Mind Games - Week 1: “The War in Your Mind” - Full Service

Your spiritual enemy cannot read your thoughts. That's comforting. But he can seed your thoughts. That's not comforting at all. And we're gonna talk about that. He can't read your mind, but he can seed your mind. How does he do that? I don't know. Social media, TV, it's everywhere. Here's the good news. In Genesis three, right in the middle of the chaos, right in the middle of all of the problems erupting everywhere, right in the middle, God promises a remedy. God promises a remedy to the mind game. What's the remedy? In a word, Jesus. [01:02:03] (40 seconds)  #SeededThoughts

Friends, God's remedy for the mind games is Jesus. He came to crush the chatter that accuses, confuses, and abuses you. And the moment you turn, repentance, from your way to his way, from you as the center to Jesus as the center, the chatter begins to die down and peace of mind begins to rise. [01:09:31] (26 seconds)  #RepentanceBringsPeace

In other words, friends, your mind is not neutral. Your mind is like a garden. Something's growing there. And guess who the gardener is? It's you. You're the one who should care for your mind, the way you think. So let me ask, when's the last time you thought about the way you thought? Do you mind your mind? Have you been thinking about your thinking? Because we don't. And we have an enemy who does. [00:33:32] (28 seconds)  #MindYourMind

First thing is he's distorting God's word. He makes it sound like God said, don't eat from any tree. That's how it sounds. Did God say in Genesis two, don't eat from any tree? No, he didn't. He said eat from every tree. Oh, by the way, this one here is poison. It will kill you. Don't eat from that one. But it's this is being distorted now. Just sound like, don't eat from any tree. It's like, she's getting confused here. He's spinning her around. [00:44:28] (26 seconds)  #TwistingGodsWord

Lie number two basically says that it's not only okay, but necessary to take matters into your own hands to secure your own idea of happiness. So problems, one, is your own idea of happiness, and the second one is taking matters into your own hands to get there like it's necessary because God's not gonna do it. I just wanna say this to you all my friends. Anytime you take matters into your own hands, whose hands are you taking them out of? Do you want what God wants or do you want what you want? [00:47:24] (38 seconds)  #StopPlayingGod

Take a moment and think of the person in your life that you talk to the most. Think about who's that like, you do you have a picture of their face? Like, this is the person I I think I probably talk to the most. Who's that person? Now, reality is if you take your phone out, you won't be able to tell on your phone. You go intimate, but I call or text and like, I would be able to no, you won't know. Here's why. Because the person you talk to the most is yourself. You talk to you more than anybody talks to you. [01:01:10] (30 seconds)  #InnerDialogueMatters

That's the whole appeal to eat from the tree that she was told, do not eat from this tree. Adam and Eve were told, this tree kills. And the subtle trick of the enemy is God's holding out on you. He knows. The day you eat of it, you're gonna get some good thing that he's withholding out. That's lie number one. The core deception of your evil one is to get you to doubt the goodness of God. To get you to take matters into your own hands to meet your own need. [00:46:48] (28 seconds)  #StopTheWithholdingLie

We see God's reigning and ruling over his people. Human beings live under the rulership of God, experiencing the immediate presence of God and then channeling the blessing that out into the world. There's one word you can use to describe the world at the end of Genesis two and that's the word paradise. But Genesis chapter three, it all goes wrong. What happened? What happened was an evil being got into the heads of our primary parents and he deceived them into, guess this, he deceived them into playing God with their own lives. [00:38:22] (39 seconds)  #DeceivedIntoPlayingGod

The reality is friends, you were created to live under some rule, some leader. Wasn't meant to be some lying politician. It wasn't meant to be some phony celebrity either. But God himself is the leader that you've been longing for. But we've all gone our own way. We've done our own thing. We've been playing God. And so Jesus comes along, he announces good news. The time has come. The kingdom of God, the the the loving, wise, liberating rule of God can be restored in people's lives in him, one heart at a time, beginning now. [01:06:54] (35 seconds)  #KingdomRestoredInJesus

In other words, God wants to rule you with a loving, wise, liberating rule that makes you into the person you were meant to be. And the moment you give yourself to Christ, he gives his spirit to you. And then the process of finding peace of mind begins. Right then and there, the chatter begins to die and the peace of mind begins to rise. [01:08:33] (26 seconds)  #SpiritBringsPeace

So here's the tragedy. To buy the lie about playing God and then taking matters into your own hands, dismissing God's warning in some area of your life, and then experiencing painful consequences of your own choosing, and then to turn right around and cop the victim mindset, that is a mind game. And we live in a culture of victims now. And it's a shame because real victims are getting washed into a victim mindset culture, where no one owns anything. Everything is someone else's fault. [00:58:52] (32 seconds)  #RejectVictimMindset

We have a spiritual enemy who's angling to divert you from God's best, and he is working in the midst of your everyday environment. In a situation or a thing that doesn't look like a threat to you right now, oh, but it is. And for some of you, the overture of your spiritual enemy might be coming to you in the form of a computer or a phone. It's part of your everyday world, but somehow what's going on here is diverting you from what God would have you do. [00:43:06] (29 seconds)  #DigitalTemptations

You would never do that. Of course, you would never just put what you know to be garbage right in your mouth. Here's a question. So why would you put garbage in your mind? You are what you eat. I am what I eat. If I put garbage in my mind The reality is we have an enemy, and his strategy is to try to convince you to feed on a steady diet of garbage. [00:51:02] (28 seconds)  #MindFoodMatters

And his first mind game is his best mind game. So we're gonna trace the mind game that played out then because it's playing out right now in the lives of ordinary human beings. And that's what we're gonna look at today is this mind game and how he's waging this war today. So if you're a note taker, I want you to write this down. The first thing that we're gonna see is that the mind game begins with a disguised strategy. It all begins with a strategy that you can't really recognize. [00:39:01] (30 seconds)  #DisguisedMindGames

Here's what we learned my friends, and put up on the screen. If you're a notetaker, can write this down. A lie, if believed as truth, will affect your life as if it were true. It doesn't have to be true to affect you. A lie can deep you can be moving, acting, doing stuff based on a lie. So friends, here's the here's the reality. We have to be very careful. What we give ourselves permission to believe. [00:29:42] (30 seconds)  #LiesShapeLives

If you wanna get clean, you have to shower you. No one else can eat a nutritious meal for you. You have to eat nutritious meals to have nutrition. No one else can work out physically for your benefit. Oh, by the way, here's a little news flash. No one else can choose your thoughts for you. There's some things that no one else can do for you, and one of them is choosing your thoughts. [00:32:40] (28 seconds)  #YouChooseYourThoughts

And the reality is whatever rules your thoughts, my friends, rules your life. And the mind game begins with a disguised strategy that you don't always see. The second thing I wanna show you is that the mind game produces a repeated tragedy. In fact, I would even say a recycled tragedy. It's the same tragedy just replayed over and over and over, passed down through generations. It's a repeated recycled tragedy. [00:49:47] (25 seconds)  #ThoughtsRuleYourLife

The quality of your food that you consume determines the quality of your health. The quality of the thoughts that you allow into your head shapes the kind of person that you become the most. So by show of hands, how many of you would knowingly, let's just say you're in your kitchen, how many of you would knowingly go over to the garbage can, take the lid off, rummage around in the garbage can, get some garbage, and put it in your mouth. Anybody? Go ahead and raise your hand. Anyone? [00:50:32] (30 seconds)  #GuardYourMentalDiet

That he does defeat sin and evil and death, and that he does grant his own forgiveness and his own holy spirit to come and live inside all who call upon him to save them. So the good news is that Jesus came to crush the chatter that accuses you and confuses you and abuses you. The question is if Jesus is the remedy, how do we access that remedy? Well, the day Jesus launched his public ministry, on that first day, his first words tell us. [01:05:21] (36 seconds)  #JesusIsTheRemedy

That's to to divert you from God's best, to distract you from God's best. And as I said, he is so smart, he can cleverly convince you to wreck yourself and blame God for it. He's so clever. There's some of you even right now, you're looking yourself in the mirror in the morning and you're saying, you know what? I'm gonna go ahead and do that thing. I'm not sure. I don't think I should really do, but I'm gonna do it anyway without even realizing the pain that that's gonna bring into your life and the lives of your loved ones, but you're gonna do it anyway. [00:40:28] (39 seconds)  #DontBlameGod