February 21, 2025 Casey McCall
Those who study war and battle tactics understand the strategic significance of choosing the right battlefield. In fact, choosing to fight in the wrong place can lead to significant loss even if your side possesses other advantages. Union General Ambrose Burnside learned this lesson the hard way in the early days of America’s Civil War. At the Battle of Fredericksburg, he led his army to engage the outnumbered Confederate side at Marye’s Heights. There was one problem. The thick Confederate front line was positioned behind a stone wall on a hilly slope fifty feet above the plain. Burnside stubbornly sent wave after wave of Union soldiers over the open field into the teeth of what can only be described as slaughter. As the cannon smoke cleared, the blood-soaked ground held the bodies of more than 12,500 dead Union soldiers.
Identifying the right theater for battle matters. The Christian life is no different.
We live in a therapeutic age that trains us to label every emotional struggle as disease. We are trained to identify illnesses for which we bear no responsibility. Our mental state is determined solely by forces outside our control. As a result, we bypass our own moral agency and engage in an external battle against invisible forces with the help of the professional medical class. Our greatest problem is never in here—in what the Bible calls the “mind” or “heart”; it’s always out there in an oppressive trauma-inducing society that wreaks havoc on emotionally-deficient persons. My only recourse is to turn to professional therapists and prescribed medications in hopes that I can cope.
To suggest that the individual may bear some responsibility for his own mental state is to do the unthinkable—it stigmatizes mental illness. In therapeutic culture, anything that makes anyone feel uncomfortable must be avoided at all costs. Therefore, we must sidestep ever suggesting personal responsibility from fear of causing the painful experiences of guilt or shame.
I’m thankful that therapy culture draws attention to the reality of mental illness. Many emotional struggles do indeed arise from forces outside our control. We should try to avoid compounding mental anguish through false guilt. However, even in such instances, individual moral agency must be preserved. We can’t always help how we feel, but we are responsible for how we respond. Our wise Creator endowed his image-bearers with resolve in the face of adversity. Our merciful Redeemer restores his redeemed people with resources to fight back the darkness.
If you believe you lack these resources—if you continue to believe that you are helplessly vulnerable and powerless against great forces beyond your control—then you will remove your own agency and succumb to those powers. The hard process of healing and change requires help from many sources, but it must not omit your own participation.
In his book on spiritual depression, the late Welsh minister, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, wrote, “Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them, but they start talking to you, they bring back the problem of yesterday. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you? Your self is talking to you.” He then pointed to the example of the psalmist who speaks truth about God to his own “cast down” soul (Psalm 42).
Lloyd-Jones continued, “The main art in the matter of spiritual living is to know how to handle yourself. You have to take yourself in hand, you have to address yourself, preach to yourself, question yourself.”
Lloyd-Jones understood that the mind is the primary battleground for the Christian. When we listen to ourselves, we surrender to forces beyond our control. We rarely feel good, and listening instead of talking puts us in a vulnerable position. It removes our moral agency to act. It orients the mind to passivity, resulting in helpless surrender to whatever the world or our own emotive state throws at us. Listening to ourselves locates the conflict in the wrong place and makes us vulnerable to attack.
The Bible, however, calls us to take an active position—to go on attack. Rather than conformity to the world, we are to be transformed by the renewal of our minds (Rom 12:2). We are to “take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor 10:5) and prepare our minds for action by setting our hope fully on grace (1 Pet 1:13).
What does this look like in practice? We must tell ourselves what is true, what to think, and how to feel. We must seek to know Christ through his word—to study his nature, his ways, and his grace. We must memorize his promises and replace thoughts based on our feelings with new thoughts originating from what he has said. In short, we preach to ourselves so that our reality is shaped more by his reliable word than our unreliable emotions.
You can’t win the war if you choose the wrong battleground. Let’s make sure we’re fighting only where we’re assured of winning.
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