Steppin To A New Level Of Thinking
GNLCC 3/12/2006 Proverb s 4:20-27 Philippians 4:4-9
Let’s suppose for a moment, that Bob is out with friends and they talk him into using come cocaine. Bob goes ahead and does it and thinks nothing of it. The next day he goes for a job interview, and the interview goes well. It’s a good paying job one that he’s been looking forward to. As a matter of fact the interviewer tells Bob, I can see right now, you’re the man for the job. Be prepared to start next week. Just go down the hall and take the drug test. As soon as I get the results I’ll let you know when you can start. Is Bob going to get that job?
Let’s suppose for a moment, Janice’s car is on empty before she leaves for work. She decides to use the gas that’s in the gas can in the garage to get to the filling station. But she doesn’t know that her husband had washed out the gas can and put soapy water in it in order to wash away some stains on the back yard patio. She’s not paying much attention as she pours the liquid into the tank. She’s just glad when she turns the key, the car is no longer on dead E. Is Janet going to make it to work on time.
Let’s suppose for a moment that you come downstairs and see a bottle on the table with skulls and crossbones on it. Poison is written all over the bottle. Do you call 911 to report the bottle on the table? Of course not. But what if you saw the bottle spilled open on the counter and a member of your family lying on the floor not moving. Would you be searching for a phone?
In each of these illustrations, we find that what we think, determines how we act. Do you think Bob would have tried that cocaine if he knew there was going to be a drug test as part of the interview? Did Janet’s belief that she was doing the right thing make her car work? Did you panic at the sight of the poison? No, you think as long as the stuff is on the outside of you, it will not affect you. Would you have called 911 if your thought your family member was playing a joke on you. What we think determines our ultimate actions.
The key to changing a behavior is to change the way you think. As adults our government set us up for the War in Iraq, by changing the way we think. They showed us pictures of things that we were told were weapons of Sadaam Hussain, ready to be launched at us and our allies. Now we know they were simply trucks. They told us they had undeniable proof that weapons of mass destruction were being produced. Now we know they never existed. They made us believe that future terrorist attacks were imminent if we did not invade Iraq. They had us believing that the Iraqi people could not wait for us to liberate them, and that there would be dancing and singing in the streets at the sight of American soldiers.
Little by little we swallowed these lies and they began to become a part of the way we thought. We became warmongers and allowed our government to attack and destroy a nation simply because we had the power to do so. Now as a result, everyday American soldiers and Iraqi people die, because someone changed the way we think It’s not longer full page news and politicians showing up when our soliders die in battle. Why were we manipulated and for whose benefit.
Not too long ago I saw a special on the music industry. They showed how recording companies pay bribes to radio stations to play their songs more often than their competitor’s. The more air time a song gets, the more cd’s they sell. So when songs make the top 10, they are not necessarily the best songs or the best artists. They may be nothing more than the songs, companies bribed stations to play the most often. You can be the greatest artist and never crack a chart or even be heard. If you don’t have payoff money.
Now music is one of the things that is used to change the way we think. Where is it that our youth get their messages from about life, about sex, and about success? They get about 10 Minutes a week from a pastor if they attend church. They get hours and hours from the music industry. We have put the wrong people in charge of educating our youth, and are paying them a hefty sum of money to do it.
We buy our kids cd’s and mp3 players and they have their ears plucked with an ear plug listening to who knows what. Now I have watched some of our youth, who will not sing at all during praise and worship, but I’ve heard them singing “I’m in love with a Stripper.” It’s one of the top 10 songs right now and I guarantee you most of our children have either heard it, sung it, seen the video or have it in their music collection. It’s a story about a guy who is in love with a young woman who is stripper in a bar. Listen to the words of what our youth are spending their money on and your money on.
Who is trying to shape their way of thinking. Why is somebody paying money to make sure our young black women, think it’s fine to dance almost naked up and down a pole with men and women cheering them on. 50 Cents sounds like such a harmless name. He’s in the top 10 with his Song PIMP. Listen to it’s words that our kids are listening to day after day.
Whose paying money to train our guys to think that PIMPing is the way to go to life and you can use women as your play toys.
I saw the making of one of the popular music videos. The young women who were in it half naked, with all the grinding moves and gyrating that you could imagine were so happy to be in it that they did their dancing for free. The producer was telling them, even though they were not getting, they would be getting exposure. One young lady explained, their presence in the video could launch them into a career, because you never know who might see their skills. What skills. Somebody had really messed up their way of thinking. Without them in the video, the sales would be flat, and yet they were the ones not being paid.
Words are powerful. The Bible teaches, as a person thinks in his heart that is what he becomes. The Bible also tells us to guard our hearts or our minds because it is the wellspring of life. You can’t truly change your behavior until you change your way of thinking. You continue to rely on alcohol or drugs because you believe in your heart you are entitled to it and that it will give you a sense of relief and happiness that not using it wouldn’t.
You continue to act the fool in class, and talk back to the teacher, because you believe you have the right to be the center of attention and to disrupt everybody else. Your thinking does not allow you to see how rude, selfishn and self centered you are being every time you do it. Behind every destructive behavior in our life, there is a false belief that we are holding on to.
That is why the word of God says, “be not wise in your own eyes.” In other words, quit thinking that you know everything. How many of us here today, if we had known back then, some of the things we know now, we would not have made some of the choices that we made in the past? God is giving us a chance to change our lives, by changing the way we think.
The first thing you need to change is your thinking about God. It you do not believe that God loves you, you are not going to do what God’s word tells you to do, I don’t care how much bible you learn, how many classes you come to, or how often you attend church. If you don’t believe God loves you, you are not going to change. Many of you have been trained to think, that nobody is looking out for you and you had better think about taking care of yourself first. Everybody has an angle to try to rip you off. My friends that is a lie.
God cares very much about you, and God intends the best for your life. People in the church care about you if you’d make yourself available to be loved. You are not going to have a better life by pushing God to the side. You may live a very long life. But the reality is you are going to die. When you die, you will see how important God’s love for you really was, but then it’s going to be too late.
Everyone of us here knows that we have done wrong. We all know that we are guilty of breaking God’s commandments. The penalty for sin is death both physical and spiritual. God has told us plainly in the bible what we can expect in life and in death. There is nothing worse than dying without Jesus Christ having been Lord of your life.
The reality is, you don’t even know how much longer you have to live. God is not obligated to give us our next breath. You didn’t make yourself start breathing, God did it in the way He created you. God is all powerful. When He commands your lungs to cease breathing, all the science and medical technology in the world can give you back the same quality of life that God put inside you.
If you’re going to try stepping up, it’s got to start with stepping to a new way of thinking, because your thinking is going to determine your actions. Your thinking is influenced by what goes inside of your mind. Has any of you ever used profanity in Chinese. No why not. It has never gone inside of you, so there’s no way it can come out. But I guarantee you, if you spent a lot of time with guys who did use it, it would begin as a thought in your mind. Once in your mind, that thing begins to germinate. Before you know it, you’ll be able to curse out people without them even knowing it, because you’ll be doing it in Chinese.
To grow as a Christian is a choice. But you need to be honest with yourself and quit trying to blend in with the world around you. You can’t be one of the crowd like everybody else and think you are serving Jesus Christ. The benediction I use almost every week says and be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
Your mind has to be transformed weekly, because there is so much that comes at you that is contrary to the word of God and what God would have you thinking about. We need to stop this nonsense of claiming, what I see and what I hear does not affect me.. The psalmist prayed in Psalm 119:37, turn my eyes away from worthless things, preserve my life according to your word. Our eyes cause us to sin because they are the gateway to our souls and our way of thinking.
Do you think it was mere coincidence that one of the most powerful movies that was seen around the globe by who knows how many people called the Passion of the Christ received no Oscars, but a movie featuring two homosexual cowboys did receive an Oscar. Is is possible somebody wanted one message to enter into our souls but another message was to be kept out. Jesus went so far as to say, if your eye causes you to sin, it is better to pluck it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell. Jesus gives much more thought and attention to what we allow to enter our souls than we do.
Suppose you came to my house and I asked if you would like a drink. Now suppose you saw me pour something out of glass and rinse the glass out. If I said to you, I meant to pour that rat poison out yesterday from this glass. I’m glad I rinsed it out good before putting in your diet coke. Now how many of you are going to pass on my offer to give you a drink. We will do all that we can to protect our physical bodies, and yet we open up ourselves to all kinds of things which contaminate our spirits and our souls.
The way we think, can defile our bodies. There were a group in Jesus’s day that were so concerned with eating the right foods in order to make sure their bodies were clean. Jesus told them they were missing the boat. It’s what comes back out of our hearts that defile us. Nothing can come out, except what was put in there in the first place.
As believers, we are to be wise to the things that Satan uses to destroy us. You can get people to swallow poison if you put it in the right setting and pass it off as something else. It happens all the time. We spot it so easily in the physical realm but it slips past us in the spiritual realm. There are some things we do unknowingly that we would never do, if we truly knew what we were doing.
We often pray for the Spirit’s guidance in our lives when making decisions, but we need to stop praying and start applying the tests that are found in the word of God. The real issue for us wanting to grow in Christ is what is the message we are putting in our hearts. God does not care what kind of music you listen to. It could be rock, rap, rhythm and blues, gospel or punk rock. God does not have a preference.
God does not care what kind of movies you like be it science fiction, drama, love stories, documentaries or whatever. God does care about the message you receive. What is somebody spending millions of dollars on trying to get you to do?
What’s the music test. What’s the tv program test. What’s the movie test. What’s the activity test? What’s the group test that you want to be a part of. What’s the relationship test? They are all the same.You go through Philippians 4:8 which says. Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things. If what you’re putting in your spirit is contrary to these things, then know it’s just like swallowing a little poison at a time. You probably won’t die from it today, but eventually it will kill you.
Our spirits can only take so much. We are either going to be filled with the Holy Spirit or we will be filled with the Spirit of the world or there is going to be a combination of the two. When one level goes up, the other level goes down. How much of the Holy Spirit do you really want in your life? How much of a price are you willing to pay to have it. If you think the presence of the Holy Spirit isn’t worth much, you will put a very low price on His role in your life and you will keep drinking in whatever the world sends your way.
You won’t grow much spiritually, and God is not going to be able to do in your life what He desires to do. You will trust in your own intelligence and consider yourself pretty wise. Remember that some of the smartest people in the world are locked up in prison today.
If you think the Holy Spirit’s presence in your life can make your life far better and more rewarding, then you begin to apply this simple test of Philippians 4:8 to determine, what you will allow to enter your spirit through your eyes and through your ears. You will take seriously God’s warning against being smart in your own eyes. Instead you will choose to put your trust and your confidence in God. You’re stepping up to a New Level Of Thinking by choosing to think upon the way God has called you to live.
