In the Song of Solomon the shepherd maiden is told by the one she loves to catch the little foxes for they spoil the vine.  Little foxes nibble away on all the tender young fruit--it never has a chance to mature! This is a spiritual picture of our interior thought life as well. With the new birth and the new nature the Living Vine is in every one of us, but our old thought life--like those pesky little foxes--is also there. We have to catch those thoughts, carry them captive to Christ and put them to death by choosing to believe His Truths instead.

Here is an excerpt from the book Escape from Hell that I've been working on which I wrote yesterday after seeing the movie Inception and remembered the time I had to catch some thoughts the evil one had planted into my deep unconscious. Inception (with Leo DiCaprio) is a sci-fi thriller that revolves about planting the seed of an idea in the unconscious mind of a sleeping person so that when they awaken they will think it is their own idea that they will then shape their life around. In the movie DiCaprio meant it for good, but the scenes give a graphic portrayal of the very thing the enemy does to us--in our earliest years when our mind is unprotected by awake and alert adult understandings. Such "thought seeds" planted by the enemy are never intended for our good.

Another major foot hill appeared on the horizon. I was reading books on healing and learning a lot about the power of words and of our inner beliefs. You would think that the words beaten into a child by an unloving person would be words he would throw off as quickly as he could. Sadly, this is not the case. Children take things to heart, especially if a parent speaks them. Just as deadly, they can add their own words or wrong interpretive conclusions: “There must be something wrong with me, look how I’m being treated; No one loves me; I should never have been born.” In all of this an invisible Enemy is secretly “fathering” us by planting his twisted words disguised as our own thoughts.

With me it wasn’t words from my earliest years that got stuck inside of me, but words which from those years in hell. The trick is catching these little foxes that spoil the vine—they are so "ingrained" they go unnoticed and unquestioned, like the pattern of the wood's grain that may be in the reading table beside you. One night I had hunkered down intentionally near the most hurting place in my heart and despite my tears was listening for whatever I might hear. A tiny little voice seemed to be crying, “No one could love me. I can’t be loved. I can’t love me.” “Aha! I’ve got you” I thought as I captured the thought and carried it captive to Christ.

This took some doing, because so much of me was in emotional agreement with that thought, but I managed to fully and deeply renounce it as not being true and chose instead to believe that I could be loved and am loved now that Jesus is in my life. This breakthrough needed to happen or I could never have advanced to the mountain I really wanted to climb, the one that held the towering perspective of seeing myself as God sees me—with unconditional acceptance.