A STRONGHOLD is defined as:
*A place that has been fortified so as to protect it against attack.
*A place where a particular cause or belief is strongly defended or upheld.
They can be physical locations but what I'm talking of here are mental & spiritual strongholds.

While a stronghold can be a positive, truth-based belief established in your life through repetition, it is usually negative and exists as a faulty thinking or belief pattern based on lies and deception. A stronghold of the mind or spirit affects your behavior and ability to make choices. Negative strongholds lead to big-time bondage or being trapped in a fixed mode of maladaptive behaviors - addictions, phobias, compulsions, habits, disorders etc. You can have many strongholds at once & negative strongholds cause us to think in ways which block us from God's best for us. Christian spiritual warfare is concerned with the demolition of evil (anti-God's love) strongholds & establishment of holy (pro-God's love) ones:

--Psalm 18 v 2: The LORD is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer; my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.

--2 Corinthians 10 vv 3-5: For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. 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.

--Proverbs 21 v 2: One who is wise can go up against the city of the mighty and pull down the stronghold in which they trust.

Think of every challenge you face in life as an opportunity to build a fortress for yourself - either positively or negatively protective. If a situation arises and you feel fear, you put down a block for someone to stumble over to get to you - keep away! If you make a positive choice next, you would be choosing a foothold to step back over it into the world again, to 'overcome' so-to-speak. But 20 more situations arise that you react to with fear, shame, guilt, frustration, bitterness etc and now you've built yourself a decent wall. The longer you spend on one side of the wall, hiding & protecting yourself, the harder it is to take the blocks back down, pick stable footholds to climb back over or even see & understand if the people on the other side are friends or enemies. You build the walls higher and thicker and one day you are inside a fortress and alone. You can't get out, you have no real freedom and other people can no longer really reach you either, intimacy is pretty much impossible and open communication difficult.

There are 3 primary areas where negative mental/spiritual blocks can increase in strength or regularity to become strongholds and hold you captive:
*Deception
*Temptation
*Accusation

To deceive means to make another person believe a lie or something that is not true so that they will fall into error. Deception is ancient, Satan deceived Eve into believing that God's Word was not true. In Genesis 3 v 4, the devil (via the serpent) told her that she will not surely die as God said she would in Genesis 2 v 17 if they ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good & Evil. The 'Fall' story is worth a look for the original set-up for life, the devil's tactics, human responses and the consequences for us today:

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%202:15%20-%20Genesis%203:24&version=AMP

Temptation tends to follow Deception. First the devil told Eve, "You won't surely die!", then he made the fruit on the forbidden tree look good to her. Since Eve accepted his deception tactic (his lie), she pondered over the tree that she was not supposed to touch & the fruit did look good to her. She was tempted (enticed) to disobey God's command because she allowed herself to first be deceived and then spent time letting the tempting fantasy dwell too long in her thoughts. Her own desires for knowledge & wisdom to become equal with God and feelings of lust for power and sensual pleasure suddenly became more important to her than God's full love, protection, blessings and her current reality of stewarding a perfect world - how powerful are deception & temptation!

Deception shows you a delicious-looking worm but hides the hook & makes you forget consequences in the moment, succumbing to temptation leads you to get hooked and accusation taunts you after you're anxiously dangling, making you feel guilt, shame, humiliation, panic, condemnation and all those other nasty, destructive emotions. Your either shut down & numb yourself against further temptation or the triad repeats again with you accusing others of baiting your hook, deception tells you you'll never be free, accusation bombards you with mockery & insults at your weakness, temptation makes you reach for more tasty worms to self-medicate for your original hook injury; blame, recriminations and self-loathing as barbed as the hooks...

As a born-again Christian I have a stronghold of faith, I believe that each person who has become broken, trapped & damaged through negative strongholds in their mind/spirit can be made whole, free & healthy again. More on that in part 2! Thanks for reading .