This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Get Out of Your Head" by Jennie Allen. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What are the best quotes from Get Out of Your Head? What can you learn from these quotes?
Many people live as victims of their own minds, consumed with negative thoughts. But as a Christian, you can consciously choose your thoughts and replace ungodly lies with scriptural truths. This is what Jennie Allen reveals in her book Get Out of Your Head. Understanding key passages and quotes from Get Out of Your Head will help you better understand the concepts in the book.
Keep reading for the best quotes from Get Out of Your Head.
Get Out of Your Head: Quotes: Explained
The following quotes from Get Out of Your Head will help you better understand the key concepts and advice from the book. Here are the nine best quotes from Get Out of Your Head:
“We can’t curl up on our couches, read the pages of a book, pray, and simply will our minds to change. God is concerned not only with the posture of our hearts but also with the people on each of our arms. In terms of fulfilling our mission in this life, we can’t do anything worthwhile alone.”
The truth opposing the lie of self-esteem is that real and lasting joy only comes from choosing God and other people over yourself. God didn’t create you to be the center of your own world. What’s important isn’t for you to be empowered but for you to rest in his power.
A key scripture supporting this truth is Paul’s exhortation in Philippians 2 for us to share Christ’s attitude in our interpersonal relationships. Just as Jesus humbled himself as a servant of everyone and became the ultimate example of humility by willingly suffering crucifixion for our sins, so we should humble ourselves and devote our lives to serving others. The instructions in 1 Peter 2:21 for us to take Christ’s suffering and service as our example, and to follow in Christ’s steps, reinforce the same point.
“Humility is a grateful and spontaneous awareness that life is a gift, and it is manifested as an ungrudging and unhypocritical acknowledgment of absolute dependence upon God.”
The way to defeat your enemy of self-inflation is to choose to value and serve God and others instead of yourself. Embrace humility.
Bear in mind that although “serving others” may sound clear enough, as a strategy for defeating self-importance it’s inseparable from choosing others over yourself, which is a subtler thing. There are various ways to make this choice.
“When you and I choose to believe a lie about ourselves, it’s one of these three lies we believe: I’m helpless. I’m worthless. I’m unlovable.”
According to Jennie Allen, Satan attacks your mind by convincing you to believe lies about yourself, which are rooted in a lie about God.
Your self-lies resolve into three general categories:
- “I’m helpless.”
- “I’m worthless.”
- “I’m unlovable.”
The fundamental lie about God that lurks behind your self-lies is the unconscious belief that God’s love isn’t for you. The source of these lies is both spiritual and practical. As stated in Chapter 1, the ultimate source of all such lies is demonic. On the practical level, painful life experiences generate self-lies, which then become part of you when engraved in your brain through toxic thoughts.
“Evil never wants to be noticed, I should mention here. It sneaks in and hijacks our minds, and we barely notice anything’s amiss.”
The distorted thought life that Satan’s lies create about you and God is the deepest, darkest stronghold of evil inside you. The devil wants to keep you locked in there forever, and his intention is reflected in the psychological fact that up to 70 percent of all spontaneous thoughts are negative. Negativity appears to be our default setting.
Evil never wants you to notice it. It prefers to sneak in and hijack your mind. A mental story map provides a specific technique for shining light on these unwanted intruders.
“No human is ever meant to be the person who fills our souls or holds in place our worth. Only God can do that. But until I throw off the lie that God’s love isn’t for me, my emotions, decisions, behaviors, and relationships will remain twisted up in the mistaken belief that I’m worthless. When we begin to think about our thoughts, perhaps for the first time, we can stop the downward spiral. We can reset and redirect them. That’s our hope.”
The fact that God made you for community reaches back to the nature of our creator himself. God is intrinsically a community because of his triune nature. The Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exists for all eternity in an internal community of loving relationship. It’s the primal template for human relational needs. We need community because God made us that way.
Through Jesus, God provides community by inviting us into his family. When we’re saved through faith in Christ, we become God’s children, and he becomes our loving father. We receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, and we’re adopted into the eternal loving community of the Trinity.
“What we believe and what we think about matters, and the enemy knows it. And he is determined to get in your head to distract you from doing good and to sink you so deep that you feel helpless, overwhelmed, shut down, and incapable of rising to make a difference for the kingdom of God.”
This is the spiritual war of our generation, a battle between you and the enemy of your mind (and soul). Your enemy in this war is Satan, whose objective is to prevent you from learning to take your thoughts captive. He wants you to waste your God-given life in feelings of helplessness, because this inner defeat will accomplish his overall goal: to prevent you from doing and becoming all that God wants.
“They say authors write books for two reasons, either the author an expert on the subject or the subject makes the author desperate enough to spend years finding the answers.”
Allen has also experienced toxic thoughts that have had long-lasting effects on her life. For instance, she describes the diminishment, shame, and insecurity that she felt when a fellow student in her high school biology class called her dumb. She also describes the residual, lurking thought that her husband didn’t love her after their first fight as newlyweds.
“The greatest spiritual battle of our generation is being fought between our ears. What we believe and what we think about matters, and the enemy knows it. And he is determined to get in your head to distract you from doing good and to sink you so deep that you feel helpless, overwhelmed, shut down, and incapable of rising to make a difference for the kingdom of God.”
Remember, the battleground is your mind, not individual problematic actions or habits. You are what you think (see Proverbs 23:7). Satan knows this and wants you to believe lies about God and yourself. What you need to do is to shift your mental focus from the flesh to the Spirit.
Satan is invested in your defeat, and his primary target is your mind. His mental attacks catapult you into downward spirals as negative emotions drive your thoughts, decisions, behaviors, and relationships. You live on autopilot, circling ever downward into dysfunction and misery.
The key to stopping these spirals is to interrupt them by learning to think about your thoughts, to “mind your mind.” Taking charge of your thoughts is in fact a biblical command, and it begins with the realization that your thoughts, not your emotions, determine your experience. This means you can change your whole life by reprogramming your mind with God’s thoughts.
The above quotes from Get Out of Your Head elucidate the key ideas from the book.
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Like what you just read? Read the rest of the world's best book summary and analysis of Jennie Allen's "Get Out of Your Head" at Shortform .
Here's what you'll find in our full Get Out of Your Head summary :
- Satan’s master plan for poisoning your mind with toxic thoughts
- How to replace ungodly lies with scriptural truths
- How to “put on the mind of Christ” and fulfill God’s plan for you
