How You Think Affects Your Life
As you become skillful at “casting down every imagination and high thing that exalts itself against the Word of God” you will experience more peace and a greater focus toward purpose within your life.
An evil imagination is a death wound formed in the soul that has its roots in the fallen corrupted nature of man.
God created your mind for thinking. Your mind is like a critically thinking super computer designed to draw on information for the purpose of coming to a rightful determination. It will continually search out bits of data from life experience, prior knowledge, even assumptions to extrapolate a conclusion. To extrapolate means to use information as the starting point to gain knowledge, draw inferences and make decisions about something unknown. There are thoughts that suppose something and are nothing more than random bits of information without merit, proof, witness, or substance. Thoughts like that have no real value and are unsystematic. The most dangerous thoughts, however, are those that lead to a particular belief.
The source of thoughts, your thoughts, needs to be discerned. Are they real or imagined? Good or bad, right or wrong? Was Hamlet on to something when he echoed Montaigne who said, “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so?” Can your thoughts make things so? Do they deserve your attention? Should they be reflected on and acted out?
Only the mature understand the wisdom of parsed judgment until they can assemble all the necessary facts and come to a rightful conclusion. These champions of the kingdom know how to think. Like precision time pieces that carry the unfaltering sounds of tick-tock they examine each systematic movement of the big hand until finally clarity forms within their minds. Then and only then do they move the small hand forward and enter the next hour.
How you think affects your life. The Apostle Paul taught his students not to think like flawed gentiles. The gentiles were outside the covenant blessings of God until salvation. Paul used them as an example. He said that Christ’ disciples should not walk like they do in the “vanity of their minds,” in different words, banned imaginations. “How does one walk in the vanity of their minds,” you ask? By trying to live out vain imaginations.
Paul said, “This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind; Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them because of the blindness of their heart” (Ephesians 4:17-18). Remember the meeting between the fallacious serpent in the Garden of Eden and Eve? As already said, she looked, she took, she ate, and she gave to her husband and he also partook. This scri pture teaches the power of toying with deceptive words and imaginations. Fallen mankind, walking out the vanity within their minds, searches for ways to fulfill sensual, fleshly, lustful passions, and when they find them those passions pull on their carnal nature.
WHAT’S IN YOU?Satan’s activities are still the same today, thousands of years later. He looks through ancient eyes for something in you to work with. Something small, perhaps a seed, something hidden from the sunlight, or something buried deep within. It could be pride, rejection or lust. It could be bitterness, unforgiveness, even the love of money. Again, he has nothing to web except what’s already in you. Jesus said, “For the prince of this world cometh and hath nothing in me” (John 14:30). What about you? When that old dragon draws near can he find anything in you to anvil? To win the war against your mind you must, “Keep your heart with all diligence for out of it are the issues of life” (Proverbs 4:23). Carnal thoughts and pondered vain imaginations give the enemy opportunity to attack you.
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Peter also wrote about the dangers of vain words, thoughts and imaginations. “For when they speak great swelling words of vanity, they allure through the lusts of the flesh, through much wantonness, those that were clean escaped from them who live in error. While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption: for of whom a man is overcome of the same is he brought into bondage” (2 Peter 2:18-19). Did you get that? Carnal passion, stirred by the lusts of the flesh and vanity within the mind is designed to overtake you and bring you to the timbered stocks. That’s why Paul said to avoid the vanity within the mind. Vain thoughts are enticements toward further carnality and conceiving sin. Like walking in cold sunlight they pull on the old man, that carnal nature that needs daily crucifixion. Is he dead in your life?
An evil imagination is a death wound formed in the soul that has its roots in the fallen corrupted nature of man. It is a different way of walking, outside your design. Like an addiction, vain imaginations can grab you and pull at your soul beckoning the reapers to come. Spoken greed, for example, draws on the blackened sinful nature of man. So, too, lust that pants for the forbidden. Lust is fabricated first within the imagination then onto the flesh looking for its harvest. When pondered it’s like a narcotic to the most addicted of junkies.
What did Peter mean “they are servants of corruption?” Bondage! That’s right, slavery trenched deep within their souls. Those taken captive through cultivated sinful imaginations become slaves fettered to their own carnality. Paul’s warning “don’t think like that” is significant. “How can one be overcome by an imagination,” you query? As mentioned before, by brooding evil thoughts within the mind, imaging them and acting them out. That’s what happened to Eve. She considered what the serpent said, she pondered the outcome, and she partook of the forbidden thereby giving birth to sin.
Futile imaginations obscure vision and corrupt judgment. scri pture says, “Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart” (Ephesians 4:18). Your understanding can only be darkened when you are carried away by carnal thoughts and hollow imaginations. You must avoid them at all cost because they separate you from the good life of Christ and blind spiritual understanding.
All of us must avoid carnal thoughts and vain imaginations and cast them down as they occur, even those that come from others. As you become skillful at “casting down every imagination and high thing that exalts itself against the Word of God” you will experience more peace and a greater focus toward purpose within your life.
It seems we have come full circle once again in our pursuit of winning the battles against the mind. The bottom line is the mind must be renewed. Some try to get the Holy Spirit to grapple with their minds. The problem with that is you must be involved in the process by making every effort to renew your mind yourself. Give the Holy Spirit something to work with. Make the effort by studying to “show yourself approved.” Epictetus said, “No great thing is created suddenly.” So meditate on the Word daily. It will impart life, truth and grace for living into your soul.
MEDITATION AND REFLECTION
To extrapolate means to use information as the starting point to draw inferences or conclusions about something unknown.
There are thoughts that suppose something and are nothing more than random bits of information without merit, proof, witness, or substance.
Satan’s activities are still the same today. He looks for something in you to work with. It could be pride, rebellion or lust. It’s significant to remember that he has nothing to work with except what’s already in you.
8/30/2008
8/25/2008
HOW DARK IMAGINATIONS CAN DESTROY YOUR MIND
Christ gave you authority to bind and loose every thought and imagination. Refuse to let Satan introduce demonic imaginary into your imagination.
Your imagination can only incubate what you linger on, good or bad.
Imaginations create reality, even evil reality. There are over 400,000 registered sex offenders in the United States. The pornography industry, fueled by carnal lust and sexual fantasy, is larger than the combined revenues of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo and Apple. Driven by debased images this blackened smut is a $1 billion industry in North America alone. Engineered by wicked masterminds, pornography is the creation and distribution of sexually illicit images that have no literary or artistic value.
Through the contagion of erotica, Satan uses the imagination of man to sin against God, himself and society. Unrestrained sensuous pingere have a dark side that leads to wickedness, debauchery and destruction. The infamous serial killer Ted Bundy, murderer of 12-year old Kimberly Leach, was interviewed by Dr. James Dobson before his execution in the Florida State electric chair on January 24, 1989. Bundy murdered 28 young girls and women. He grew up in a Christian home, went to church and had loving parents. He describes pornography as the genesis of his fall into the abyss.
In the interview just hours before his electrocution, he tells of finding, as a 12- to 13-year-old boy, a pornographic magazine in the trash near his home. In time he became more and more addicted to pornography, especially violent images of tortured women. When that no longer satisfied his lust he fantasized of sexually assaulting and murdering women himself. He said, “The most damaging kind of pornography – and I’m talking from hard, real, personal experience – is that that involves violence and sexual violence. The wedding of those two forces – as I know only too well – brings about behavior that is too terrible to describe.”
In “The Road to Xanadu” Professor John Livingston Lowes wrote, “Fantasy and imagination are not two powers at all but one.” Bundy brought life to his perverted sexual fantasies. Commenting on the dangers of pornography he said, “I’ve lived in prison for a long time now, and I’ve met a lot of men who were motivated to commit violence. Without exception, every one of them was deeply involved in pornography – deeply consumed by the addiction. The FBI’s own study on serial homicide shows that the most common interest among serial killers is pornographers.”
Bundy is an example of the dark side of unfettered and incubated evil imaginations. He leaves us with a fagged warning, “There are those loose in their towns and communities, like me, whose dangerous impulses are being fueled, day in and day out, by violence in the media in its various forms – particularly sexualized violence.”
The good news is that Christ gave you authority to bind and loose every thought and imagination. Refuse to let Satan introduce demonic imaginary into your imagination. Bind every image and cast them down. You can choose how you respond. Bundy didn’t, you can.
RESPONSIBILITY
Everyday we are bombarded by secular television reminding us that we are in a spiritual battle against our minds. There is much concern about the economy, jobs, and housing prices, mortgage foreclosures, declining morals, attacks against family values, wars and rumors of wars, sickness, disease, terrorism and natural disasters of all kinds. It seems like the perpetual hostilities against our minds offers much opportunity to leave the realm of faith in Christ and enter the quagmire of doubt, unbelief and worry.
Once again I am assisted by the Apostle Paul’s statement: “Casting down imaginations and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God.” I love the power to imagine “all things possible to him that believeth.” Don’t you? Frequently, however, we have to battle the negative thoughts that war against our minds first. This brings me to the testimony of Viktor Frankl a survivor of the Nazi prison camps. In his autobiography, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” he pens an inspirational testimony of humanity’s potential for greatness whatever the circumstances. He wrote, “Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.” Frankl stated that no matter the mistreatment by his demonic oppressors they could never take away his choice of how he responded to them.
BUILDING STRONGHOLDS
Vain imaginations pondered will build damaging strongholds in your life. They war against your mind and keep you from walking in God’s perfect plan and purpose. Remember the degenerate progression. First the enemy challenges God’s Word in your life by introducing such things as doubt and unbelief. Next you have opportunity to ponder the thought and image it or cast it down. Further, you have the ability to linger on that imagination and speak it out or take it captive to the Word of God and cast it down. See the progression? The ability to give freedom to your imaginations belongs entirely to you.
The result of habitual negative thoughts and imaginations can send you spiraling into a state of depression. When we think something often enough, we begin to believe it’s true and our feelings match what we are thinking. To conquer depression psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck developed “cognitive therapy” in the 1960s to stop negative thoughts by replacing them with more positive ones. He believed that depression could be stopped before it ever started. The Apostle Paul developed the therapy long before Beck. He said, “Be careful (anxious) for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. Those things, which ye have both learned, and received, and heard, and seen in me, do: and the God of peace shall be with you” (Philippians 4:6-9).
God gave you freedom to choose how you respond to every circumstance in life, every thought that attacks your mind and every bad report that contradicts God’s plan. Like Frankl you have complete control over your thought life. All of us have thoughts. They can be good or bad but thoughts are only ingredients we use to make decisions. If your thoughts are carnal, then cast them down. If they are positive, feed them. Your imagination can only incubate what you linger on, good or bad.
You have control over your thought life and nobody can ever take away your freedom to choose how you respond to thoughts and imaginations. The Word teaches of a demon possessed man with an unclean spirit that lived in a cemetery. When he saw Jesus he ran to Him, bowed and worshipped (Mark 5). If a legion of devils could not stop him from coming to Christ then no devil, demonic thought or evil imagination can stop you from the abundant life in Christ Jesus.
The world has always been filled with doubt, unbelief and evil goings-on. The good news is that you, the born-again believer, are no longer part of that kingdom. You can escape the dark side. Christ has redeemed you and given you great and precious promises. Take control of your life and choose to respond to every circumstance of life, thought and imagination according to the truth found in the Word of God.
MEDITATION AND REFLECTION
Imaginations create reality, even evil reality.
All of us have thoughts. They can be good or bad but thoughts are only ingredients we use to make decisions.
If your thoughts are carnal, then cast them down. If they are positive, feed them.
Your imagination can only incubate what you linger on, good or bad.
Your imagination can only incubate what you linger on, good or bad.
Imaginations create reality, even evil reality. There are over 400,000 registered sex offenders in the United States. The pornography industry, fueled by carnal lust and sexual fantasy, is larger than the combined revenues of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo and Apple. Driven by debased images this blackened smut is a $1 billion industry in North America alone. Engineered by wicked masterminds, pornography is the creation and distribution of sexually illicit images that have no literary or artistic value.
Through the contagion of erotica, Satan uses the imagination of man to sin against God, himself and society. Unrestrained sensuous pingere have a dark side that leads to wickedness, debauchery and destruction. The infamous serial killer Ted Bundy, murderer of 12-year old Kimberly Leach, was interviewed by Dr. James Dobson before his execution in the Florida State electric chair on January 24, 1989. Bundy murdered 28 young girls and women. He grew up in a Christian home, went to church and had loving parents. He describes pornography as the genesis of his fall into the abyss.
In the interview just hours before his electrocution, he tells of finding, as a 12- to 13-year-old boy, a pornographic magazine in the trash near his home. In time he became more and more addicted to pornography, especially violent images of tortured women. When that no longer satisfied his lust he fantasized of sexually assaulting and murdering women himself. He said, “The most damaging kind of pornography – and I’m talking from hard, real, personal experience – is that that involves violence and sexual violence. The wedding of those two forces – as I know only too well – brings about behavior that is too terrible to describe.”
In “The Road to Xanadu” Professor John Livingston Lowes wrote, “Fantasy and imagination are not two powers at all but one.” Bundy brought life to his perverted sexual fantasies. Commenting on the dangers of pornography he said, “I’ve lived in prison for a long time now, and I’ve met a lot of men who were motivated to commit violence. Without exception, every one of them was deeply involved in pornography – deeply consumed by the addiction. The FBI’s own study on serial homicide shows that the most common interest among serial killers is pornographers.”
Bundy is an example of the dark side of unfettered and incubated evil imaginations. He leaves us with a fagged warning, “There are those loose in their towns and communities, like me, whose dangerous impulses are being fueled, day in and day out, by violence in the media in its various forms – particularly sexualized violence.”
The good news is that Christ gave you authority to bind and loose every thought and imagination. Refuse to let Satan introduce demonic imaginary into your imagination. Bind every image and cast them down. You can choose how you respond. Bundy didn’t, you can.
RESPONSIBILITY
Everyday we are bombarded by secular television reminding us that we are in a spiritual battle against our minds. There is much concern about the economy, jobs, and housing prices, mortgage foreclosures, declining morals, attacks against family values, wars and rumors of wars, sickness, disease, terrorism and natural disasters of all kinds. It seems like the perpetual hostilities against our minds offers much opportunity to leave the realm of faith in Christ and enter the quagmire of doubt, unbelief and worry.
Once again I am assisted by the Apostle Paul’s statement: “Casting down imaginations and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God.” I love the power to imagine “all things possible to him that believeth.” Don’t you? Frequently, however, we have to battle the negative thoughts that war against our minds first. This brings me to the testimony of Viktor Frankl a survivor of the Nazi prison camps. In his autobiography, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” he pens an inspirational testimony of humanity’s potential for greatness whatever the circumstances. He wrote, “Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.” Frankl stated that no matter the mistreatment by his demonic oppressors they could never take away his choice of how he responded to them.
BUILDING STRONGHOLDS
Vain imaginations pondered will build damaging strongholds in your life. They war against your mind and keep you from walking in God’s perfect plan and purpose. Remember the degenerate progression. First the enemy challenges God’s Word in your life by introducing such things as doubt and unbelief. Next you have opportunity to ponder the thought and image it or cast it down. Further, you have the ability to linger on that imagination and speak it out or take it captive to the Word of God and cast it down. See the progression? The ability to give freedom to your imaginations belongs entirely to you.
The result of habitual negative thoughts and imaginations can send you spiraling into a state of depression. When we think something often enough, we begin to believe it’s true and our feelings match what we are thinking. To conquer depression psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck developed “cognitive therapy” in the 1960s to stop negative thoughts by replacing them with more positive ones. He believed that depression could be stopped before it ever started. The Apostle Paul developed the therapy long before Beck. He said, “Be careful (anxious) for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. Those things, which ye have both learned, and received, and heard, and seen in me, do: and the God of peace shall be with you” (Philippians 4:6-9).
God gave you freedom to choose how you respond to every circumstance in life, every thought that attacks your mind and every bad report that contradicts God’s plan. Like Frankl you have complete control over your thought life. All of us have thoughts. They can be good or bad but thoughts are only ingredients we use to make decisions. If your thoughts are carnal, then cast them down. If they are positive, feed them. Your imagination can only incubate what you linger on, good or bad.
You have control over your thought life and nobody can ever take away your freedom to choose how you respond to thoughts and imaginations. The Word teaches of a demon possessed man with an unclean spirit that lived in a cemetery. When he saw Jesus he ran to Him, bowed and worshipped (Mark 5). If a legion of devils could not stop him from coming to Christ then no devil, demonic thought or evil imagination can stop you from the abundant life in Christ Jesus.
The world has always been filled with doubt, unbelief and evil goings-on. The good news is that you, the born-again believer, are no longer part of that kingdom. You can escape the dark side. Christ has redeemed you and given you great and precious promises. Take control of your life and choose to respond to every circumstance of life, thought and imagination according to the truth found in the Word of God.
MEDITATION AND REFLECTION
Imaginations create reality, even evil reality.
All of us have thoughts. They can be good or bad but thoughts are only ingredients we use to make decisions.
If your thoughts are carnal, then cast them down. If they are positive, feed them.
Your imagination can only incubate what you linger on, good or bad.
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