How to Rebuke the Devil in 3 Easy Steps

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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Do you want to know how to rebuke the devil? How can you ensure Satan is not controlling your life and mindset?

In her book Get Out of Your Head, Jennie Allen uncovers Satan’s master plan for trapping you in a life of defeat by poisoning your mind with self-reinforcing cycles of toxic thought, self-lies, and inner battles.

Here’s how you can rebuke the devil and reclaim the power of your own mind.

3 Steps to Rebuke the Devil

In this article, you’ll find Jennie Allen’s best advice for how to rebuke the devil. Follow these steps to rebuke the devil from your life:

Step 1: Confront Self-Lies

Satan attacks your mind by convincing you to believe lies about yourself, which are rooted in a lie about God. Confronting self-lies is an important consideration if you want to rebuke the devil.

One useful and practical tool is a “mental story map.” 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.

Here’s how you make one:

Step 1: Draw your map.
- Write down your current primary emotion. Draw a circle around it.
- Around the circle, write contributing factors. Unfinished work? A relationship? Money? Circle each and draw a line to the central emotion.
- Near each smaller circle, list how it contributes to your current emotion.
Step 2: Talk to God.
- Pray through each item.
- Search the scriptures for relevant truths.
- Ask God to reveal wrong thoughts about himself and yourself.
Step 3: Look for common patterns and themes in your map items (anxiety about things you can’t control? anger at insults? self-criticism?).
Step 4: Notice the storyline your thoughts build about God. Is it true or false?

(Shortform note: To learn a similar approach to “minding your mind,” read our summary of Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Basics and Beyond.)

Step 2: Stop Toxic Thoughts

Toxic thoughts, arising from self-lies, have devastating effects on your life. If you want to rebuke the devil, it’s important to stop these toxic thoughts.

For one thing, toxic thoughts shape your mind, emotions, and responses, creating their own alternate reality, a false mental state in which and from which distorted reasoning seems true. They blind you to the real truth by trapping you in negative cycles that you build whole chunks of your life around.

The key to freedom from negative thoughts is another thought, the “interrupting thought.” It is simply this: “I have a choice.”

Making skillful use of the interrupting thought short-circuits any negative spiral and its accompanying mental chaos and imprisonment because it reminds you that you aren’t really at the mercy of your thoughts at all. You can actually choose the mind of Christ over toxic thoughts. This interrupts the negative spiral at its origin point, reverses the polarity, and starts an upward spiral toward health.

We can take a lesson about this from the way we deal with our children. We teach our children to interrupt their downward spirals all the time, as in a parent disciplining a toddler throwing a fit in public. We remind our children that we love them and that they can choose other thoughts and behavior, that they’re not victims of their negativity. Why not apply this to ourselves?

Step 3: Fight Your Inner Battles

Allen argues that common mental struggles are caused by inner spiritual battles. Here’s how you can counteract each inner battle and rebuke the devil: