Mind Games Series

Mind Games

Ephesians 4:17-24

Three storms in seven years. I don’t know about you but after Katrina I was hoping for another 40 year span of no storms like we had between Betsy and Katrina. As Isaac was bearing down on the city, it was dredging up all kinds of bad feelings and memories from August 29, 2005. And after Isaac made landfall and we had assessed the damage, we totaled more than $250,000 of damage and months of rebuilding. But here’s the thing: you have a choice how you respond. You can let it get you down or you can choose to look forward and upward. You can look at it as a problem or as an opportunity. Our lives are determined more by our thoughts than they are our circumstances. That's why it says in the Bible, "As a person thinks within themselves, so they are." That’s why the battlefield for your mind is really so strategic and critical because your mind is the door to your heart that influences your character. It all begins in the mind. Whatever has your mind, has you. Your mind is the door to your heart which is the center of your character.

There are all kinds of scientific studies out there that have found the impact of a positive attitude. It results in faster recovery from surgery, a quicker recovery from burns. Your attitude even affects our immune system. Science has discovered that our attitude gives resistance to certain kind of cancers. The Bible backs this up when we see people ask Jesus to heal them and he in turn would ask about their expectations. He said, "Do you believe I can do this?" You receive what you believe. Then Jesus responded by saying, "Let it be to you according to your faith." This is the power of the mind and faith and why your mind is such a powerful battlefield because what you believe, you receive. What you think, you become. Our thoughts become the behaviors that become our life patterns. So whoever or whatever gets your mind, gets you. This is why the media and commercial advertising thrives on shaping your ideas, values and attitudes to influence your behavior. If you want an example see how South Korean men have begun to wear makeup as a sign of success. South Korean men spent $495.5 million on skincare last year, accounting for nearly 21 percent of global sales. One of the primary reasons is that men are barraged daily with messages in popular media featuring a group of exceptionally good-looking, smooth-skinned, fashionable sports stars and celebrities suggesting that flawless skin is a crucial part of any plan to get ahead at work and romance. Men wearing makeup to get ahead in their careers! Need I say any more. So you can see how important this battle for our mind really is. Whatever or whoever has your mind, has you. So in the battle for your mind, your values, your beliefs and morals - whatever has your mind, your thinking, has you.

We have lost spiritual sensitivity. In our Scripture today, Paul says in Eph 4:19 “Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity…” In other words, we have lost the ability to experience the presence, purpose and will or voice of God in your life. I didn't say believe in God. When you lose spiritual sensitivity, you don't experience burning bushes. All you see are shrubs. When you lose spiritual sensitivity, you fail to see the hand of God active in the world and hear the voice of God for your life. You also fail to receive the promptings of the Holy Spirit. It’s this spiritual side of life that many have such great difficulty accepting in the United State and Europe? Why? We have been raised with a rationalistic worldview that relies on science and only things you can prove with it and rejects any spiritual interpretation of life. What this causes us to do is deny and negate the spiritual side of life and any revelation from God. And that begins to determine everything else in life.

There are three people who have primarily influenced your worldview and they are: Charles Darwin and science; Sigmund Freud and psychology; and Karl Marx and politics. Darwin's theory of evolution is based on random selection. Darwin said that all of this is by accident. And what is a theory which has yet to be proven is taught as fact in our schools. It is illegal to teach in most of our public school systems creationism or intelligent design which says God is the cause and the source of all things created. So Darwin is the first influence that everything is an accident. Second is Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis. What Freud has done in psychology is that he has reduced human psyche to this closed mechanical view that we are biological beings that have been impacted by the environment of our childhood and our internal impulse. We are nothing more than matter and how that matter responds to the environment in which we were raised. Third is Karl Marx and secular politic. Marx was the first person that came up with a secular politic which means a government without God. America's politic is a secular and is becoming even moreso. The separation of Church and State was meant to protect the Church and faith from the government. That has been distorted now to protect the government from anything spiritual and revelatory. It is a politic without God, like when the Democrats at their convention voted to not mention God in their party or platform.