The Lie You Live Inside

Part One of Two: False Narratives

I am curious, what are the false narratives you have created about yourself and what have they cost you spiritually?

Bottom line upfront: The most dangerous lies you'll ever believe aren't the ones other people tell about you. They're the ones you quietly tell about yourself—day after day, for decades—until you can't tell them apart from the truth.

I remember, as a brand-new believer, I used to call myself the world's biggest spiritual loser. My past was real—and my fellow believers liked to call it my “checkered past.” So that became my label. For years, even as a Christ follower, that's exactly how I described myself… until my executive assistant here at BTTB confronted me. Hard. In no uncertain terms, I was told I was lying to myself: I am a new creature in Christ, and I needed to knock it off with the “spiritual loser” routine.

That rebuke landed. And here's the thing—even now, as I get older, I still catch the same propensity in myself. The pull to believe a false narrative about who I really am.

Take the other day. The news broke that they'd finally released the cause of death for Hulk Hogan—and I went hunting. I tracked down every article I could find. I wasn't looking for tributes or highlight reels. I was looking for two facts: How old was he? Seventy-one. What killed him?  Natural causes. And the moment I had those two details locked down… something in me settled. A strange wave of comfort. Relief, almost—over a man I never met.

Why?

Every time someone dies—a friend, a neighbor, a name in the news—my first move is to hunt down the obituary and collect the numbers. Then based on the facts of their death I would figure out the odds in my head of dying at the same age, of the same thing as the person did. Here's the lie I've told myself most of my life: If I can just gather all the facts—the exact age, the precise cause—I'll somehow feel safer. I'll be in control. As if knowing the details could build a wall between me and my own fear of dying.

But it can't. It's an anxiety ritual dressed up as research. It's a false narrative. And I'd bet you've got a few of your own.

A couple of weeks ago I was in California. Char's father had passed, and we gathered the family for the funeral. Our family isn't normally drama-prone… but somewhere in the grief, one of our kids told me—that Char and I had wounded them deeply ten years ago. They'd silently carried it, for a decade.

Here's the problem. Char and I have no memory of it. Neither do the people who were there. And the honest truth? We're fairly certain it never happened the way it's been remembered. I'll deal with that kind of false narrative next week—the stories other people and even our own kids build about us. 

But it sent me looking inward first. Because I've spent a lifetime believing things about my own parents… about whether they really loved me… that, looking back now, simply weren't true. Stories I authored and then lived inside. Psychologists call these problem-saturated stories—self-limiting beliefs that override the actual complexity of your life. I'm a failure. I'm unlovable. I'm too far gone. God probably isn't really good to me. The narratives feel absolute. They're rarely accurate.

And the research is sobering. The stories we rehearse about ourselves don't just sit in our heads—they bend our decisions. Studies on worry, rumination, and self-criticism show that the people most trapped in negative self-talk make measurably worse choices: more fearful, more short-sighted, more driven by the worst-case scenario they keep rehearsing. The lie doesn't stay a lie. It becomes the steering wheel.

So how do we fight back?

The first move is externalization—a simple but powerful maxim: the person is not the problem; the problem is the problem. Instead of “I am an anxious person,” you learn to say, “Anxiety is trying to influence my choices today.” That tiny shift creates distance. It strips away the shame and lets you look at the lie with curiosity instead of condemnation.

Then you hunt for unique outcomes—the real moments in your past that flat-out contradict the story. If the lie says “I always give up,” you go find the time you didn't. You build a truer narrative on the evidence God already wrote into your life.

And no, this isn't just good psychobabble. It's deeply biblical.

“The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”  —2 Corinthians 10:4–5

Read that again. Strongholds. Arguments. Pretensions. Those are the false narratives—the lies that set themselves up against the knowledge of God. And Paul doesn't say tolerate them. He says demolish them. Take every thought captive.

That's the whole work in one verse: name the lie, drag it into the light, hold it up against the truth of Christ—and refuse to let it run your life one more day.

So before you ever deal with what others say about you, deal with what you say about you. What's the story you've been living inside? And is it actually true?  Please let me know.

Next week—Father's Day—we turn outward. So many families are fractured not by what really happened, but by the narratives we've built about each other. If you've got a relationship torn by a story you're not even sure is true… you'll want to be here.

All in, eyes up!

 —Arnie

P.S. Be sure to join us this week on Spiritually Fit Today where I’ll be joined by Brian Doyle, National Director of Iron Sharpens Iron as we discuss authentic fatherhood and spiritual leadership as we draw closer to Father’s Day.