But whether you realize this or not
You are in a war and this war has an enemy and he is after your mind every day
So Satan works, he doesn't work on your toe your leg or somewhere else. He works in your mind
It's the battlefield in every person's life
Whatever goes on right here is going to affect every single aspect of your life
Satan wants to control your mind
The world wants to control your mind
And there's a battle for the way you think
Why because whatever gets your attention gets you
The mind is the battleground where satan tries his level best to take
control of our lives
The devil's out to destroy your future
He's trying to ruin you
He's trying to he is trying to render your life so ineffective and so ugly that you will never win anybody to Christ
That's his job. That's what he does
Satan's wants to pull you one way God the other
Satan has never done you any good
He's lied to you deceived you and made you promises not a single one of them has ever come true
The devil is a liar
The father of lies
How quickly do we recognize an enemy attack
How long do we put up
With the devil's nonsense before we even bother to say
I know what you're trying to do and you're not going to do it
No matter what lie you tell me this is what God's Word says and that is what I believe
Satan comes to kill steal and destroy
But Jesus said I came and I'm so glad he did
I came that you might have and enjoy your life and have it in abundance to the full until it overflows
Let's learn how to do what the Bible says in 1st Peter 5 resists the devil at his on set
The best time to win the battle
is before it begins
Psalm 119:112 I have made up my mind
to obey your laws forever
No matter what
Until you come to that point you're just gonna keep stumbling and stumbling and stumbling and stumbling I have made up my mind
That's a choice
I have made up my mind to obey your laws forever. No matter what
Now let me be real clear satan cannot force you to do anything
If you're a Christian you have the Holy Spirit in you satan cannot force you to do anything
Because greater is he that is in me than he that is in the world
but he can make suggestions and those suggestions are very very powerful
And he is constantly
Continually planting negative thoughts in your mind
The moment you wake up he starts dropping little seeds
You're not gonna have a good day today
Life is gonna really be bad
Nobody's gonna like you and and you got to start getting all of this talk going on in your brain
and he starts giving you all these reasons to give up and you haven't started the day yet and he's just
constantly dropping thoughts when the devil gives a thought we call it temptation when God gives a thought we call it inspiration
And not just there's external war for your mind
But there's actually an internal war in your mind
We know what to do. We know what to do right but for whatever reason we still have this urge to do
what is wrong
Here's the good news
God has given you everything you need to win this war to win the battle in and for my mind I must have God's
Spirit and God's Word inside me
If I depend on my own
personal
power and energy to handle this
I'm gonna lose because I don't I'm never gonna win this war on my own strength
You need two key weapons to win the battle in my mind
and for my mind
I must have two things God's Spirit in me and I must have God's Word in me
Because without the Holy Spirit inside you without God's Spirit of love inside you you're powerless
There's no way you can control the rogue mind that you have your sinful nature controls your mind
It's going to lead to all the wrong places
So I need God's Spirit in me the second thing I need is the Word of God
The Bible says in John 8 verse 31 to 32. Jesus says this
If you learn and obey my word
You will be
my disciple
Then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free, isn't it
interesting how the world loves that second part, but doesn't like the first
What they don't put is the verse before where Jesus says it's my word
If you continue in my word you you listen to you live in you do you practice my word then your my disciples
And then you know the truth and the truth will set free. We want the truth without God's truth
God is the source of all truth
And so you can't separate verse 31 and verse 32, there is no freedom without truth
But there is no truth without God's word. The truth is right here in this book
God's given it to us
And so the mind is very important and can be easily deceived by the devil
Unless you fill it with the truth of the word of God
Surely we can learn
to compare our thoughts
to the Word of God and if what we think does not line up with what God said we can say
I refuse to think that that is not my thought and I am not going to take ownership of it
The more you think about something the more it becomes a part of you and you're gonna think about something anyway
So you might as well think about something that's gonna do you some good and produce some good fruit in your life
What is it that determines what I think
Is it the Word of God or is it something else
I read something else that I watch and I think about how many people sit down and open their mind
To a television program. Watching the news or whatever it might be
Not realizing they are sitting there being programmed in their mind to think a certain way
And I want you to listen carefully
Because I want you to be programmed to think the way God thinks
Programmed to understand the Word of God
Programmed in such a way that you will live in a fashion that's pleasing and honorable to God
How we think what we choose to think about is one of the most
Important things in our life and I've determined that I want to have a beautiful mind
I want to have a mind that glorifies God and I want to think beautiful thoughts
I want to think good thoughts about people we don't need to think judgment and criticism
And all kinds of junk about people think about all of our problems all the time of what we don't have
Change your thought life and you change your world. So the question is, what are you putting into your mind?
Pick up the good news feed your mind on the peace of God
If I want to think right if I want to think Godly if I want to think holy if I want to think righteously
Right here's where it starts
And many people lose it right here. They don't think right
They don't think Godly they don't think like they're worth anything and they say well, you know
I just never had the
opportunity or I just never will be that or I'm just this and I'm not that
Don't think less of yourself than God thinks and he died for you. No matter what somebody else says about you
You are a child of God
Once you've trusted Christ as your Savior
So we're the ones who determine what we're going to be and so forth
Because it's the way we think and this is why people can come from nowhere the worst kind of situation circumstances
You'd think they never amount to anything in their life and they excel excel
excel beyond even their
imagination what they started thinking rightly about themselves and about the Lord and about his place in position in their life
God is far more interested in changing your mind than in changing your circumstances
We want God to change our circumstances
We want him to take away all the problems all the pain all the sorrow all the suffering all the sickness all the sadness
And God says yeah yeah. I know that's important but really more important than that is what's happening in you
And I'm far more interested in changing your mind before we change your circumstance
Because nothing happens in your life until you get the renewing of your mind
No transformation takes place no change takes place in your mind
or in your life
until your thoughts begin to change
And we can't control everybody else in control of all of our circumstances
but we are going to respond to circumstances in one way or the other and so when I think about
How this affects us, I think about the fact that many people are where they are
Because of wrong thinking and so they don't like where they are other folks are where they are because of right thinking
Any change that I want to make
For good or bad it all starts in your mind change starts in your brain
Not in your behavior change starts in your cerebellum not in your circumstances
Change starts inside you not
outside you
You don't start by changing your behavior
You start by changing the way you think about whatever you want to change it all
starts in your mind. Our mind is the control tower of our life
Whatever happens in our life starts right here. All of our decisions are there and the truth is whatever we are
today is the result of what we've been thinking about all those years
The Bible says as a man thinketh in his heart. So is he
So if you don't like what's going on around you, maybe you should ask yourself the question. What am I thinking about?
What do I think about myself and what do I think about other people?
Because what we think about is really what controls us for example our relationship to God
Our relationship to each other
Our sense of direction in life, whatever we accomplish our failures in life. All of that is a result of the way we think
If you rehearse all your problems and make a mental list of them and think about what you don't have you're gonna sink
You can think your way
right out of bondage
we have the mind of Christ 1st Corinthians chapter 2 says we have been given the mind of Christ that means
that we can learn to think
like Jesus
thinks
When you trusted Jesus as your personal Savior he gave us
the power
to think the way he thinks
That doesn't mean we'll be as wise as he is our that we'll have all the knowledge that he has
But he gives us the right and the power to think Godly as his creations. So we have the power to think right
We have the gift of Almighty God and someone to protect us in the process
We should be thinking God's thoughts. What does he think? How does he want us to think? How does he want us to live?
And in the process of doing so remember this when you're thinking his thoughts you're thinking the most powerful thoughts
there are when you're thinking his thoughts your thinking
and beginning to see what he's thinking about you
And when you focus on what God thinks about you that he loves you that he's forgiven you that he cares for you that he wants
the best for you things begin to happen in your life
Set your mind
on the things above not on the things that are on earth, which is an awesome statement set your mind
You're gonna set it on something set it on things above things that are holy and righteous and good and Godly and helpful
Whatever we put our mind on. That's what we're gonna go after so we have to learn how to
think things on purpose
That are gonna benefit us
Think about Jesus
Think about Jesus you've heard that old cliche you become whatever you think about most
Well, you think about Jesus guess what you're gonna become like like Jesus
Think about eternity that there's more to life than just here and now
The problem that we do today is we have short-term thinking we only think about what's happening right now
Colossians 3:2 let heaven fill your thoughts
Do not think only about things down here on earth
King James Version says set your minds on things above not upon things on the earth let heaven fill your thoughts
First Corinthians 2:9. No eye has seen no ear has heard and no mind has imagined what God has prepared
For those who love him
Think about that
When you start thinking about that all of the problems little nitpicky problems in your life are going to seem so
inferior
compared to the glory the joy the pleasure the enjoyment
The things we have to look forward to in eternity
Remember this
You decide who you want to be
You decide what you want to accomplish
You decide how you want to live all right here you decide whether you want to be accepted or rejected
You make a lot of decisions in your life all right here and I remember right here is the battlefield in your life
You have to decide right there
What kind of life you're gonna live
What kind of future you're gonna have and he says if you're wise
You'll make right decisions, it's my prayer you make the right decision wise decision
And you'll be glad