Core Convictions: Putting It All Together
Questions That Will Change Your Life: The Core Convictions Series
Most of us are living by answers we never consciously chose.
Somewhere along the way — in a childhood home, in a moment of pain, in years of small repeated experiences — we formed a picture of how the world works, who we are, and what we can expect from God and other people. That picture became the lens. And most of us have been looking through it so long that we've forgotten it's there. We don't see the lens; we just see life.
This is what the Core Convictions series is about. Six questions — not therapeutic exercises, not personality inventory prompts — but the kind of questions that expose the architecture of how we actually live, as opposed to how we think we live. They are, in many ways, the same questions Jesus was always asking: What do you want? Who do you say I am? Where are you? That last one, from Genesis 3:9, is God calling into the garden after the fall. He wasn't asking because He'd lost track of Adam. He was asking to create the one thing that makes healing possible: awareness. These six questions do the same.
What Story Am I Living In?
There's a difference between a person who grew up learning the world is a dog-eat-dog place where the strongest survive and a person who grew up learning you are loved, you belong, you don't have to earn your place. Both people walk into the same room, the same conflict, the same moment of failure — and they experience something completely different. Not because the facts are different, but because the story is different. The narrative we inhabit shapes how we interpret everything: disappointment, love, God, silence after a prayer. When we don't examine the story, we keep living it on autopilot — reacting out of a script we didn't consciously write.
The dedicated article — What Story Am I Living In? — traces three common false meta-narratives and contrasts them with the story Scripture tells: creation, fall, redemption, restoration. Anchoring yourself in the true story doesn't erase the painful chapters. It gives them a frame and a future.
What Commitments Have I Made?
The commitments that shape us most are often the ones we made in pain, and made silently. I will never need anyone. I will never be weak again. I'll never let anyone see who I really am. These inner vows feel like protection in the moment — a way to keep a wound from happening twice. But vows made in fear don't just guard a door; they lock it from the inside. Over time, the wall that was supposed to keep out harm also keeps out intimacy, growth, and the healing that only comes when someone gets close enough to help.
The article Inner Vows: How "Never Again" Promises Keep You Stuck walks through how these commitments form, why they're so hard to see, and the Spirit-led path toward breaking them. But the story doesn't end with renunciation — it ends with replacement. The companion piece, The Power of Declarations: A New Allegiance, explores the flip side: that declarations made in faith carry just as much power as vows made in fear. I belong to God. I am not alone. I am not who my wound said I was. A life can be reoriented around these words, one declared truth at a time.
What Core Beliefs Do I Hold For God, Self, and Others?
Most of us have two theologies: the one we would write down, and the one that actually runs our life. We can say, sincerely, that God is good — and still spend every day bracing for punishment. We can say we believe we are loved — and still work ourselves to exhaustion trying to earn it. The gap between professed belief and lived belief is not hypocrisy; it's the human condition. The beliefs stored deepest in the heart — formed by childhood experience, absorbed from family systems, shaped by the ways we were seen and treated — operate well below the waterline of conscious theology.
Theology of the Heart explores how to find the real belief beneath the stated one. Not to shame it, but to surface it — to bring it into the light where it can be gently, patiently re-storied in light of what God actually says about who we are and what He thinks of us.
What Judgments Have I Formed?
Every time we render a final verdict on a person — she'll never change, men are all the same, that group of people can't be trusted — we plant a seed that grows into a filter for all future experience. The same is true of the verdicts we render on ourselves: I am fundamentally broken. I ruin everything I touch. I'm the kind of person bad things happen to. Judgments don't just describe reality. They start to create it. Once the verdict is in, the mind stops gathering new evidence and starts looking for confirmation.
Two articles in the series address this question directly: Scooch Over and The Root and the Fruit. Both are coming soon — and this question may be the most practically urgent one in the series, because the judgments we've formed are often the thing we least suspect is at work.
What Habits And Assumptions Shape Me?
Much of what we call personality is actually pattern. The grooves worn into the mind by repetition — the way we narrate bad days, the stories we tell ourselves in silence, the reflexive conclusions we reach when something goes wrong — these feel like fact because they've been running long enough to seem like nature. But they're not nature. They're conditioning, and conditioning can change.
Self-Talk and Personal Narratives examines the constant inner commentary most of us barely notice — and how to step back from the stream of thoughts rather than being swept downstream by them. The companion article on cognitive distortions goes further, naming the specific patterns that bend reality — all-or-nothing thinking, catastrophizing, mind-reading, emotional reasoning — and offering a practical, faith-integrated path to retraining the inner narrator. Naming these patterns is the first step toward not being ruled by them. You can't change what you won't see.
What Do I Trust To Define Reality?
At the bottom of every life is an answer to this question. Most of us have never said it out loud. For some it's performance — when I succeed, I'm okay; when I fail, I'm not. For others it's people's approval, or relationships, or the sense of control. Whatever we trust most to tell us we're okay functions as our practical god — the thing we build our emotional security on, the lens that tints everything else. We might not name it that. But our calendar, our anxiety patterns, and our moments of deepest fear often know the answer before we do.
What Do You Trust to Define Reality? is the question that brings the series home, because the answer reaches back and reorganizes everything that came before it — story, vows, beliefs, judgments, habits. The companion piece, Does God Still Love Me If I'm Failing?, speaks directly to those who have built their sense of worth on what they produce — and how the gospel offers not just forgiveness but a different foundation altogether.
An Invitation
These questions aren't meant to be answered quickly, or once. They're the kind you return to — in a journal, in prayer, in a conversation with someone you trust, in a counseling room. Each honest answer is a step toward living from the inside out rather than being driven by what's unexamined. The work isn't about digging up the past for its own sake. It's about the freedom that comes when the things that have been running quietly in the background are finally brought into the light.
God's posture toward this kind of self-examination has always been invitation, not interrogation. Where are you? He already knows. He asks so that we can begin to know too.
If you'd like to explore these questions with a counselor, we'd love to walk with you. Book a free 15-minute consultation at Growth Counseling or learn more about what we do.
