Eight Keys To Protect The Mind (Part 1)
All believers have problems with their mind sometimes, some a lot of the time! Perhaps it was a habit that developed before they came to know the Lord; some people seem to be worriers; others have struggles with fantasising about past hurts, rejections, broken dreams. Many males begin to fantasise about sexual things when they come into puberty. The experts say men have at least 6 sexual thoughts every hour, I trust that for Christian men it is a lot less than that. It is not a sin to have a sexual thought or any other sinful thought (we will have them until the day we die, because of our sinful nature). WHAT WE DO WITH THAT THOUGHT IS THE ISSUE !!!!!
Turn with me to 2 Cor. 10:4-5. Paul says here that we have a set of weapons (we mentioned them in the last blog relative to the Christian’s Armour). Paul suggests that natural methods won’t work, but these spiritual weapons will. He says in verse 5 that we must CAST DOWN those sinful thoughts. Other translations say demolish, destroy these thoughts. How do we do it? What are the keys to cast down these thoughts? If we don’t know what they are, or don’t know how to use them, we will never be victorious over our thought life.
KEY #1 1 John 1:7
We know this verse very well, there is so much truth here, let us dissect it up:
We must walk in the Light – in the Light of what?
(a) The Light of the Word of God, we must read, study, meditate on the Word, and hide it in our hearts. The psalmist says that if we do, we will not sin against the Lord – Ps. 119:11.
(b) The Light of our conscience. How many sermons have you ever heard on the conscience? The word is used over 30 times in the New Testament. It is something God puts into every human being, an awareness to be able to distinguish between right and wrong. It has been described as a “red flashing light” that should operate when we come anywhere near to sin. My friends in Indonesia say that “red is just a different shade of green” as millions of drivers every day go through the red light !!!! By the time we come into our teens we often disregard the red flashing light so often that our conscience doesn’t work very well. Paul says in 1 Tim 4:2 that our conscience can be seared with a hot iron. If I put a hot iron on your arm, you would scream with pain, but when it healed, I could take a pin and prick the area, and you would feel nothing – the nerves have been killed by the hot iron. The good news is – remember my favourite verse – James 4:2 “We have not because we ask not”. Let us ask the Lord to renew our conscience so that it again becomes sensitive when we come anywhere near sin.
(c) We must maintain right relationships with our brothers and sisters in Christ. If we have something against a person, or we know they have something against us, we must initiate communication and seek reconciliation. The person may not want to be reconciled, but we must make the first move. If we don’t, we are unprotected and a target for the enemy to attack our minds.
If we do these things, John says automatically the Blood of Christ is on our life.
I want to remind you that the Blood of Christ is to PROTECT AS WELL AS CLEANSE. Remember the Children of Israel in Egypt? God told Moses to kill a lamb and sprinkle the blood on the doorposts & lintels of every house, so that when the Angel of Death came across the land, he saw the blood and passed over that house. Christ the Lamb was slain before the foundation of the world (Rev.13:8)!
I have had the privilege of mentoring hundreds of young men over the years, and most of them had problems with their mind including sexual and weird dreams. I recommended that every night as they prepared to sleep they claim the Blood of Christ over their mind while they slept. The sinful dreams stopped INSTANTLY! You know our mind consists of the conscious and subconscious. Everything we have ever thought about, or looked at, is still in the hard drive (subconscious) and the enemy wants to stimulate those areas whilst we sleep. BUT he CANNOT CROSS THE BLOOD LINE – Praise God! We also need to take Paul’s admonition to our hearts in Rom 12:2 and see that our minds are renewed by the Word of God. Let us fill our minds with God’s Word.
There has been much extreme teaching in the past in different church circles about “pleading the blood” and so the response is always to throw the truth out completely, I believe the above is balanced and IT WORKS. Why don’t you try it for yourself? From personal experience I know the power of the Blood of Christ to protect my mind.
