TAKING BACK THE MIND
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FORTIFYING OUR MINDS FOR VICTORY
FORTIFYING OUR MINDS FOR VICTORY
1 I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.
2 And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.
This is the final cut we want to consider about spiritual warfare, and it may be the most important.
The fact that warfare is a battle for the mind should not surprise you, based on all that's been said so far about how the enemy attacks us and gains ground in our lives. Protecting our minds from his onslaughts is vital because sin begins as a thought. A suggestion, an idea, a tempting possibility -whatever it takes, Satan wants to bring some plan to your mind to get you and me to act upon.
Fortifying our minds for effective spiritual warfare is the final step in the process we've been describing, whereby we take back any ground led to Satan and begin clearing that ground of the strongholds he has built.
Once we have moved from spiritual defeat to spiritual victory, we aim to live daily in that victory. We can only do that by replacing Satan's strongholds of lies with towers of truth to which we can flee when the enemy attacks.
Getting control of our minds and turning them into effective spiritual weapons in the power of the Holy Spirit is the stage in spiritual warfare where we go on the offensive. Once I have taken background, surrendered to the enemy and have destroyed his strongholds, I want to keep him from stealing back any of that ground the next time he comes around. That's why our minds are so crucial.
The Battle for the Mind
To help you in this important area, I want to talk first about the mind under attack, the battle we're facing for our minds. Some of this will, of necessity, be review, because we've already looked at some of the ways Satan comes against our minds. But these truths are so crucial to understanding that I don't think repeating a point or two made earlier will hurt. Then we will consider how we can renew our minds as Christians, as Paul tells us to in Romans 12:1-2. I want to give you a biblical "battle plan" that includes what it means to renew your mind, how you can take control of your thoughts, and how to set your mind on those thoughts that please God and are according to His Word.
So let's begin as we seek to obey Peter's command to "gird up the loins of your mind" (1 Peter 1:13), a figure of speech that pictures a person in the ancient world tucking the ends of his flowing garment into his waistband so he will be free for action. An equivalent exhortation in our day would be, "Roll up your sleeves and get to work!"
That's a great picture of what God wants us to do with our minds.
There is nothing passive about spiritual warfare, especially when it comes to guarding and fortifying the mind. I like the way one Bible scholar defines the mind in 1 Peter 1:13: It is «the center of understanding that produces thoughts and resolves, the power of rational of evil desires (v. 14).'
There's a lot of truth in that sentence. What he is saying is right in line with what we said earlier about our thoughts. Remember, thoughts can come from one of three sources: ourselves, God, or Satan. Woe be to the person who cannot tell the difference. Satan's great scheme is to plant his intruding thoughts in our minds, make us think they are our thoughts, and then accuse us for having them.
This is why 2 Corinthians 10:3-5 is such a vital passage of Scripture to understand. Have you ever put these verses side-by-side with Romans 12:2? These two texts are wholly consistent. They tell us that there is a false belief system out there that seeks to capture us and squeeze us into its mold, a system shaped by all the influences around and within us that the Bible calls the "world" and the "flesh." I said in an earlier chapter that each of us has within him a belief system that is the product of these influences-family, education, media, peers, music, etc. I am not suggesting that everything we receive through these sources is false. Not at all. However, our false perceptions based on these influences must be replaced by a belief system based on truth if our behavior is to be acceptable to God.
Why? Because we draw on our belief system to formulate our decisions and actions. What kind of decisions and actions will come from a badly flawed belief system? Badly flawed decisions and actions!
Our friend Bill is a classic example. As long as he believed that he was hopelessly trapped in his sexual problem and was slowly destroying his family too, the only rational decision seemed to be to do away with himself. God had to change Bill's belief system, his mind, before Bill could come to freedom.
According to Proverbs 23:7
Proverbs 23:7 (KJV 1900)
7 For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he:...
In essence, a person can’t live inconsistently with his belief system. A person may not always live what he professes, but he will always act according to his beliefs.
So our challenge is to refocus and reprogram our minds, to replace wrong thoughts with right and God-honoring thoughts. We'll conclude the chapter, and the book in fact, by looking at Paul's "recommended thinking" list in Philippians 4S. But we're not ready for that yet.
Two Actions to Take
Let's return to 2 Corinthians 10:3-5, which contains truths that are essential to winning the battle for the mind. Notice first the strong context of warfare. These verses alert us that we are in a very real battle and that the battleground is the mind of the Christian.
Two critical actions here are vital to carry out if we are to win the battle for our minds.
The first is that we must yield our minds to the control of the Holy Spirit. The importance of being Spirit-filled is spelled out elsewhere in Scripture (Ephesians 5:18
18 And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit;
We belong to the Lord body, soul, and spirit, and the Holy Spirit indwells us to empower us for obedience. So it follows that our minds must be placed under His control. What's the alternative to a Spirit-controlled mind? A "carnal" or fleshly mind, and Paul tells us in verse 4 that weapons of the flesh are utterly useless in spiritual warfare.
The second action we must take is to accept God's Word as our final authority.
Why is this important when tearing down Satan's strongholds in our minds? Because feelings reinforce these strongholds. In my own life, I didn't just believe I was inferior. I felt strongly inferior for many years, and this feeling had a devastating effect on my ministry and my personal walk with Christ.
Here's where a believer's commitment to the authority of the Word makes the difference. I had a decision to make. Was I going to hold on to my wrong belief and wrong feelings about myself, or was I going to believe God's objective, written truth to me that I was a person of worth and value in His sight? You have faced those same kinds of decisions, I'm sure. In my case, I had to make a new choice if anything would happen in my life. I had to decide to believe God minus the feelings or hang on to my wrong beliefs reinforced by wrong feelings.
It comes down to this: Is God worthy of our trust, and is His Word the final authority in our lives? By His grace, God enabled me to trust Him and believe His Word. As I did that, the stronghold of inferiority was pulled down in my life.
Two Battles to Fight
In addition to two actions, I see two battles in 2 Corinthians 10:3-5.
The first is the one I have just described, the "pulling down strong. holds" (v. 4).
The second battle here is called "bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ" (v. 5). If anyone thinks spiritual warfare is a passive affair where we empty our minds and let God fill them, this verse is a corrective. This is a verse of action. The idea behind the word captivity is that we are to take our thoughts "at spear point."
I think what M. R. Vincent says about verse 5 in his Word Studies in the New Testament is very helpful. He calls the strongholds high military works thrown up, or lofty, natural fortresses with their battlements of rock." Bringing our thoughts into captivity, he says, continues the military metaphor. "The obedience [of Christ] is the new stronghold into which the captives are led."
Isn't that a great picture? The new strongholds Vincent is talking about are the same thing we have been calling towers of truth. His insight is valuable because the idea is not just to liberate our thoughts from Satan's control so they can float freely. As sinful people, our thoughts still need to be brought into captivity and obedience.
The goal is to submit our minds to the right commander.
Discerning the Source of Our Thoughts
But this also raises a question. If we are to take our thoughts captive, how do we know when we've captured an intruding thought from the enemy and either need to turn it around or get rid of it? What do wrong thoughts look like? I can't do a lot to take my thoughts captive for Christ if I can't distinguish among my thoughts.
Identifying Wrong Thoughts
One reason this is so important is that we as believers, can fall victim to what appear to be good thoughts. They may even be religious thoughts, telling us to do seemingly good things. The difference is that when these thoughts are from the enemy, they come with a strong coercive force that is much different than the gentle constraining of the Holy Spirit's direction.
But because these thoughts come in a religious guise, it never occurs to most of us to question their origin. The enemy doesn't care what tool he uses to ensnare us, as long as he gets us bound up and renders us useless.
Recognizing Satan's Attacks
What Alan experienced is just one of the ways Satan can attack our minds. The Scripture gives us other examples of how Satan can come against the mind, not only of believers but of unbelievers as well. Satan can darken or blind the mind (Ephesians 4:17-18; 2 Corinthians 4:3-4
3 But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost:
4 In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.
corrupt the mind (2 Corinthians 11:3
3 But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.
deceive with his wiles (Ephesians 6:11
11 Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.
prevent understanding of the Word (Mark 4:15
15 And these are they by the way side, where the word is sown; but when they have heard, Satan cometh immediately, and taketh away the word that was sown in their hearts.
and come as an angel of light to spread darkness (2 Corinthians 11:14
14 And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.
Satan even engages in seduction, as he uses "deceiving spirits" to lead the mind away from the truth to a lie (1 Timothy 4:1
1 Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils;
What a contrast to how the Scripture describes a mind in tune with God and under the control of the Holy Spirit, one ready and eager to receive the truth of God's Word (Acts 17:11
11 These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.
This kind of mind produces humility (Acts 20:19; Colossians 3:12
12 Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering;
it is a spiritual mind (Romans 8:6
6 For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.
a willing mind (2 Corinthians 8:12
12 For if there be first a willing mind, it is accepted according to that a man hath, and not according to that he hath not.
a sound mind (2 Timothy 4:1
1 I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom;
and a pure mind (2 Peter 3:1
1 This second epistle, beloved, I now write unto you; in both which I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance:
In short, a mind in tune with God and under the control of the Holy Spirit is a renewed mind. Let's find out how we can renew our minds as God intends and win this all-important battle, the great ongoing battle in spiritual warfare.
Renewing Our Minds
The primary exhortation to us to renew our minds is found in Romans 12:2.
But the apostle Paul's plea for mind renewal begins in verse 1, with a call to present our bodies to God as a living sacrifice.
The place to start in renewing our minds is to make a complete surrender of ourselves to the Lord-body, soul, and spirit, which includes our minds.
This has to be a daily attitude of surrender. As several people have observed, the trouble with a living sacrifice is that it keeps crawling off the altar. Our minds are alive and active, taking in and processing thoughts daily. That's why mind renewal is one of the everyday disciplines of spiritual warfare for the Christian. The good news is that we can train our minds the way we train our bodies. It's a positive process, not simply a matter of emptying our heads of bad thoughts. We are never told in Scripture to empty our minds. Jesus warned about the danger of a empty and swept mind concerning demonic activity (see Matthew 12:45
45 Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first. Even so shall it be also unto this wicked generation.
Some Important Reminders
We've already identified the three sources of our thoughts: ourselves, the Lord, and the enemy. Let me remind you here that you do not need to be dominated by your old way of thinking. Your thoughts are not authoritative. Having a thought says nothing about who or what you are. To accept your thoughts as authoritative is to set yourself up for real problems.
Also, the mere presence of a thought in your mind does not mean you have to obey it. Neither does the presence of a thought mean that it will happen. We do not create reality by our thought life. I am repeating these things here because so many people believe that if they think something, they are bound to carry it out, or that thinking the thought somehow gives them freedom to commit the deed.
A final reminder I want to leave with you before we get into the discipline of renewing the mind is this: simply having a wrong thought does not make you sinful or guilty. If it did, Jesus would be sinful, as He received (but did not act upon) wrong thoughts, which were suggested to Him by Satan in the temptation in the wilderness.
Indeed, the devil will not give control over a person's thought life without a fight, so we should be prepared for spiritual warfare when we declare war on our old way of thinking. But the battle has already been won for us. We have been set free. God has given us a "sound mind" (2 Timothy 1:7).
A Daily Discipline for Mind Renewal
As you can tell by now, I like to talk about specific, achievable steps people can take to get where God wants them to be. This is true when it comes to obeying Romans 12:1-2, so let me suggest some steps that have helped thousands of men and women to take charge of THEIR thinking and bring their minds under the control of the Holy Spirit.
1. Test your thoughts.
"Test the spirits, whether they are of God" (1 John 4:1
1 Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.
Get used to the process of examining your thoughts to determine their origin. The source of some thoughts will be readily apparent if they are vile and wicked. But as we saw in Alan's case, the origin of other thoughts is not so obvious.
We have the ministry of the Spirit to help us in this process, but too many believers have never engaged their minds to cooperate with the Spirit. It was Plato who said the unexamined life is not worth living. We could paraphrase this and say the unexamined thought is not worth thinking. (Of course, when examining our thoughts, we do not try to chase down the source of every thought that passes through our minds. That would be impossible, anyway. Instead, we're dealing with those thoughts that crowd their way into our conscious thinking and have some effect on our actions.)
Thankfully, God has not left us on our own to try and figure things out. His Word gives us the standard by which to test every thought. We don't need to fall into the trap of believing chat God is just sort of open-minded about things, that if something is beautiful and true to me, this is all that matters. God's truth doesn't work that way. What is the first piece of spiritual armor the Christian is to put on? The belt of truth (Ephesians 6:14).
2. Refuse wrong thoughts.
The fact that we have the power in Christ to say no to wrong thoughts is an eye-opening revelation to many whom I counsel. By the time they come to my office, many of these people are so used to being in bondage to wrong thinking that it never occurs to them that they have the power to refuse to obey their wrong thoughts.
There is an important distinction we need to keep in mind here: the difference between thoughts and thinking. The enemy can plant wrong thoughts in our minds, but he cannot force us to chink about them, mull them over, and let them germinate into full-fledged sin.
This distinction is what James 1:14-15 is talking about.
Lust has to "conceive" to produce sin. We have to feed and nourish a lustful thought before it can produce anything. I encourage you to use this simple affirmation when a wrong thought comes: "I give no consent to chat."
3. Resist the devil.
We've dealt with this in enough detail chat I don't need to add much more here. But resistance needs to be included in our daily mind renewal process because Satan does not always flee at our first effort to say no to him. We have the authority and power of Christ, though, to command the enemy to leave.
4. Share every thought with the Lord immediately.
This is very important regarding the kinds of thoughts Satan most often uses to trip us up: the memories of past sins and failures. If such sin is under the blood of Christ and you have dealt with its consequences, the enemy has no authority to afflict you with it. You can give that accusing thought to Christ and thank Him that He died to cleanse you.
5. Memorize God's Word.
We could do an entire chapter on Scripture memory’s incredible value and importance. We keep coming back to the importance of replacing wrong thoughts with right ones-and the only infallible source of right thoughts is God's Word.
Scripture memory is one of those daily disciplines that has a wonderful cumulative effect on your mind and heart. As you soak your mind in Scripture, you think God's thoughts. And you give the Holy Spirit a tremendous arsenal of truth to draw upon and bring to your mind when you are in a time of need.
6. Set your mind on things above.
A wonderful New Testament verse is a biblical "catalog" of what God wants us to think about. Here is the catalog description:
Philippians 4:8
Our study is to consider each of these terms Paul uses and see how God wants us to use our minds.
"Whatever things are true." The idea of truth is that which conforms to reality from God's perspective and is genuine and accurate. The opposite of truth, by the way, is not falsehood. It is an unreal fantasy that does not conform to biblical reality.
"Whatever things are noble." This concerns what is honorable, God-honoring, and worthy of our reverence and esteem. It suggests that we should reject ignoble thoughts, mean, or unworthy of someone who is seeking to imitate the Lord Jesus Christ.
"Whatever things are just." In the Bible, God’s righteousness is the only true standard of what is just or right. So to think and do what is right, we must meditate on God's law, His Word (see Psalm 1:2).
"Whatever things are pure." This means uncontaminated, chaste, innocent, clean, and free from all moral impurity. Obeying this standard alone would eliminate about half of the problems with our thought lives.
"Whatever things are lovely." This word suggests thoughts that are pleasing and agreeable, moving us and others toward love rather than toward that which is unlovely and unloving. Lovely (loving) thoughts lead to actions that cause you to have an excellent reputation with others.
Whatever things are of good report." The beautiful term good report means "well spoken of." It suggests a commitment to speak only that which is favorable about others. This does not deny the need to speak the truth in love. Instead, what Paul has in mind here is the opposite of slander and gossip.
What a tremendous list! And what a call for us as God's people to conform our thinking to this pattern. The "virtue" and "praise" attached to thinking this way make these the highest, most excellent thoughts we can have because they glorify God.
My closing challenge to you as a fellow believer is to make the renewal of your mind a daily discipline as you "war a good warfare."
God will honor you for it, and you'll find spiritual power, authority, fruitfulness, and peace you never imagined available.
Remember, a walk of spiritual victory is not a matter of one step at a time but rather one choice at a time. God has given you all the necessary resources to make that right choice!
Renewing Your Mind
A mind in tune with God is more able to stand against Satan's attack.
Mind renewal (Romans 12:2) is crucial, and this six-part list shows how to open your mind to God's control. (See also pages 249-54 for an action plan you can follow to daily renew your mind and stay on top of the spiritual battle.)
Acknowledge the lies, negative thoughts, accusations, and doubts as no longer being true of you as a new creation in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17).
Ask God's forgiveness for any lingering resentment, anger, hatred, and bitterness you may hold against people who have hurt or sinned against you. Freely forgive them that God may freely forgive you (Mark 11:25
25 And when ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have ought against any: that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.
Turn back the enemy's lies as attempts to thwart your growth and freedom in Christ. Put off your old self (Ephesians 4:22).
Immerse your mind and heart in God's truth. Spend time in portions of Scripture that speak to your soul; claim His promises by faith.
Ask the Holy Spirit to strengthen you. Thank God for what He is doing in your life (Ephesians 5:20).
Praise and bless the Lord (Psalms 16:7; 34:1).
Rest in the assurance that, as you are faithful, God will do the work of renewing your mind.