“Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord” (Jer. 17:5). Before we begin to look at this, I want you to think about what this text is saying to us. In a practical sense, when you study the original Hebrew, the idea of “cursed” has to do with becoming a slave. When you put confidence in your own flesh or other people, in other words, man, you become a slave to the one that you put your confidence in, and you can only go as far as they can take you or you can take yourself. The danger is that putting confidence in yourself is almost like saying, “believe in yourself” and “follow your heart.” When we hear people say that, always say to them, “Well, show me in the Bible where you’re called to believe in yourself and follow your heart.”
Proverbs 28:26 says, “He who trusts in his own heart is a fool, but whoever walks wisely will be delivered.” This idea that it’s okay to believe in yourself is part of this trick of the positive thinking movement that is very deceptive, and it’s killing us because it’s crept into the church. We have people following their hearts instead of confessing, repenting, and letting their hearts be cleansed by the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and being renewed. We don’t want to follow our hearts. We want to have our hearts evaluated through Scripture in the power of God. The positive thinking mindset is dangerous because it is a preoccupation with self, and it causes you to trust in yourself.
I want to look at some of the ideas of that preoccupation with self, where it leads us as well as some of the history behind the movement. E. Brooks Holifield believed that man had moved from self-denial to self-love, from self-love to self-culture, from self-culture to self-realization. In other words, through history man has been consumed with himself. There is a danger when life is all about you. The human potential movement is described as the realization of one’s inner human potential through the raw and vital experience of one’s own body and mind.
Many of these ideas for finding yourself and believing in yourself and man as basically good can be traced back to this human potential movement when people like Carl Rogers said that Freudian ideas seemed to be always negative and always talked about the negative part of mankind. Rogers believed that there was something good in man, and man needed to reach his potential. He needed to self-actualize. Then you have people like Maslow and his hierarchy of needs that came out of the human potential movement. He said that man was basically good, and if he just looked within and followed his heart and worked hard at it, he could finally become all he wanted to be. Isn’t it sad that we hear a lot of that in the church today? It is based on the cultic idea that man is basically good. This movement gained popularity as it focused on fulfilling and gratifying interpersonal longings to gain identity and meaning.
Every time man rejects the idea that there is a God and that he is to be submissive to that God, he creates his own ideas about himself. Do we not see that in Romans 1, where it talks about man forsaking God and now worshiping the creation above the Creator?
When Man Forgets God
There are three terms I want you to remember: self-rule, self-righteousness, and self-indulgence.
Self-rule we can summarize into two big ideas: autonomy and self-sufficiency, the idea that I don’t have to answer to anybody. I’m my own responsibility. I am my own person, and I am my own god. Self-sufficiency has the idea that I don’t need anybody. I can take care of myself apart from anyone. Self-righteousness gives the idea that my way is right. What I think is right; therefore, I am dominated by my standard of right. Self-indulgence has to do with the concept of anything that satisfies and pleases me is golden. When you consider all three of these together, you start to get this idea that man is good, evolved, and is his own god. He can think what he wants and control his destiny, and if he controls his destiny, then he controls his own thoughts.
The problem is that this kind of thinking excludes one central thing. It’s excluding God. This movement gained popularity and focused on fulfilling and gratifying interpersonal longings to gain identity and meaning. It was part of the movement to foster feelings of power, feelings of self-esteem, and feelings of happiness, without truly modifying the real conditions of life.
When man forgets God, man comes up with all these ideas of how he can make himself better apart from anything or anyone. As we look at this preoccupation with self, I want you to see these names: Abraham Maslow, Rollo May and Carl Rogers. They promoted the advance of the human potential movement by connecting human dignity and self-actualization to self-esteem. They promoted positive thinking and the idea that you can think your way to success; you can think your way healthy, and you can make yourself better just by thinking a certain way.
When they talk about human dignity, they’re saying it imposes this idea that one has value or worthiness imputed to him and should be treated according to that worthiness. There is this idea that people have a right to something. They deserve something. They say, “I’m valuable. I’m worthy.” The Bible says that we are reckless sinners in need of a Savior. It’s hard to talk about sin when people think they’re basically good. Evangelizing is difficult because we live in a culture that really thinks that they’re okay. A lot of people, including Christians, get offended when I tell them that the gospel is only good news for wicked people.
If that offends you, that says something about how much you have bought into this movement. If it’s an “amen” for you, then you understand that you knew your condition which is why you needed a God. You can only see the grace of God when you see how bad you are, not how good you are. This particular movement leads us to get this idea that we’re okay, and that makes presenting the gospel even more difficult.
Again, this movement begins with a preoccupation with self. Self-actualization is the idea that one can become fully human or mature. It is a man striving to accomplish anything he can to become all that he can be. Do you remember that? “be all you can be”?
Here’s a question then: What does it mean to be all you can be apart from God? The world struggles with that. There is so much suicide and depression because people are trying to fulfill this idea that they can “be all they can be,” but they’re coming to a place as we see in the book of Ecclesiastes: vanity is vanity. People who want to commit suicide have come to the right conclusion, just the wrong solution. They have come to the right conclusion because life is meaningless apart from God. It is worthless apart from God. What’s the point of living? The goal is not to take your life. The goal is to give your life to someone who can do something with it, so now you can have a sense of hope.
When you have a preoccupation with self, that you’re basically a good person and everything in life contradicts that, you have nowhere to go. Either you lie to yourself and come up with a new concept called forgiving yourself or you get over yourself and get under the mighty hand of God. The basic premise of forgiving yourself says, “I thought I was all of that and a bag of chips. I thought I was a wonderful person, and I realize I’m not as good as I thought I was, so let me cut me some slack.”
This is self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-sorrow versus saying, “I am a no-good son-of-a-gun, and I’m in need of a Savior, and there is a God who loves me in spite of me, not because of me. Let me surrender because as I see how bad I am, I see how great He is.” It’s hard to get there with the movement that wants you to self-actualize and be all that you can be.
Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick. Who can understand it?” I need you to understand that the Bible doesn’t really cut any corners when it’s trying to get us to have an accurate assessment of who we are, so we can see the reality of what we need. At the end of the day, our hearts are deceitful. They are deceptive apart from God, generating us and changing our position and our condition, which then gives us the ability to think differently and to be different. We are some rough individuals. This idea of positive thinking is really a denial of our wicked hearts. When I’m in denial about myself, I have to hype myself up more than what I really am. The positive thinking movement is a way to try to have something good about yourself apart from God himself, and it never works.
History of the Movement
The modern positive thinking movement started in the late 1800s with a watchmaker named Phinehas Quimby who became fascinated with the practice of mesmerism. The movement takes its name from a German physician named Franz Mesmer from back in the old days. He used to hypnotize or mesmerize people. It is from his name that we get the term “mesmerize.” Quimby became an apprentice of a famous French mesmerist and traveled New England learning the trade. Once he could hypnotize on his own, he opened a practice and started having some success alleviating the symptoms of psychosomatic disorders, which refers to things that affect your body because of what you’re thinking. We know this to be true on some level. If I’m thinking evil thoughts for a long time, what starts to happen physically if I’m not careful? I get tense. I start to get “stressed.” There is some connection.
Psalm 32 says, “When I kept silent (about my sin), my bones wasted away.” There are times when one can have some physiological things happening that are the result of wrong thinking. Every now and again unbelievers say something that’s biblical, but then they take it out of context. Quimby probably had some people with bad headaches because of some things going on in their hearts, and they weren’t thinking properly about it. He got them to relax, and then their bodies relaxed. Yes, when we stop sinning, a lot of stuff “works.”
This led him to believe that the body was a reflection of the mind and that all illnesses were caused by false beliefs. Do you see what happened? You can take something out of context, stretch it, and make it an idea. Positive thinking came from the origin of believing that all physical illness came from false thinking. The reason you have a cold is because you’re thinking of a cold. All suffering comes from false belief, what you’re believing in your mind. Are you hearing some ideas or hearing some people preach some of these ideas? Have you heard some naming and claiming, some grab it and bag it, and some calling and hauling? All of this comes from these ideas that are wrong.
Let’s look at some more history here. Mary Baker Eddy in the latter part of the 19th century began teaching a philosophy she learned from Phineas Quimby. Attention began to focus on the relationship of the mind to healing as a study of psychology as a science began. Mrs. Eddy taught that all sickness was a result of wrong thinking. If you could direct a man’s thinking, his illness would be cured. She said sick boys evolved from sick thoughts. They thought sickly thoughts, and their souls became sick.
Some quack had a great idea in his mind and started to believe that because he was thinking a certain way, and started to feel a certain way, all of his physical illness came from bad thinking. So what’s the solution? Let’s think positive! Sounds logical, doesn’t it? But it’s illogical when you’re not thinking theologically.
Let’s build on this little bit more. The new thought movement started during the last part of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century as thinkers, philosophers, and businessmen started to write about the power of thoughts and positive thinking from a secular point of view. The following are some people you are probably familiar with: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ernest Holmes, Dale Carnegie, and William James, one of the first psychologists in America. James is the one who started the self-esteem movement in America. All of these people had a bad idea and made it worse.
What is sad to say is that Christians like what they perceive as good for themselves and not what is really good for them and will buy into this bad thinking. And that’s where we see ourselves in the church today. Remember Jeremiah 17:9, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick. Who can understand it?”
If I’m sin-sick and I pass on some counsel to you, what kind of counsel will you now have for me? Then you pass it on to someone else. What do they get from you? Sin-sick counsel. Then it becomes a movement where we’re trying to get people to believe in themselves and follow their heart. I call it the Disney model. In every good Disney movie, they say two things, and they always put that nice music behind these thoughts: You need to follow your heart and believe in yourself. We think this is so beautiful, but the problem is that it’s a lie from the pit of Hell.
When you spell the word “sin,” what’s the middle letter? What did God really deliver us from? Isn’t it interesting that positive thinking wants to keep you consumed with whom? I! Satan is crafty, and he knows how to push ideas that may be wrong, but they’re so delicious that we still take a bite. This idea of positive thinking is dangerous because it’s not rooted in biblical thinking.
What God’s Word Says About False Teachers
Like every “good” bad thing, we love to take it and adopt it in the church. Let’s look in our Bibles to see how this thinking got into the Christian arena. Peter warned us to be aware of the dangers of and to watch out for these false prophets. These people creep in amongst us and claim to be, but really are not, believers. 2 Peter 2:1-3 says, “But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction. And many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed. And in their greed they will exploit you with false words. Their condemnation from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep.”
When Christians began to embrace positive thinking, they were actually walking in this passage. They became false prophets peddling a lie and making it sound good to Christians, marring the way of truth. We’ve got to understand the history and consequences of this movement, and when people come to us talking about believing in yourself, following your heart, and thinking positively, we need to ask the question: Can you show me that in the Bible?
Positive Thinking Infiltrates the Church
How did the positive thinking movement begin to move from the culture to Christianity? In 1952 Norman Vincent Peale published his book, The Power of Positive Thinking. Religion was changing from theology to psychology, and more and more books were being published as self-help manuals. People applied many of the principles of the positive thinking philosophy to the Bible, teaching that these principles had always been in the Bible but only recently discovered, What others attributed to subconscious thinking, visualization and affirmation, Peale called faith. This faith released an inner power, which enabled one to accomplish his goals and be successful. Is that what the Christian life is about? Did God save me from the penalty of sin, the power of sin, and one day, the presence of sin, so my life could be full of myself and free to love myself? Was that the gospel of Jesus Christ?
This idea that God saved me because I was so valuable and so lovable is a lie from the pit of Hell. Romans 5:8 says, “…while we were yet sinners” and hated Him, Christ demonstrated His love to us. The gospel is not so much about how valuable we are, but how great God is that He would love sinners. He didn’t love us because of who we are; He loved us because of who He is, and He is asking us to do the same with the culture that can’t stand Him or us. He’s asking us to go to a dying world and love people who can’t stand us. Why? Because we’re not loving them according to who they are, we’re loving them according to who we are and by His power so that they can get the great news that we received in order to live in the newness of life that we have now through the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
This false thinking gives us the idea that salvation is just about having a good life, and you know what’s sad about this? How does this thinking work in third-world countries? Whenever something is true, it works everywhere, not just in America. Whenever something is true, it’s not just tied to a dollar sign; it’s tied to a heart change. And this positive thinking movement is peddling the “American Dream,” trying to use Scripture to peddle it in faith, and it is dangerous.
Peale made positive thinking a matter of faith and made the One responsible for success, not some mystical power of the mind, but God. The positive thinking philosophy was now sanctified into Christianity. So long as the positive thinking philosophy was tied to Christian science, it was viewed as a cult, neither Christian nor science. With Peale, the positive thinking philosophy moved into the mainstream of denominationalism. We have Peale to thank for the mass appeal of this idea of positive thinking.
Robert Schuller took Peale to another level. He combined the positive thinking philosophy and piety to assure audiences of their own self-worth and success. His individual-centered gospel glossed over sin and preached a success-oriented message with a shallow, happy optimism.
Many Christians have bought into these lies, and they cannot become all God intended because they’re full of themselves. Can I tell you a secret just between us? You are so full of yourself that no one will love you as much as you love yourself. That is the problem. God says difficult times will come because men will be lovers of themselves. These ideas feed the flesh that God is calling us to die to.
A number of very popular television evangelists have preached a health and wealth gospel of success that is conditioned upon faith in God. Men and women such as Robert Schuller, Pat Robinson, Jim and Tammy Bakker, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, and many others have presented programs that have featured testimonies of those whose lives have been changed from sickness to health, from poverty to wealth, and from sadness to gladness through faith in Christ. Jesus, the right God, will make you healthy and prosperous, but first you’ve got to give to the ministry. What is the focus of all this?
Always be careful of any movement that makes you the center. We need to discern good and evil and understand that no movement of God will keep you focused on self. Let’s explore that theologically. God’s glory is His ultimate agenda. His glory is to demonstrate the greatness of His character, and He has chosen creation and mankind to be the means by which He will demonstrate the greatness of His character. If we understand that “all things are from Him and to Him and through Him. To Him be the glory,” according to Romans 11:36, then any movement that keeps you wrapped up in yourself cannot be a movement that comes from God. God does not want you wrapped up in yourself. God wants you wrapped up in Him.
The Negative Behind Positive Thinking
Turn your Bibles to Colossians 2:8. Notice what Paul is telling this particular congregation. He says, “See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.” I want you to notice in this text that he didn’t say see to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy because the issue is not philosophy. Christianity is a philosophy. Paul is talking about vain and empty philosophy, a philosophy that’s according to the tradition of men and the principles of this world. Is this the thinking of the world and culture or is this the wisdom of God? God is telling us to not be held captive by the world’s thinking. Do not allow your mind to be consumed with thinking that gets you wrapped up in that which contradicts the will and the ways of God. If something is of God, it will not keep you focused on yourself.
Here is a negative of positive thinking. One is led to believe that God has given man the ability to accomplish whatever he wants through faith. Is that a true statement? Can I accomplish anything I want through my faith? What about Philippians 4:13 that says, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” because this is what I hear a lot of Christians tell me all the time. If you look at the text, there are a couple of verses that go before that verse. What if we read verses 11 and 12 and see how those verses connect to verse 13? Those verses before verse 13 talk about how I can live with a little and I can live with a lot. The idea is I can live through any condition in life, whether having a little or having a lot through my relationship with Jesus Christ. That is the context of that verse. How did it get so far outside of the window of the context?
No, I can’t do all things through Christ who strengthens me. I can do all things that He wants me to do through Him who strengthens me, not all things that I want to do. I have the ability to live out this Christian life through Him who strengthens me. I have the ability to live with a lot. I have the ability to live with a little through my relationship with God. It doesn’t mean that I can do anything I want to do if I just think positively. That’s a lie from the pit of Hell; it doesn’t match Scripture.
God has given man the ability to accomplish what God wants accomplished through faith in Jesus Christ. This is the danger of telling people, “You can achieve it if you just think hard and long.” That’s not necessarily true. Because if in God’s sovereignty, He doesn’t want it to happen, it won’t happen. What if your idea doesn’t match God’s agenda? You have to be careful about this.
Here’s another negative on positive thinking. One is taught to put faith in the mind’s power to accomplish and be what he wants. That’s not true. What if I feel in my spirit that I want to be a woman, and I’m a man? Can I just believe long and hard enough that that’s the right thing to do? If I have enough faith, God will be okay with that. Is that true?
The truth is that through faith in Jesus Christ, man has been empowered to renew his mind in truth and to be and do what God wants him to be and do. 2 Corinthians 5:15 says that Christ “died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.” 2 Corinthians 5:9 says that we are to make it our ambition, whether dead or alive to be pleasing to the Lord. Has it not been said that we’ve been reconciled to the Father? Has it not been said that our lives are no longer our own? We’ve been bought with a price or are those just cute little Scriptures that we like to say every now and again?
Positive thinking keeps you rooted and grounded in a self-preoccupation of one trying to believe he can do what he wants at any level. That is basically self-rule tied to self-righteousness tied to self-indulgence, and God has called us to die to self.
Biblical Alternative to Positive Thinking
What has God given us as to how we are to train ourselves to think? The answer is very simple, and it comes from the book of Philippians. Go back and study the original Greek of Philippians 4:8 to get an even deeper context of the meaning of the verse. Years ago, I spent about 10 weeks on just that verse with my congregation, and we broke down every single word in order to understand the process of how to think. I’m giving you a summary of that now.
The idea is that we don’t have to have positive thinking. We have to have biblical thinking. The idea is not to think positively; it is to think biblically. If you think biblically, that not only will transform your mind, it will transform your life. Romans 12:1 says, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” Psalm 119:11 says, “Thy word have I hid in my heart, that I might not sin against thee.”
There’s a way of thinking that God has called us to, and if we really took the time to explore Philippians 4:8 and to break down each word, looking at the context and the implications, we will be busy for years. We can challenge this positive thinking craziness with biblical thinking.
Let me suggest to you, looking at Philippians 4:8, that we are to let our minds dwell on what is true. The idea of true is whatever is real as opposed to that which is false, whatever is fact as opposed to that which is fiction, and whatever is reality as opposed to that which is fantasy. We are called to dwell on what is true and to occupy our minds with it. With the word “dwell,” God intends for us to occupy our minds with these ways of thinking.
We’re also to dwell on what is honorable. Honorable has the idea of that which is worthy of respect or deemed as admirable in the sight of God and that which is of a matter of importance to God. It’s not trivial or meaningless, leading to a self-centered preoccupation of pursuits. It’s that which reflects good character as God defines character and is precious to God. We are to dwell on what is honorable and occupy our minds with this.
We’re to dwell on what is right, that which is just or fair, the proper or correct thing to do. We are to do the God-approved thing, which conforms to the standard, will, or character of God. This is where our minds are to go daily.
We’re to dwell on what is pure and what’s wholesome, undefiled, and not stained with moral impurity and is unstained by sin. We’re to dwell on what is lovely, thoughts that will bring about a loving act that is pleasing to God. We’re to dwell on what is of good repute and that which focuses on the good instead of the bad. We’re to think about what is positive and constructive rather than what is negative and destructive.
We’re called to dwell on what is of excellence, conforming our thinking to focus on what is the best way to demonstrate the moral character of God in all aspects of life. We are to focus on the highest level of morality that we can present in all aspects of life and focus on being our best as empowered by God in all aspects of life to His glory. We are to be a living advertisement for Jesus.
Every day, we need to be thinking, how can I be a living advertisement for Jesus? I don’t know about you, but I love those chocolate chip cookie commercials. They make them look so good that you can almost smell them through the commercial. That’s a good advertisement! It makes you want to taste the cookies. That’s what God wants us to be to this culture. We are to be such an advertisement for Christ in our character, our conduct, our conversations, and our commitments that when the world sees us, they think, Oh man, there is something about this guy, or there is something about her that’s just interesting. I want to be or have a taste of what they have. That is the kind of thing that God wants our minds to dwell on.
Finally, we are to dwell on that which is worthy of praise and that which is worthy of applause in relation to God. This is called biblical thinking. We’ve got to throw out positive thinking and began to see it for what it is: man’s way of trying to have something without God that will destroy him because it keeps him filled with lies and impossibilities versus coming and humbling himself before almighty God and beginning to think in the reality that can transform him and bring a sense of satisfaction to the soul and productivity to his life that is promoted and empowered by God.
