You will keep him
in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on You, because he trusts in You.
About ten years ago I was surprised to
learn that the word mind in Isaiah 26 could easily have been translated as imagination. (1)
Romans
6:13 in the Philips New Testament (2) says:
And
no longer lend your faculties as unrighteous weapons for Sin to use. On the
contrary surrender your very selves to God as living men who have risen from
the dead, and surrender your several faculties to God, to be used as weapons to
maintain the right.
God
has gifted each of us with a human body that is fully equipped with a long list
of faculties. One of those faculties is the mind or imagination.
Each of us possesses the ability to yield these faculties to one of two
diametrically opposing entities: the flesh or the Spirit.
When
the faculty of the imagination is yielded to fleshly activities such as sexual
immorality, impurity, sensuality, the worship of false gods, witchcraft,
hatred, jealousy, anger, rivalry, envy, drunkenness, and things like this it
gives birth to carnality and alienation from God and His character.
Interestingly,
in preparing for a time of listening to God, as a person prays through the Listening Prayer Guidelines, he or she is actually engaging in a
process of systematically yielding their members and faculties to God the
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
1. Come fully
present before God
Fix your
attention fully on Jesus and away from distractions. Heb 12:2
2. Exercise
Christ’s authority over all other voices
Pray
similar to, “In the name of Jesus Christ, I command all other voices to be
silent.” Jas 4:7 & Acts 16:18
3. Ask the
Three-in-One to reveal Himself in a special way
“Come
quickly to rescue and help me, O Lord.” Psa 70:1
4. Ask God to
search your heart
Talk to Him
about what He reveals, confess any known sin. Psa 139:23-24
5. Ask Jesus to
communicate with you
“Speak,
Lord, for I am listening.” 1 Sam 3:10, John 16:12-14
6. Wait in
silence
“My soul
waits in silence for God only.” Psa 62:1
Oftentimes,
like the Prophet Habakkuk (3) , people who deliberately listen to
God are often asking God a question. It can be as simple as Jesus, what is
Your word for me today? – or, it can be more like a complaint, God, why
did I get so angry during my conversation with my wife? Or, what are you
trying to teach me in this situation?
What
if the God who has chosen to reveal Himself to us is not only willing, but
eager to communicate with needy, hurting, and desperate everyday people like
you and me? What if listening to Him is really as simple as yielding our
capacities to the Holy Spirit, asking Him a question, and since His Spirit
resides in our innermost being, (4)
allowing Him to communicate with us by
the thoughts He projects across the screen of our mind? What if our western
intellectual, scientific, skeptical, conservative evangelical, rational
worldview has made spiritual life much more complicated for us than it was to
the spiritual worldview people of Jesus’ day. Many non-western cultures
are much more comfortable with the supernatural than the average western
conservative evangelical. The people of Jesus’ day asked who sinned that a man
was born blind (John 9)? We would have never asked a question like that. We’d
have looked for a scientific, medical explanation to his malady.
Walking in the Spirit is meant to be a
supernatural experience where we place our trust in the Holy Spirit rather than
in ourselves. It is the key to moving away from carnality and being more and
more characterized by the fruit of the Spirit (love, joy, peace,
long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance).
Being led by the Spirit is a
combination of surrender and sensitivity to His presence, gentle urgings, and
still, small voice. John 16:12-15 NASB is one of the best passages on what
Jesus has in mind for us as we walk in deep intimacy with Him:
“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear
them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth,
for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak,
and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for
he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is
mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you”
"God is more eager to speak to us,
than we are to listen." (5)
1)
Mind
is Strong’s Concordance # 03336 = Hebrew = yetser. Used 9 times in the O.T. and
translated in the KJV version as follows: imagination 5 times, frame 1 time,
mind 1 time, thing framed 1 time, work 1 time. (Source: Brown Driver Briggs
Gesenius Hebrew Aramaic English Lexicon.)
3)
“I will stand at my watch and
station myself on the ramparts; I will look to see what he will say to me, and
what answer I am to give to this complaint.” Habakkuk 2:1 NIV
4)
"If anyone is thirsty, let
him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, ‘From
his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.’ But this He spoke of the
Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive.” John 7:37b-39a NASB.
5) Unknown
source.
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