Slings and Stones: How God Works in the Mind to Inspire Courage in the Heart

By Mike Rakes

OVERCOME your personal mind wars.

YOU ARE IN AN INTERNAL WAR with an invisible giant who is relentlessly assaulting your thoughts, draining your energy, and keeping you from living a meaningful life.  Deep down you’re a lover of God and are aware of your incredible potential, but you’ve run into an intimidating giant that has you blocked.
Negative thoughts are like invisible giants that live in the mind. Your thoughts will either strengthen or undermine the courage and confidence of your heart.  They don’t carry swords and spears, but they sabotage your thinking and keep you from God’s best.
  You can defeat these giants for good.
  Slings and Stones looks at the classic underdog story of David and Goliath to help you see that you can be like young David, who defeated his giant.  You can deconstruct the negative thoughts and attitudes that have infiltrated your mind, face down your giants, and triumphantly take hold of God’s plan for your life.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charisma House
• Release date: Apr 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781629980331

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Introduction

EXPLAINING THE LANGUAGE OF SLINGS AND STONES

IN MANY WAYS, and perhaps on more days than you’d like to admit, you are in an internal war with an invisible giant who is relentlessly assaulting your thoughts and draining your energy, keeping you from living a meaningful life. My guess is that deep down you’re a lover of God, aware of your incredible potential, but you’ve run into an intimidating giant that has you blocked.

You might have personal giants from childhood that taunt you internally and continually declare that you’re a failure. Or maybe you have professional giants that block the way toward your God-given destiny. This book isn’t specifically about the things you struggle with, whatever those may be, but rather about how God works in your soul with His transforming power to bring about victories big and small over the giants that you face.

Slings and Stones is about delivering the good news, the believable news that contrary to what you might think, you can be like young David who defeated his giant in about fifteen seconds. I believe God selected Goliath just for David because the giants you face define your identity and outline the spaces and places that God has planned for you to live a transformed life, just as David’s encounter with Goliath led to his place as king of Israel.

The truth is, I have never really liked the war metaphor for a multiplicity of reasons when it comes to spirituality, primarily because I see Jesus as antiwar on so many levels. But to simply use the word conflict in this book does not carry the same weightiness. Your life is dramatically influenced by the numerous social realities around you—your family, coworkers, the few true friends you have, and even your frenemies (those who pretend to be a friend but secretly oppose your advancement).

There are seasons of your life when an internal war—a war that others cannot see—rages against a relentless giant who is competing for the energies of your heart and mind. Truthfully, the literal spiritual war for you was won on Resurrection morning, but it has never been God’s plan to remove us from the struggle of the human experience. Jesus told His disciples near the end of His ministry they would experience trouble but that He had overcome the world.

I don’t like the war metaphor because it seems religion throughout history has been used in the name of God to bring power-seeking people groups to dominate other people. But in the Gospels Jesus warned His followers continually about the thinking of both the religious and the mainstream cultures. There were dramatic clashes and pushbacks by Jesus’s ministry as He set Himself against the mind-sets of the Pharisees (the religious culture) and Herod (the mainstream culture) (see Mark 8) in teaching His disciples to just live from a higher reality, God’s kingdom.

Other reasons could be given for not liking the war metaphor and all its complexity; however, the crux of the issue is that this metaphor represents the reality that one invisible kingdom is always clashing with another kingdom. It’s the clash of thoughts, clusters of thoughts, and mind-sets that cause a person’s thoughts to be full of tension. The collision of thoughts opposing one’s destiny is what I, therefore, call a mind war.

In Slings and Stones we take a look at the story of David and Goliath, which occurred in only one chapter of the Bible. It’s found in 1 Samuel 17, and I use the new Modern English Version of the Bible all the way through. The story takes place at a time when the nation of Israel was struggling to find her identity, which is why the story is so pivotal. Through his actions David declared, "We have a God in Israel who will bring down giants."

The writer of the narrative for the Jewish people recorded the important parts of this very trustworthy story. His main message was that the God of Israel can take an underestimated kid who has complete trust in Him and even slay giants to protect God’s people. There was a clash, a skirmish, not yet a full military struggle taking place between the Philistines and David’s people. So, literally, out of the mind and imagination and the courage of David—symbolized by the astoundingly simple sling and stone he fought with—we see the coming of age of a powerful nation that would become a force for God in the centuries to come.

The use of the metaphor slings and stones reminds me of C. S. Lewis’s fictional book The Screwtape Letters, in which the demonic realm schemes to trick believers into thinking they are not real. Slings and Stones assumes that you, like me, have experienced an internal clash of thoughts. When that internal tension escalates, we label it more than a skirmish or conflict. For this reason I sometimes will use the metaphor of a mind war to describe how it feels when the enemy of your soul is opposing your advancement personally, in your family or work life.

The spiritual reality is that the big war has already been won for you. But deep down you can feel more than just the inner tension of being human; there are times when you just know that you are in a fight for your very mental, vocational, or emotional well-being. God has created you with the desire to experience meaningfulness in every area of your life.

The actual war taking place is for the future, the God future inside you. There is a future full of possibilities as long as God’s involved and a future that contains freedom, and blessing, and a life of pushing back against your enemies’ threats with just one God thought.

Slings and Stones examines verse by verse this one event in David’s life when he becomes established as one who completely trusts in God. This book is to help you notice the thought clashes taking place internally that block your destiny and keep you frozen in place. Simply put, this book was not written to help you try harder, pray more, or exert more effort on any front.

Slings and Stones uses the story of David to point out key areas of his life that turned into actual weapons he used to get to the battlefield and ultimately carried him to victory. Every chapter, with the exception of one, shows you the prewar victories that were necessary to bring down the foul-mouthed giant, Goliath.

This is not an easy matter. If it were, millions would be living out their God-given dreams. Succeeding is much more than just overcoming the inner critic that repeats, "You could never accomplish that!" So if you are willing, let’s examine what’s happening inside you on your journey to God’s very best for your life.

Let me save you wasted time, warn you of dead ends on your journey, and share some lessons I learned from the epic battle of David and Goliath. What secured David’s victory that day were all the mind wars taking place before that moment. I’m honored to be your guide for this part of your spiritual journey. Let’s explore David’s transforming friendship with his God and how God inspired courage in David’s heart through his personal circumstances.

PART I

IMAGINE NEW IMAGES (THINKING)

YOU PROBABLY HAVEN’T thought that much about David’s life before Goliath. If you have, it’s probably the story about him being anointed king as an even younger boy than he was when he faced Goliath. David was all boy, and his head was full of images from that boyhood. We know this because David referenced his past when King Saul was trying to fit him for armor.

David’s gaming or hunting experience as a young boy was not virtual but incredibly real. It was common in his day for the young shepherds to perish tending the sheep for their families. If you remember the story of young Joseph in Genesis, that’s why his father was so easily fooled when his brothers presented a bloody coat to Jacob. So David’s reality as a young shepherd was intense and the images of more than one lion and more than one bear were very much in his psyche.

Images are powerful. They influence us and move us to action of some kind. Images can be neutral, but more often they are positive or negative. In this section you will come to a greater awareness of how images influence your thinking. David accessed his memory of chasing down lions and bears to rescue sheep from the mouths of predators. In fact, these memories might be the key factor in just how God worked in the mind of young David to stir courage in his heart to face Goliath, by recalling the victories in those encounters.

Remembering images is one of the ways God works to influence your mind to inspire courage in your heart. Many people who have set out determined to follow the ways of Jesus suffer deep and private mind wars that feel unwinnable. Much of this internal suffering has to do with a fear of the future or the intimidating images and constant reminders of past failures in their lives.

You have the same human faculties available to you that David accessed when he brought down a negative-thought-spewing giant. That courage is accessed through flashes of new images that show oneself in a new light and put the giant in the right perspective. God’s Spirit is at work deep within you to literally guide you toward your next great personal victory.

Malcolm Gladwell points out in his best-selling book, David and Goliath, that young David had developed a skill and proficiency with the sling. His research indicates that slinging took an amazing amount of skill and practice. He says history would label David as a projectile warrior. In fact, the historian he quotes says there would have been a whole division of these projectile warriors. If that’s true, it actually reaffirms the biblical account of David’s courage. I can just picture all the various divisions of soldiers on the side of the mountain, trapped and intimidated without the courage or imagination to bring down the infantry foot soldier Goliath.

Humans make slings and God made rocks, and together they form an unbeatable combination. Slings and Stones is a book that demonstrates how your humanity partners with God to bring down the giants in your life. No matter how you see the story, slinger against infantry soldier, the fact remains that with God’s help the boy who came to deliver sandwiches to his grown-up brothers ends up changing history—a victory so profound it’s used even in our day to inspire business leaders reading Gladwell’s book to imagine new ways of succeeding in business.

The power of new images in the mind open up the heart to brand-new possibilities. In reality, your God is so powerful that whether the images in your mind are positive or negative, full of failure and setbacks, your job is to keep practicing the ancient art of slinging. The stones God has provided are all around in the natural world, those common things that God wants to use not only to get your attention but also to help you bring down the giant in your life.

Slings and Stones will help you develop a greater skill and strengthen those internal muscles of faith, hope, and love to bring about your next victory and promotion. David had obviously learned that God was with him, and it’s my prayer you will too.

Chapter 1

THE WEAPON OF AWARENESS

Now the Philistines gathered their armies for battle, and were gathered at Sokoh, which belongs to Judah. And they camped between Sokoh and Azekah in Ephes Dammim. Saul and Israel’s fighting men were gathered, and they camped in the Valley of Elah. And they drew up in battle order to meet the Philistines.

—1 SAMUEL 17:1–2

FOR SEVERAL YEARS at 5:30 a.m. I would leave the house to beat the traffic and make sure I was in my classroom by 7:30 a.m. to teach at the university. Some time into that commute I developed the habit of stopping at my favorite spot to grab a very large coffee. On one particular occasion, though running a little late, I stopped for coffee out of sheer habit. That particular morning I was dressed like a Wall Street executive because I was being interviewed by a local television show in the morning, and I would also be conducting some official business for the university later in the day.

At the television studio the audio man was fitting me for a microphone when he noticed that I had coffee on my shirt. In fact, as I excused myself to the dressing room, I noticed that I had coffee all over me—on my tan slacks, my blazer, and down the front of my open-collared white, pin-point shirt. To my dismay, it appeared that each time