John Murphy 

This is the Rock House Center Podcast, and I'm John Murphy. 

Beth Murphy 

And I'm Beth Murphy. Our podcast today is False Beliefs About God. It connects directly to last week's podcast, which was Moving Beyond Belief to Trust, because false beliefs about God create a barrier to trusting Him. And any separation from God will inevitably cause your suffering. 

John Murphy 

Yeah, I just think it's a really important topic. I think a lot of times people don't really understand necessarily the false beliefs they have about God. They probably don't understand the basis of the suffering it's creating inside of them. But that foundational peace that's missing in our relationship with God is, and being able to have peace, like we talked about in our last podcast, comes from this barrier to being able to trust God. There's something going on. And what we know when we're working with our clients is that virtually everybody who comes in has a difficulty in the trust category, and the trust issue is with God. They may have some trust issue with other relationships and so forth, but their foundational sense of peace about how comfortable they are or how assured they are in their relationship with the Lord really revolves around whether they trust Him or not. Another really interesting aspect of this is it just completely makes sense that Satan, who wants to bring us torment and who is a liar, would use lies about God to try to make us not see him for being as trustworthy as he actually is. So this whole idea of focusing on lies makes sense because it is the strategy of Satan to break down this relationship. That's been his focus since the very beginning in the garden, which was to lie about what it was that God said. And so we just think it's a really important thing to talk about and help people focus on it so they can start having some revelation about the ways in which they have had some false beliefs, and it's been really hard to accept him for who he is. It's been hard to trust him. It's been hard to have the assurances that he's offered. It's been hard to have the fulfillment of things that we need from him because we don't really believe that he is who he says he is. All of these things are really critical to our sense of well-being, and the ultimate downside, the ultimate suffering, is just the sense of, it's all on me. I don't have God in my life. as a trustworthy entity to deal with life. 

Beth Murphy 

So as you were saying, it started in the Garden of Eden. And when you look at that, it worked then, it's still working effectively now. And what's at the basis of that, in essence, it's the enemy who we know seeks to steal, kill, and destroy and rob us of the abundant spiritual life that God plans for us. And the most effective way to do that is to have lies about God's character, to attribute the things of Satan to God is one way to look at it, to blame him, to think the bad things in life, anything from our suffering, natural disasters, things that have been done to us, one way or another, to blame God, to feel like he's either caused it or his absence has allowed it, and to therefore distrust his goodness, And the enemy is really maligning his character. I think of it kind of like a vulnerable child being enticed away by an evil influence who is speaking words against their parents, their loving parents, and subtly planting seeds of doubt that pull the child away down a track that, of course, ultimately leads to a great deal of suffering. 

John Murphy 

A couple different ways in which we have an impression about what God's character is. It can have to do with the church culture that we're involved with. It can have to do with how in early life, as we were building an understanding of the foundational sort of grid for understanding God's true character comes through parents. Parents may have had their own problem trusting God. They may have, instead of trusting God, demonstrated that maybe you should trust in performance or you should trust in wealth or you should trust in the approval of other people or you should get comfort from things in the world instead of from God. Just them not beating them up, just they're trying to figure out how to do their life. They're working on the limited information that they have. But they're living that in front of us. And we're as children. And so we're now building a sense of understanding of who God is from there. That's one. And of course, the other is that we get into church cultures, where there are a lot of different beliefs about who God really is. One of the big ones has to do, I think, with a sense of, there's sort of the grace side of things where we understand that God really does forgive us and that our righteousness is based on a gift from Him, basically. And then there are those church cultures where I really need to be careful to be good all the time because God's going to whack me or send me to hell if I'm not on my game of being as morally upright and righteous as I possibly can be. That is in effect describing the character of God when you say those things. So there are a lot of built-in sort of assumptions about the man behind the curtain, God, in terms of how all these things are coming at us and the ways they've been interpreted to us through just a variety of sources. 

Beth Murphy 

That point you're making about the way in which God was modeled to us, either overtly taught by our parents or the way what we saw play out before us, is of enormous importance. I don't think you can overstate the significance of the foundational understanding of our life, our world, ourselves, and God based on how it played out before us. And so one of the ways that we see that commonly is how a person's susceptibility for wrong beliefs about God so matches up with what was demonstrated to them. Like one person who believes that God has abandoned them. And the way that belief shapes up happens to be the way in which a parent abandoned them. Or like you mentioned, that God is all about performance. Of course, the truth is He's not about performance, rules, or religion. He's all about relationship and desire. But if the wrong thing got modeled inadvertently through parents, then that's absolutely what gets in a sense, smeared onto God and His character, and presents a lot of suffering in terms of the inability to warm up to God, receive Him to be who He really is because of how probably unintentionally He may have been represented to us. 

John Murphy 

It's really important to have an understanding of his character in place, because I can remember when I was early into Christianity, I had a lot of things coming at me, because when I was growing up, I had really no exposure to Christianity at all. At 26, when I became a believer, I had very little Christian background. When I came into Christianity and began to be a part of the church culture and read the books and listen to the sermons and hear the people in the pews next to me and people in small groups and all the different sources of Christian culture input, I found it really hard to know what was right because some of it had some apparent contradictions in it and it kind of threw me off a little bit. But one of the things that hit me in that time was it has to be consistent with the character of Christ. Is it consistent with his character? And so that became a standard. Now filtering all of those things. And so that's one of the additional reasons why it's so important is that number one, if we believe a bunch of lies, we're going to have a hard time trusting God. Number 2, if we, however it is that we interpret the things that come at us in our Christian faith, if we don't have something to compare it to that is absolute truth, then we start ingesting more and more near misses on theology and some things that were outright wrong or some things that causes suffering. So it has a couple of different implications to trying to get this correct perspective of who God is. 

Beth Murphy 

I want to drop anchor on that because just as you were describing it, I was thinking back to what it was like in those early years. when you became a believer. And I'd grown up in the church, and then I was a couple of years in on my own born-again experience. So I was just really revved up and going hard after the Lord and really had a lot of blessing as a result of that. But I also brought into that some assumptive things about God, beliefs, things about his character that I didn't see as beliefs about his character. They were just so much woven into the Christian culture. Now, as you were saying that, I was thinking back on your grid for, is this consistent with the character of God, the heart of Christ? And I would get irritated about some of the things that you would question because it's like, no, I always question that. How dare you question that? And then I came around to see, oh, well, I need to question that because I've been so assumptive on those things and they're wrong. That is not the truth about God. It does not fit. You know, I knew I had the intellectual understanding. I knew what scripture said. Didn't recognize until several years in of your insistence on No, we're going to look at this whether it lines up with the character of God or not. And it was that insistence that really caused really a right-angled turn in the road for me, so to speak, in questioning things that I had so assumptively accepted because in my view, everyone around me did. And how dare you suggest otherwise? 

John Murphy 

Yeah, that makes sense. And I think that's kind of how it comes along is that we kind of grow up in a cloud of understanding with all the other believers and we sort of assume things and we don't really recognize that a lot of those assumptions have built into them some assumptions about his character. And we have to have, I mean, Christ is the ultimate truth. They use capital T, truth, instead of his name a lot in scripture. And so clearly that's what we're after. We want to have the ultimate truth to compare everything that comes to us by, mostly well-meaning people, I'm certain. But the problem is it's still, no matter how well-meaning they are, it needs to test, it has to be tested up against something. And that's why that truth of who Christ is, that's so critical for the filter to see how we're ingesting these things into our heart and to our belief systems. And ultimately, we ingest enough of this stuff we haven't tested, then we're dealing with a God that really isn't who he really is. And anything other than who he really is, not enough for what we need to be at peace enough to trust him. 

Beth Murphy 

One of the fascinating things that we've seen over the years is how people are so influenced by, you used that phrase a bit ago, never heard that before, but just the cloud, the cloud of Christian belief that surrounds us. And so people with a particular denominational background or even a certain bent of non-denominational background, over the years we've begun to see how the cloud of belief that it's a little bit off follows people based on those specific tracks that they've been on for a long time. And what freedom comes from the willingness to question those things against the character of God. And that's a really powerful, important sort of perspective. And it's also a fascinating thing about Rockhouse Center and the Be Transformed therapeutic curriculum that we use in that they don't find anything that disagrees with scripture. And that's because of, you know, originating without a denominational bent, without a bias on a certain thing that can steer you away from the character of God. We just want to look at, okay, Lord, what are you really revealing to us about you? What does your word say? And what have I assumptively not really been able to buy into because of... again, the various influences that clouded over my ability to have a clear vision of you. Not that any of us have a clear vision of God. Let me just stop and say that. 

John Murphy 

To our limited understanding. 

Beth Murphy 

To our limited understanding of what we're trying to get access to, really understanding Him. Of course, none of us do. But to the best of our ability, we do know without question that getting rid of these false beliefs about God pulls the spiritual veil off our eyes and relieves A tremendous amount of suffering. 

John Murphy 

I think it'd be good to go ahead and start throwing up some truth so that people can just, in this context of our conversation, begin to build a filter that's really based on who he is. And so we're just going to talk about some of the kinds of things that really describe him well. First absolute one I think is so critical to us is he absolutely, unconditionally loves us. unconditional. That is without reservation. There are no requirements for this. There's also nothing you can do to cause Him to love you. Also, therefore, there's nothing you can do to cause Him to love you more than He already does because He already loves you perfectly. He already loves you for eternity. He has nothing but your best interest at heart. He is totally trustworthy to come through on all of His promises and to love you absolutely no matter what happens and to be with you. He lives literally in us through the Holy Spirit. So He's promised to dwell with us for forever to love us perfectly and have nothing but a desire for our peace and our well-being and our spiritual prosperity and all those things. That's really, those are sort of foundational first beliefs. So there are some lies we believe that would go against the idea that God absolutely loves us without condition because so many of the folks that we work with have, and maybe they don't really see it, but they have an assumption that this is something they've got to earn. Sometimes it's related to just a general sense of that, and then sometimes it seems to be related to, I've done these sins, and so I really need to make up for these sins in my relationship with the Lord, almost as if the righteousness of Christ doesn't quite... get there. It's like, it's almost like I can't really fully trust even the righteousness of Christ to make me fully acceptable to God. And there's still some things I feel like I need to work out between the two of us for him to really accept me and to really love me and for me to, in some cases, for me to really feel saved. 

Beth Murphy 

So a way that plays out is when you go through this list that clients will do in counseling or they get the Be Transformed New Life Awaits workbook, And they may check the box that they know that God accepts them unconditionally. Because they know that in their mind, they know what scripture says. But then later on a question that's asked, where list any other beliefs about God that might contradict his perfect love, then they'll list the various things they've got to do to earn his love. and maybe even not necessarily see the inherent contradiction in there that they've just said that he loves me without any condition, but then they list the conditions of his love and what they would have to do to earn it or what is a barrier to them receiving it, how they need to change, the whole head-heart disconnect that I guess everyone in mankind has some amount of. 

John Murphy 

Certainly. 

Beth Murphy 

Certainly, we both did. And every counselor here who came, went through the process, and now as a counselor. I mean, we all have that. That's where our foundational suffering in life comes from, is the head-heart disconnect between if we do know the truth about God, then the way that reality is not playing out in our lives. And so. 

John Murphy 

I don't really have the peace that my inside, in my heart that I should have if everything I'm believing about him is true. What's going on inside? And I think that's what you're talking about is we have the, I know this about God, we hear this a lot, and we've experienced this ourselves. I know this to be true, but this is the way I feel. And that's that head-heart disconnect. 

Beth Murphy 

For us to get at the piece that we need, we need that absolute rock-solid foundation of knowing that He really does love us no matter what. And He did before He created us. He loved us when He chose us, set us apart before the foundation of the world, was delighting in us, adoring us. This means you, whoever's listening, that's you. He delights in you. He adores you. He loves you. There's nothing you could have done to earn that. He loved you that way before you did anything. He just loves you, period. There's no risk he'll ever reject you. Won't turn his back on you. Isn't punishing you. He absolutely loves and adores you. 

John Murphy 

And he doesn't love you because he wants something from you. 

Beth Murphy 

It's not a dependent love. It's the essence of authentic love. 

John Murphy 

It is the absolute model of authentic love, just the decision to love out of character, not because the person on the receiving end has in any way earned it or deserved it. 

Beth Murphy 

Or is going to come around to making the giver of the love feel better or be appreciated or whatever. He just loves you because he loves you, period. And the fact that we all yearn to be loved, To be fully known and fully loved is because He went before us and loved us first. scripture says He is love, so the only... reason we even have the notion planted within us of wanting that and that eternal longing for his perfect love is because he planted that in us and he's the source of it. Without that there would be no foundational driver to get at it. 

John Murphy 

Right. Now that is sort of in the air, let's throw some interesting beliefs that people can have, because we're going to pray about this before the end, and we want to help people bubble up some things that they're going to add to that prayer so they can get some movement on this. There's so many lies people believe about who God really is. I think it'd be good to kind of dig into a couple. 

Beth Murphy 

Well, commonly people think that, and I'll just ask you as you're listening, do you ever feel like God's disappointed in you? Do you ever feel like you've let him down or that he couldn't possibly not be disappointed in some of your decisions or moral failings or just flagrant things you just feel are terribly wrong that you've done? When you think about that, goes against the character of God. 

John Murphy 

In so many different ways. One of them is sort of the very practical sense is that we do know that God is not stuck at any point in time, and He does know who you are, and He knows what's coming. And so how could He be disappointed in something that He already knows is coming? He understands that you were never going to be perfect. His love wasn't based on that understanding, nor were any of His promises or any of the blessings that He has for you were not based on an expectation or an understanding. that you'd be perfect. He already understands the imperfection of man and he moves forward with his blessings and his love despite that. So actually, could he really be disappointed? I don't think so. I think he knows what it is he's dealing with. 

Beth Murphy 

He's not taken by surprise that we've all sinned and fallen short of his glory. That's a given. So it's like welcome to all mankind. That's our position. You know, we come into this whole thing with our salvation as sinners desperately in need of a Savior because we can't save ourselves. He saves us. Now he's opened the door to transform our hearts and make us more like Christ. None of that is a surprise to him. It's his foundational, magnificent, incredible plan that he had from the get-go when things went awry in the garden. And so none of us could possibly be surprising him or disappointing him. It just, it would be a matter of him being disappointed that we aren't Christ. that we have failings and that we have a sin nature. And again, none of that is a surprise to Him or a disappointment to Him. He just knows where it comes from. He wants to heal us, bless us, and get us to a whole new place, a whole new, we think of it like spiritual promotion, a whole new level of connecting to Him and receiving His love, not tormented by the lie that He's disappointed in you. 

John Murphy 

And there's another one that I want to bring up here that I think is something people commonly wrestle with, and that is the lie that I have to be worthy for God to love me and bless me. That there's some kind of earning thing. And I certainly understand how people's life stories can get them to a place where they feel like their worth is about earning things and about performance. And then we take that and move that into our relationship with the Lord and say, he must be the same way that I'm going to have to earn or somehow do something to cause him to love me and bless me the way I want to be loved and blessed. One of the things I think is very freeing is to completely give up any notion, pretense, strategy at all that I need to have something in me that God would see was worthy of His love. And that's a complete misunderstanding of God's love. 

Beth Murphy 

And a source of that misunderstanding of God's character and His love and where your worth comes from can happen because of things that happened in childhood. Maybe a parent walked out and left the family or had an addiction problem and or anything that distracted them, left them unable to spend meaningful, loving time with their child for whatever reason. And the child develops the wrong belief about their parent, even, or about themselves, that they weren't worthy of spending time with. Or my parents gave me up for adoption because I was not worthy of being raised. those sorts of things that get, the seed gets planted in a child's mind and then goes over on to God. That's the view of what God would think about them because the gods of their youth seem to think that about them. And commonly the parents didn't necessarily think that about them. The parent who got drunk every night after work, say, for example, and never spent time with their child had nothing to do with whether the child had worth or value. It had everything to do with the inner torment of that parent and their desire to medicate to get rid of that inner torment. But the child may interpret that, commonly does interpret that to mean that they have a diminished worth or value, and then attribute that thought to God, that God doesn't see them as worth loving or valuing. And so, obviously, God wants to uproot that lie about themselves. It ultimately is about the character of God, just the thought that we would have to somehow earn His love or be worthy of His love. The truth is, He established our value by the price he paid for your life. And that value got established. You can't establish that value or increase it or diminish it. God just wants you to be able to accept it. Another lie or false belief about God that causes a tremendous amount of suffering is the belief that God can't be trusted to satisfy my deepest needs for peace, so it's up to me. Now people back on that head-heart disconnect, they may say they know that God he's reliable, he's trustworthy, yet they, if we're laying awake at night in bed, trying to figure out, process through how I'm going to take care of my financial challenge, whether or not my relationship's going to work out. Am I ever going to get married? Is my marriage ever going to be what I want it to be? What about my child that I'm terribly worried about, the track that they've gone down and where that's going to go? I can't be peaceful unless I figure out how to resolve that. It's all up to me. The burden's on me, and we're processing through all of that or going through all kinds of self-recrimination in our mind. Whatever's keeping me awake at night is an indication that I've got a barrier to being able to trust God with those things that are keeping me up at night because I feel like it's up to me to resolve it, get my peace, fix the problem. It's up to me to get my deepest needs that God planted in me in the 1st place. And now I've taken on the burden of trying to resolve those things in my own strength because I don't know how to trust God. 

John Murphy 

I think another interesting one that I hear a lot is the impression, a fairly strong impression, that the suffering that someone is experiencing now has to do with the fact that God is punishing them for some mistakes in the past and that they see it as a consequence where God is really dealing out the consequences. And that's another false belief because obviously we have the righteousness of Christ over us. God is not in the judgment, punishment, consequence business. Absolutely is not at all. We're under a new covenant. That's not our relationship with the Lord. That's not the relationship that He's defined with us. But it is interesting how many people, maybe through, you know, again, some authority figure or situation, parents or someone else in their life, whoever it is, have developed this sense of consequences coming from the God-like figure and began to build a grid around that. But that is one of the larger lies that has done a tremendous amount of damage in people's willingness to trust God. Because if I'm afraid that He is going to whack me, if I'm afraid that I'm going to be punished by Him, and He's the source of my suffering and the consequences of either my own decisions or, which is really the two ways in which I'm suffering. I'm suffering because something out in the world, randomly I have been caught up in something that's caused me to suffer, or I've made a decision that has caused me to suffer. suffer. In neither case is God behind that. The scripture is very clear, God is not evil and contempt, no man with evil. So God's not stirring up evil to come at you. He's not focusing evil on your life. And then the other aspect of it is just who we are in terms of the decisions we make. We make decisions because of our control. We make decisions trying to solve big things in our own strength, and we don't always make a lot of great decisions, and a lot of times there are consequences to that. For instance, if I decide that the way I'm going to comfort myself in my own strength is not to go to God, but it's going to be to eat. That really was a foundational belief that I had. That's why I had so much weight issues, is that that's where I went to escape the way life felt. Well, the consequence of that was putting on a lot of weight. Is that God's fault or is that my fault? Well, clearly, that's just the consequence of the condition of my heart. That's just the way it works when we over feed our body, our bodies create storage. Well, God didn't do that to you as much as you hate it. God didn't make you, whatever it is, number of pounds overweight. And so that's just one of those interesting things where we look at our suffering or we look at our consequences. And sometimes we start tying that back to, well, this has happened because I did this, and this. Well, sure, everybody's got the this, and this. Everybody can look back and look at their bad thinking or their bad decisions. and believe, that was a mistake. And then there's this interesting bridge that gets developed. Where is it? And here are the consequences of my life. It's got to be connected back to all this sin that I had in the past. And that's really all about God punishing me. Well, we can't trust in, lean on, count on someone who we are afraid of, who is going to bring consequences and suffering in our life because of our imperfection. how do people feel about other people who bring them suffering? They want to get as far away from them as possible. That is why that's such an effective lie of Satan's, is to get you to believe that any of your suffering comes from God, because what that's going to mean is that you're going to cut him out. You're going to get away from him. As a matter of fact, I've had a number of folks who have specific issues in their lives that they won't bring God into that discussion because they're afraid that because of something that happened in the past around that issue, that he's going to make it happen again. And that it was like, I trust a guy with this, but the outcome was not good, and so therefore I'm going to not bring him into these conversations when I'm trying to deal with this, because I feel like he might have been the source of this. That's A barrier to building that bridge of trust so that we can have the peace that we want. 

Beth Murphy 

That's all really critically important, and it rolls into a next grid of lies. that gets set up where if I believe that I've done my part, but God's not come through. He hasn't done what I expected of Him. That's the unwritten contract with God that connects to all of what you just said, where we can end up feeling like I've checked all these boxes, whatever boxes I think I'm supposed to do. I've done my spiritual disciplines, if that's what I believe is going to make me closer to God or earn His favor, or I I've been a good person. I've led a good life. I've done all these different things. Whatever the thing is that we've created, or it's been created for us, and we've followed along behind that plan, I feel like I've done those things that were laid out for me, and God hasn't come through for me. All right, that's a terrible place to live. Really, it's hell on earth. And one of the, I'll say on the flip side of that, just to give God the glory, one of the most glorious things we see here is when people on their own have Growing revelation and come around to acknowledging that, well, all these years I've blamed God on, I prayed and prayed and prayed for a husband. I felt like God led me to... marry this person, and things went awry in that marriage, and they blamed God for all these years. And then they come around to gradually the barrier of lies against God goes away, and they remember that, well, actually, no, God warned me. He had red flags everywhere. And my immediate family, everybody warned me. God was right there yelling at me through a megaphone, and I did what I wanted to do. And now all these years I blamed God. And as those things unravel, it's amazing what happens in the person's life. And even in that case, in the given marriage relationship, what can change there and often does change there, because they now get access to God. They're relating to Him. They're seeing how He can actually change a marriage that got started off on a wrong foot. Or They are seeing how their low self-worth, their wounded sense of themselves caused them to blame God. And that's the bigger suffering than the actual thing itself. The distance from God. So they distance themselves from God and they're a difficult thing that maybe happened because something that caused them a financial 20 years of financial distress, and they ultimately can look back and realize that, no, a lot of their own decisions contributed to that, and no, it really wasn't God's fault. No way, no, God's been the one that's held me together these whole 20 years. He's been the one that's showed up and provided for things. out of nowhere and kept my life together. And they begin to see that and the whole picture of life starts to turn around simply because the false beliefs about God start crumbling and the truth about God begins to get set up in their heart. And the very same set of life circumstances turns into feeling thankful to God, grateful, praising Him, honoring Him, dependent on Him. And it's like the big ships turns around. 

John Murphy 

I think we've done a lot to kind of stir up some potential thoughts that people who are listening might have connected with and hopefully brought some revelation. So I just want to say that if anybody is feeling condemnation from any of this, just understand that's not from God, that's from hell. But what we do, what we can feel that's productive is conviction. And with conviction, then we can respond to that in a conversation with God and a prayer to resolve it. So if you're feeling some conviction about a particular belief that you have, we're going to now roll into a prayer which will allow you to kick that lie out of your heart and accept the truth of who God is instead. So I think we'll just roll into the prayer. So Heavenly Father, I reject the lies I believe about you. I reject any wrong understanding of your character. I specifically reject the lie that you are, fill in the blank. Heavenly Father, I declare the truth that you are loving, full of grace, trustworthy, love me unconditionally, and love me for eternity, and that nothing that I have believed in my heart overrides that truth, and I reject any lie that opposes that truth. Lord, please remove from my heart these lies and any other lies that I have believed about You and replace them with the truth of who You are. Lord, please heal me of how I have suffered from these lies. And give me the strength to resist the desire of my sin nature, to return to these false beliefs about who you are. Heavenly Father, I forgive the people and anyone in the church culture, anyone in my family, anyone who's had authority over me. I forgive them all for misrepresenting your character. I also ask you to forgive them. And to heal them of the ways these lies that they've believed has caused them to suffer. I pray all these things in the precious name of your son, Jesus. Amen. 

Beth Murphy 

Amen. May this bless you as you just marinate in the truth about God's perfect love for you. Please share it with anybody that you think would be blessed. Call us or e-mail us if you feel inclined to talk about counseling at Rock House Center. And may you just be totally blessed and immersed in the truth of God's love for you. 

John Murphy 

Thanks for joining us. Goodbye.