A fascinating op-ed column in the New York Times last week, headlined “Your Brain Lies to You,” described how the phenomenon known as “source amnesia” leads people to forget whether or not a statement is true.

“Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true,” informs the article. “With time, this misremembering only gets worse. A false statement from a non-credible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength.”

Obviously you can see the biblical implications. That’s why you hear all kinds of outrageously untrue statements about what the Bible really says. People listen to other people’s lies and don’t remember what they once knew as fact from God’s Word.

I had an unsaved friend try to reason with me recently regarding my ongoing study of the Bible, “You gotta think it strange people will pore over one book every day for a lifetime. I mean, shouldn’t you at some point be able to get what it says and move on?”

The answer is, in part, as the Bible itself even reminds, truth needs to be constantly reinforced and renewed in Believers’ hearts and minds in order for them to stay in it and grow in it and not be led astray.

Regarding biblical truths, Paul urges in I Tim. 4: 15-16, “Meditate upon these things; give thyself wholly to them; that thy profiting may appear to all. Take heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine; continue in them: for in doing this thou shalt both save thyself, and them that hear thee.”

In Psalm 119, David promises the Lord, “I will meditate in thy precepts, and have respect unto thy ways. I will delight myself in thy statutes: I will not forget thy word.”

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The thing I notice about myself more and more these days is that I lie to myself, and the more the lie is subconsciously reinforced in my brain, the harder it becomes for me not to buy into it as truth on a physical-emotional level where it actually debilitates me in a very real, frightening way.

One huge example of a lie I have to fight from feeding on daily as an unemployed person is, “I’ve lost my ability to compete in today’s work force. I don’t have the skills needed, and even what I used to know and do I’m somehow now unable to translate into anything that can help me obtain a job.”

While driving the other day, I shuffled through a stack of old sermons on CD and came across one that really addressed my problem. It was based in part on this crucial verse in I Thess. 2: 13: “For this cause also thank we God without ceasing, because, when ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe.”

*****

As Jordan asks in the study, “How do you get where the truth effectually works inside of you, and produces its work in you so when your feet hit the ground you’re off doing what God’s Word says you should be doing? How to you get from where it’s stuff you just know in your head to stuff that lives in your life?”

He answered, “There’s one word and it’s not religion. It’s not rules or regulations; performance systems. Look at what the word is—believe. You know what the long and the short of it is, folks? When you read a verse of Scripture and it says that this action and attitude ought to be the action and attitude you take as a Believer, because you’re a Believer—because you’re complete in Christ and you know who you are—it should be, ‘This is the way I will live my life on a daily basis; this is how God would live and act in me.’

“When you don’t do that, you know why you don’t do it? Because you don’t believe the verse! That’s all there is to it! There’s not any other excuse. You’ve got misplaced dependencies; your confidence is not in God’s Word; it’s not in who God’s made you in Christ. It’s in you or someone else and what you want and not what God wants.

“You want the verses to work in your life? Believe. That’s all you got to do. The only response grace will accept is faith and when you believe the verses, you know what they’ll do? They’ll transform your life into what they say. The reality of what they say WILL work in your life.

“Understand that life doesn’t begin in your emotions. I bet you don’t believe that but at least you ought to know it. Your emotions are the part of your makeup that God gave you to be motivators of your will. The way you’re made by God to function is in response to decisions that your will makes. Life on a daily basis, that’s the way life is to be lived.

“Too often we live under the tyranny of emotional revolt because our emotions, as dumb and as uneducated as they are . . . do you realize your emotions are just dumb as posts?!

“Your emotions think anything your mind is thinking is true. Anything your mind thinks, you project on the screen of your thought processes and your emotions think is true.

“That’s why you cry when you see a sad movie. It’s only a movie. You know it’s not real, but you project it into the visualization of your mind and your emotions respond as though it were true.

“Your emotions are designed to respond. e-MOTION. That’s what the word is. Most of that word is the word motion. And God has built you so that there’s a part of your inner man that is designed to put into motion the things that your heart and your mind have chosen to do.

“But the order is fact first. Then you have to faith in the facts. And once you have faith in the facts, it will produce some fruit. And the fruit will then produce the feeling.

“You have to have it in that order, because until your faith rests in the reality of the facts, those facts can never go to work in your life. They’ll just be rolling around in your head. When your faith rests in them, your faith in those facts releases the power of that truth and it works effectually in you that believe.”