pattern is laid down — once you have walked the same neural pathway a thousand times — the brain will prefer to keep using it, because it costs less to keep using what’s already there than to build something new.

Imagine a park in summer. People keep cutting the corner across the grass to reach the path on the other side. After a few weeks the grass is worn flat. After a few months a brown trail has appeared. After a year it has become a small ditch. After ten years it is the official route, and the council has put paving stones down. The cut-through has become the path.

Your mind does exactly the same with every thought you have rehearsed often enough. The lie I’m not good enough runs along a deep groove in your brain. The lie people always leave has its own paved trail. The lie I’ll never have any money has been worn into the grass for so long it isn’t grass any more — it’s a road. And when life presents you with a fresh experience, your brain doesn’t carefully evaluate it from scratch. It takes the familiar route, because the familiar route is cheaper.

This is why breaking a stronghold takes effort. You are not just having a new thought. You are physically forcing your mind to walk somewhere it has not walked before, while every shortcut in your head is whispering at you to take the old road. And the whispers are practised. They know exactly what to say.

You can start tomorrow.

It’s not really that bad.

One more time won’t hurt.

This is just who you are.

You’ll never change anyway.

This is why willpower alone is rarely enough. Willpower will get you through Tuesday. It will not get you through three years of rebuilding the wiring of your inner life. To pull down a stronghold you need something more — what Paul calls weapons with divine power. You need truth. You need the Spirit. You need community. You need new habits. You need, frankly, the supernatural help of the One who designed the brain in the first place and knows how to repair it.

Strongholds defend themselves fiercely. They use your biology. They use your habits. They use your emotions. They use the people around you. They use the well-worn paths in your own head.

But — and this is the promise of the passage — they can be demolished.

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Habits and habitat

One of the most useful things I have ever learned about lasting change is the connection between habits and habitat.

Your habits are the things you repeatedly do. Your habitat is the environment, the routines, the relationships and the rhythms in which you do them. They are not the same thing. And here is the part most of us miss: if you try to change your habits without also changing your habitat, the habitat will eventually drag the habits back.

It is one of the unspoken laws of transformation.

There is a famous saying in the world of business: “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” It is one of the most-quoted sentences in business literature — often attributed to the management thinker Peter Drucker, though in truth no one has ever found it in his writings, and it seems to have come into circulation through others who summarised his ideas. Whoever first coined it, the point is a sharp one. You can have the most brilliant five-year plan in the world — a beautiful, well-researched, carefully constructed strategy — but if the underlying culture of your organisation contradicts that strategy, the culture will win. Every time. It will sit down at the breakfast table and quietly eat your strategy before lunchtime.

And what is true of organisations is, in a different register, true of human beings.

Your strategy is the new way of thinking you have decided to adopt. I’m going to be more patient. I’m going to stop comparing myself to other people. I’m going to deal with my finances properly. I’m going to stop drinking. I’m going to read my Bible every morning. I’m going to be a better husband, a better mother, a better leader. All of that is strategy. All of it is good.

But your habitat is your personal culture. And culture, as we have seen, eats strategy for breakfast.

Think of someone trying to give up drinking who keeps a fridge full of beer, goes to the same pub on Friday nights, and meets the same friends for whom drinking is the whole point of getting together. Their strategy is on a journey. Their culture is dragging it back. Within a few weeks the strategy has lost the argument, because the culture is constant and strategies are fragile.

Or take someone trying to escape a culture of complaint at work. They have decided, privately, that they are going to be more positive, more constructive, more solution-focused. Excellent. But they sit at the same desk, next to the same colleagues, in the same office, listening to the same hourly running commentary on management. Within a month the culture has worn them down. By the end of the quarter they are complaining again. Not because they aren’t sincere. Because the culture won.

If you want to change the habit, you almost always have to change something about the habitat. Even small somethings. Where you sit. Who you eat lunch with. What you listen to on the commute. What time you go to bed. Who you call on a Wednesday evening. The habitat is not optional. The habitat is the soil. And a new habit planted in old soil will struggle.

Now here is the harder part, the part that I find people are most reluctant to talk about. Sometimes — not always, but sometimes — the people in our circle are part of the stronghold.

I want to say this carefully, because it can be misheard.

I am not suggesting that everyone who has ever loved you is secretly an enemy. Most of the people around you, in most seasons, are a gift. But occasionally, when you begin to genuinely change, you discover that some of the people closest to you are quietly invested in you not changing. They may not even know they are. They are not bad people. But your old self made sense to them. Your old self confirmed their decisions. Your old self gave them company. When you start to move, you shine a light, however unintentionally, on the areas where they have not yet moved themselves.

And rather than celebrate, sometimes, they will resist.

They’ll say things like:

Why are you suddenly so serious?

You don’t need to be so extreme.

You’ve changed. And not for the better.

Remember when you used to be fun?

Don’t get all religious on us.

What they often mean, underneath the words, is something simpler and sadder.

Your change makes me uncomfortable.

I have watched this play out in life after life. People who genuinely wanted to break free from a way of thinking, who had even started the journey — and were quietly talked back into the old life by people they loved, who could not bear the implicit challenge of someone close to them choosing differently.

If you are going to break free from a real, entrenched, fortified mental stronghold, you have to be willing to change both your habits and your habitat. And you have to be ready for the reality, painful as it sometimes is, that one or two of your relationships may shift. A few may have to be held at a different distance for a season. A very few may not survive the change at all.

That is not bitterness talking. It is realism. The grass round a stronghold doesn’t grow back the moment you stop watering it. Sometimes you have to walk away from the well.

The saying is right. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. And the culture of your daily life — the rooms you sit in, the voices you listen to, the relationships that surround you — will eat your good intentions every time, unless you change the menu.

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Truth versus lies

Every stronghold is built on a lie.

That is what makes it a stronghold. The walls are made of habit, but the foundation is always a lie that has been left alone long enough to set.

Lies like:

I’ll never change.

This is just who I am.

I can’t live without this.

I’m too damaged to be loved.

If they really knew me, they’d leave.

God could never use someone like me.

People from where I’m from don’t end up in rooms like that.

My family has always been this way.

You will notice, reading those, that they don’t sound like lies. They sound like observations. They sound like common sense. They sound like honesty. That is the genius of a stronghold. The lie has lived in you so long that it has stopped sounding like a lie. It now sounds like the truth.

Which is why the words of Jesus, when you really sit with them, are so disruptive:

“Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).

Notice the verbs. Truth doesn’t simply appear in your life. It has to be known. It has to be embraced. And then it has to be acted on, walked in, lived out, until the lie loses its grip.

Breaking a stronghold, then, is not just a mystical experience. It is a process. You identify the lie. You name it. You drag it out of the dark and into the light of God’s Word. You find the truth that directly contradicts it. And then you begin, slowly and stubbornly, to reinforce that truth until it becomes your new default — until the truth runs in a deeper groove than the lie ever did.

This is hard work. But it is freeing work. Because every truth you embrace, you take a stone out of the wall the enemy has been hiding behind in your life.

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When people break free

I have seen both sides of this in the years I have been a pastor, and I think it is honest to tell you what I have actually witnessed.

I have watched people make a sincere, sometimes courageous, decision to change something fundamental about how they think. They have seen the lie. They have named it. They have wept over it, even. And then — almost predictably — they have run into the resistance. Friends who didn’t want them to change. A family system that needed them to stay the same. A culture at work that pulled them back. And without a deep commitment to truth, and a willingness to also adjust the habitat around the new habit, they have, slowly and quietly, slid back into the old way of thinking. Often within a year. Sometimes within a month. The stronghold was demolished, and then it was rebuilt, because nobody pulled out the foundation.

But.

I have also seen people stand firm.

I have seen people make the hard decisions. Endure the awkward conversations. Let some relationships drift to the edges, while inviting new ones into the centre. Let God’s Word, day after unspectacular day, do its slow, patient, neuroplastic work on the inside of them. And I have watched those people change. Not just superficially. Foundationally. The old fortress comes down. A new one is built, this time on truth. And in time, almost as a by-product, they become something I love to see in a human being.

They become beacons.

People who pull others out of cycles their own families have been trapped in for generations. People who rethink money, relationships, parenting, work, and faith — and whose changed lives quietly preach to everyone around them.

It always starts with the willingness to demolish the lie.

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Jesus the stronghold-breaker

If you read the gospels with any attention, you cannot miss one striking fact about Jesus’ ministry.

He spent an enormous amount of His time pulling down strongholds.

Not buildings. Strongholds of thought. The strongholds of His religious culture. The strongholds in the minds of the people who came to Him. Over and over again, He said sentences that began with the words “You have heard it said… but I say to you…” — and every one of those sentences was a wrecking ball aimed at a fortified way of thinking that had stood, in some cases, for centuries.

He challenged the way people thought about God. You think God is harsh, distant, transactional. He is a Father who runs to meet you.

He challenged the way people thought about themselves. You think the kingdom is for the impressive. It is for the poor in spirit.

He challenged the way people thought about their enemies. You have heard, love your neighbour and hate your enemy. I say, love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you.

He challenged the way people thought about sin and forgiveness, about wealth and worth, about the Sabbath, about cleanliness, about women, about children, about Samaritans, about Romans, about lepers, about themselves.

And notice who resisted Him most.

It wasn’t the broken. It wasn’t the sinners. It wasn’t the desperate. The broken came to Him in droves. The people who resisted Him hardest — the people who eventually wanted Him dead — were the people whose entire identity was built on the strongholds He was demolishing. The religious leaders. The men with the most invested in the status quo. Strongholds, even when they are killing us, fight to stay standing. They have to.

But Jesus stood firm. He lived the truth, taught the truth, embodied the truth — and broke the power of lies not merely with words but with His whole life.

And here is what I want you to take from this: He hasn’t stopped. He doesn’t just show you the way out of your stronghold from a safe distance. He walks into it with you. He helps you carry the stones out one by one. And what He builds in the empty space, He builds out of Himself.

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Application: how to pull down a stronghold

Let me give you five practical handholds. These are not magic. They are simply where the work is done.

One. Identify the lie. Sit down with a notebook and ask honestly: what belief has been quietly running my life? What sentence keeps repeating in my head when I am tired, or stressed, or alone at three in the morning?Write it down. Get it out of your head and into ink. Strongholds love the dark. The first stone comes out the moment you turn the light on.

Two. Find the truth that contradicts it directly. Not a general nice verse. The specific truth that answers the specific lie. If the lie is I am unloved, the truth is the Father has loved me with an everlasting love (Jeremiah 31:3). If the lie is I am too far gone, the truth is if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come (2 Corinthians 5:17). Match the truth to the lie precisely. A general medicine will not heal a specific wound.

Three. Change your habitat. Look at the soil the lie is growing in. The conversations you are in. The accounts you follow. The voices that shape your week. The places you spend your money and your time. Change at least one thing. Sometimes a small habitat shift is what finally lets a new habit breathe.

Four. Practise new habits, even when they feel ridiculous. You are walking a new path across the grass. The first few weeks it will look like nothing. The grass will spring back up behind you. You will feel as if you are achieving nothing. Keep walking. You are not a fraud. You are a path-maker. Every step is laying down a millimetre of dirt that will, one day, be a road.

Five. Pray for God’s strength, because you cannot do this alone. Paul did not say the weapons we fight with are willpower. He said they have divine power. There is a spiritual dimension to a stronghold, and it requires a spiritual dimension of response. Pray it down. Worship it down. Speak Scripture over it. Invite the Holy Spirit to do what only the Holy Spirit can do in the deepest places of the soul.

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Personal reflection

•       What recurring negative thought has come to feel so natural to you that you have stopped questioning it? Could it actually be a lie?

•       How has your environment — your habitat — quietly reinforced the habits you keep wanting to change?

•       Who in your circle genuinely supports your growth? Who, even with the best intentions, resists it?

•       What single Scripture could you take into this week as the direct counter to the biggest lie in your head?

•       What one habitat-change could you make in the next seven days that would give a new habit some space to breathe?

Declaration

I reject the lies that have held me captive. The walls were built brick by brick, and by God’s power, brick by brick, they will come down. I pull down strongholds. I take every thought captive. I walk in truth — and I walk in freedom.