Welcome to the Prospering Soul Podcast. This limited series is all about how to take care of your soul and how to make sure you understand the ways to be healthy and balanced in life. In this series, John Meadert, lead pastor of Cross City Church, sits down to explain one of the most important secrets of his own spiritual growth and a detailed explanation of how people change. Welcome back to the Prospering Soul. This is John Meadert, pastor at Cross City Church.
We are focusing on how to have a prospering soul. This is the ninth episode of Prospering Soul, which means that we have laid down a foundation for what it means to have a soul that is your mind, will, and emotions that resides inside of your body, that's influenced by your spirit, the Holy Spirit living inside of you if you're a believer. Your soul has an entrance way, it's called the mind.
When thoughts begin to take place, then it begins to affect your will and your emotions, the mind, will, and emotions is really the essence of what the soul is all about. It's how you operate from day to day. Today I want to talk to you about what I call my favorite weapon when it comes to dealing with this battle of the soul.
It's also a favorite weapon when it comes to knowing who to open the door to in my thought life because the thought life influences so much of what we feel and what we do that you really have to be a guard over the gate. I remember teaching this subject some time ago and referring back to John Bunyan's book called The War of Man Soul. He combines the word man and the word soul into one and he uses an allegorical approach to tell the story of the castle of Manso.
When the enemies come against the castle of Manso, they come against the eye gate, the ear gate, the mouth gate, the nose gate, and the mind gate. In other words, all of our senses beginning with the mind is how the enemy gains interest into the castle of Manso.
I've always remembered that and I believe it's true today and that's why we want to focus on my favorite weapon that you happen to find in the Bible for knowing how to keep that front door of your mind closed to lies and to statements and speculations and strongholds that would keep you in bondage to responding in a poor way emotionally. It would keep you in a poor mental health state if you don't guard your door. So we're going to talk about this favorite weapon of mine.
I'll remind you that we have a couple of diagrams that we posted in the previous episode and those diagrams are very, very helpful. You see them visually when you look at our podcast but also I verbalized those in our last episode.
One of them has to do with a pendulum, that there is an acceptable range of movement with any pendulum but if it's not grounded in the gravitational truth that God gives us, the absolute truth that's non-negotiable, then whenever things affect us to the positive or the negative emotionally, we can become out of balance and more extreme.
At the very extreme end of this is bipolar kind of responses where people are either angry, hopeless, depressed, feeling worthless, terrified, suicidal, so forth or on the more energetic side where they are reckless and fanatical and obsessive and abusing chemicals, thrill-seeking, etc. outside the range of acceptable behavior. The reason that happens to them is because they're not any longer gravitationally pulled to the truth.
If the truth is the gravitational force that holds us in balance, then the lies are what push us outward to more extreme behavior and at the end of that, it's a very complicated, unhealthy way to live, it complicates relationships and it's pretty much the norm for today. I really hate to say that but our world has moved from balanced to unbalanced. Behavior in relationships have moved from balanced to unbalanced and marriages from balanced to unbalanced.
It's no longer unusual for people to have psychotic behavior sometimes and it's kind of a normal course of culture. And obviously, look at your world that you live in, there are all kinds of ways of thinking about gender or sexuality or political movements, whatever they may be, race, you just go on and on and on that are clearly not in balance. And without specifying all those things, let me just stay focused on balanced living and the pendulum effect.
So my favorite weapon is a passage of scripture in 2 Corinthians and it's chapter 10 verses 3, 4 and 5 and I'm just going to read this passage but really the essence of what I'm going to say to you today comes out of that passage of scripture. And if you're looking at the diagram that I talked to you about, then the lies that I refer to that get us out of balance are four phrases that this verse mentions.
It's no surprise to me that God wrote his scripture at least 2000 years ago and addresses current day problems. If God is God, if he is the ground of all truth, if he's a loving God, then he has provided answers for us if we would just look and I find the answers to my balance or lack of balance in the scriptures. So here's what the Apostle Paul says about this kind of a mind gate that I've shared with you in the battle of the mind. I'm going to read the passage to you.
It says, for though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh. So you know it's about a battle and basically Paul starts by saying, even though we're here in our fleshly bodies, it's really not a hand to hand combat that we are dealing with here. It's really not physical but spiritual and he goes on and says, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. So right away, Paul says you're in a battle.
It's not merely a battle of flesh and blood. It's also a battle that has to do with ideas and thoughts and in the spiritual realm, those things take place and we've been given weapons by which we can fight this battle, this war and win. Aren't you glad God gives us the battlefield implements we need to win the game? He gives us the armor of God but he also gives us the offensive weapons to repel ideas and thoughts that keep us in imbalance. I said we're going to name those in this verse.
There are four of them. It says, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, and count with me here, but divinely powerful for the destruction of number one, fortresses. Number two, we are destroying speculations. That's the second one. And the third one, and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God. That's number three. And then the last one is, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.
So I know it's hard for you to remember all those things when you're listening to a podcast but I'm going to boil them down into four very, very simple terms and those terms are on our diagram that I referred to that we dropped in the eighth episode. And I simply call these lies that damage us. If truth grounds us, lies damage us. And these four items are my wording of the four elements that are in that verse I just read.
And the first one is strongholds and the second one is speculations and the third one is wrong views of God. And the fourth one is uncaptivated thoughts. So we're going to talk through those here over these next few moments. As we start into this, let me just say never underestimate the power of your thoughts. It's so incredibly important. And never underestimate the enemy. Now if you like history, nobody can forget December 7th, 1941.
The USA underestimated Japan, who flew a series of bomber sorties over Pearl Harbor, it's become famous of course, from 7.55 a.m. to 9.45 a.m. the planes rained death down on the US forces. 3,435 people were killed and the USA just simply watched and believed. Our soldiers were there, the blocks, the ships were in the harbor, but they were attacked where and when least expected. And that invasion nearly destroyed the US fleet of ships in the Pacific.
And it's really quite incredible what took place. And all of that because we underestimated the power of the enemy and at the time Japan was an enemy of the United States of America as evidenced by their attack on America. So I say all that to say never underestimate the power of your thoughts. So that's what Paul's doing.
He's defending the mind against thoughts and specifically Paul is defending his apostleship against accusers that claim that he's fleshly and so he's dealing with this by talking about the weapons of war that help him weather it. So we're in a spiritual battle with spiritual weapons and those weapons are what I named a few moments ago. I just want you to envision for just a moment something that you might be familiar with.
I remember an old television show I used to watch called The Wild Wild West and one of the really interesting pieces of that was that the key characters of The Wild Wild West had a hidden doorway that opened to a vast array of weaponry. I mean you know the movies today that they push a button and you open up a vast array of pistols and knives and rifles and hand grenades and everything else. And the idea is this is a well equipped person and don't mess with him.
So what Paul does for Christians is he gives them that drawer full of weapons and the weapons of course are the word of God and the truth of the word of God but he also identifies the enemy. So let's look at that fourfold enemy, that fourfold battle that we face when we fight for our thoughts. First of all he says they're mighty through God, the weapons are mighty through God for the destruction of fortresses. I call these strongholds.
Now the Greek word for stronghold literally means a castle or a wall. It refers to a fortress itself. It's anything on which one relies and most of the time when this word is used it's used to denote something that has been walled out or something that's walled in. And these are often used to describe strong points or argument in which one trusts but in this case it's in the negative. In other words the weapons of our warfare tear down the walls that keep us from balanced living.
The walls that keep us from balanced living. In other words we've built up walls in our life that need to be torn down and those walls keep us thinking a certain thing when in fact those things aren't true and those things are destructive. So imagine with me for just a few moments a lie that is destructive to your life that's been walled up and you're inside that wall and you need to be breaking loose, breaking free. I often refer to my own struggle with anger.
Many refer to their struggle with lust where they know that there is a right way to think and a wrong way to think. Individuals know that there's a pure way of thinking and there's an impure way of thinking but because over the lifetime of their maturity or their adulthood they have been allowed to think in a way of lust or think in a way of anger or you can substitute any of this unbalanced thinking into this statement and this is just the way they respond.
It's such a stronghold that they feel walled in. They feel that there's no real alternative to thinking any other way. I've used another illustration to describe this and I call it ruts in the road. When I was raising my family in Oklahoma years ago we had some property outside of town and there were clay roads that had been leveled leading to that property.
They weren't paved, they didn't have gravel and over a period of time everyone that used those roads created ruts and those ruts would be about 6 to 10 inches deep and when it was rainy and slick the clay would turn almost into icy like slickness. When you turned your car in the direction of that road you knew you were going to slide into the ruts no matter what you tried to do.
Four wheel drive, two wheel drive you slid into the ruts because they were deeper than the rest of the road and everything was slanted that way. And I used to use this illustration to talk about habitual thinking. In other words thinking that is so common that we just fall into that.
It could be anger, it could be lust, it could be fear, it could be anxiety, it could be almost anything but when we habitually think that we're walled in and we tend to go with that flow because we don't know how to break out of it. But Paul says in this verse that the weapons of our warfare are mighty through God for tearing down those walls of habitual thinking.
In other words we're given the ability to tear down walls of destructive habitual thought patterns and emotion patterns that would otherwise keep us in bondage with God's Word. Now you know my story by now. My anger as a young man was eradicated because I would put into my mind what the Bible says about anger and I would memorize that.
You'll have those verses memorized that I committed to mind and heart back when I was 19 years of age and every time anger began to roll in into my mind, every time I realized it was coming I would pause, I would wait and think what am I thinking and I would instead of thinking about the anger and all the reasons I had to be angry I would think about the truth of God's Word. I would hold that thought, captivate that thought and then I broke free from that habitual pattern of anger.
The same thing can happen with lust or anxiety and fear but that's the number one enemy if you will that we have to fight the battle for and against and that is the destruction of fortresses. Then the second word is speculations. I just left that word literal on my graph and the diagram I talked about and I really like the way this word is used. It's a word in the Greek logismos and it means to reckon or to reason and it's the thinking behind the behavior.
So basically when we respond to a lie, we respond to something that we think might happen or we think could happen but may in fact never happen and it drags us away from balanced thinking into defensive thinking or retaliatory thinking or bitter thinking or impulsive thinking. We run instead of facing the music. So the Bible says we don't have to do that, that we can destroy speculations. The best way I know to illustrate this is to say that speculations are the what ifs of life.
The what ifs of life. So let's just say for instance you're at work and you receive a memo that says one tenth of the staff will be laid off in the month ahead and immediately you go into the what ifs, the speculations. And while it's wise to be able to think through the scenarios, maybe you're pulverized by fear, maybe you become extremely anxious or extremely angry because you're going into the what ifs and you're thinking this is already there when in fact it's not.
In fact most of the time when people become unbalanced in their speculation, the thing they're fearful about never happens. So instead the wisdom that I give is to wait, the wisdom God's word gives is to wait, ask yourself what are you thinking and instead of saying what if, you say I'm going to face this with God's help, whatever it is. And if it happens it happens, if it doesn't happen it doesn't happen, but either way God has my back and God is going to help me through this.
It's wise to respond that way because it's true, God does have your back, God will help you and what you're worried about may never ever happen. Years ago a women's Bible teacher named Jan Silvius used to make this statement. She would say what if is not reality, don't go there. What if is not reality, don't go there.
Now when you think of all the unbalanced way people can think, when you think of all the swings, the wild swings of the pendulum, way over to the right or way over to the left to bring us away from the ground of truth, most of it is going to a place that's not reality, a place that's not real. I used to have this horrible game that I would play in my mind of worst case scenario.
Now I wasn't trying to play that game, but whenever I had a thought about one of my children or some incident that happened or something that was threatening us in some way, my mind would immediately go to worst case scenarios and I was actually feeling in that moment those worst case scenarios when in actuality I wasn't there. In fact almost never did those worst case scenarios ever happen.
But a thought would come into my mind, I would expand on that thought and just let it keep moving until I was responding in an unbalanced way. It wasn't until I learned that it was the key to being able to feel healthy and act in a healthy way was to think in a healthy way based on facts, being grounded by the solid facts of truth instead of the what ifs, the speculations.
Then there is a third area of conflict and that would be, in the scripture it says every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God. I call this the wrong view of God. Literally in the Greek it means an elevated thought or idea, something you hold up higher than everything else.
It's in the present tense of the Greek and that simply means that this idea is holding itself up, it's lifting up above everything else and it's against the knowledge of God and that means basically the general knowledge of God. I deal with this all the time when people come to me and say God can never forgive me because I've done so many bad things and therefore they're really in an emotional basket that's moving in the wrong direction, they're sinking quick.
And then I give them the truth about God's character and the truth about God's character is that God does forgive and that there's no sin that you can commit that God is not able to forgive. And what it does is it tears down that lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God.
And we do the same thing on the other side of this picture whenever we walk into temptation and say you know God will never know or God will never deal with me about this sin or this act I'm about to commit and that is also raised up against the knowledge of God. Did you know that this lofty speculation took place in the Garden of Eden when Satan, the serpent, came to Eve and said God surely will not let you die. He surely will not.
In other words, God told Eve if you sin, if you do what I've told you not to do, death will enter in. And of course immediately, even armed with that truth, the serpent said something completely different. It was a lofty idea raised up against the knowledge of God that God gave her and she bought into it. So every lofty thing that raises itself up against the knowledge of God. There's a lot of unbiblical theology and a lot of unbiblical thinking but usually it's the wrong view of God.
There are thoughts planted from the evil one in the minds of people who do not know God well. This is why I urge you to run to the Bible in order to know God, who He is, how He speaks, how He will act. He's given us the insights into all of those things. So that is the third thing, destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God. And then the last one is probably the most applicable. Don't miss this one.
We are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. Now let me give you the word picture here. It's just such a beautiful thing in the original language and I know I've talked about the Greek a lot today but it really is revealing. I often say that the Greek language is like the 4K TV versus the black and white version of many years ago.
It's got clarity, it's got color, it's got explanations and illustrations and that single long word that we translate, take every thought captive, is a word that means to be able to capture its spear point. The idea is that thoughts are trying to infiltrate your mind and you keep those thoughts outside the door of your mind by putting the point of the sword on them when they attempt to get in.
Let's just say that I have a large knife in my hands and the thief that wants to get inside of my house, physically wants to get inside, is outside the door. And I don't know this until I open the door and there he is trying to get in. And all I need to do is hold up that large knife, place it in the middle of his chest and I'm going to captivate him before he gets in. Now obviously I'm going to repel him before he gets in. He's not expecting that.
So Paul says this in a way that helps us kind of see how it happens physically and then apply how it happens spiritually. So let's put it this way. Well I'm well acquainted enough with biblical truth and some thought comes to my mind that's not biblical truth, I captivate that at the point of that spear or the sword of the word of God. That's what the Bible calls the Bible, the scriptures. It is in spiritual warfare it is the sword of the spirit which is the word of God.
So mainly what this passage says is arming yourself with what you know truth is and with what you know God says about you, about him, about circumstances, you can take every thought captive. And not only that, you can tear down the walls of behavior and feeling, you can destroy the speculations and every lofty idea about who God is and you can take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.
Now that in a nutshell is why that's one of my favorite passages of scripture and it's my favorite weapon in dealing with all kinds of problems in life. Let me just say there's a level of aggression, aggression that you utilize this weapon. Let me try to describe it to you.
You need to have the level of aggression and intensity that comes from knowing that a lie can get you so far off balance it will complicate your future, complicate your present, it will complicate your relationships and your walk with God. Everything can happen as a result of that thought entering into your mind that doesn't need to be in your mind. So when I think of it that way I think okay this is a war. I am well armed with the scripture, the word of God.
I can take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ and even more I can destroy speculations, I can destroy every lofty thing raised up against my understanding of who God is as revealed in scripture and I can tear down walls, strongholds that keep me in behavior and feeling patterns.
So I know there's a lot of scripture here that I've just described today, many many more verses allude to this and at some point in another series altogether we'll talk about the armor of God and how all that works with you but for now the prospering soul and the idea of using this passage as one of your favorite weapons, one of your favorite go-tos is a very very good habit to have. Now here's my advice to you.
Think for a moment about the unhealthy patterns that you may have in your life whatever they are. And in our chart we have named so many of them, let me just name some of those unhealthy emotional patterns. Someone who's angry, suicidal, terrified, hopeless, destructive, depressed, worthless, retaliatory, bitter, defensive, withdrawn, in denial. That's on the negative side.
On the positive side in the sense of energy instead of anything else on the far extreme is being inattentive, sexually promiscuous, reckless, fanatical, chemically abusive, impulsive, agitated, obsessed, undisciplined, preoccupied, lustful. All those are on the extreme side of that pendulum swing that puts us in really unhealthy mindsets and emotional states and complicated relationships.
Whenever you see any of those named about yourself, please realize there is a passage of scripture, there is a sword, there is a spear point in the Bible about that particular thing in your life that will equip you to do battle against it. It's very important as you hear this. Get to the truth that grounds you and it grounds me. If we have these wide pendulum swings in our life it's because we're not grounded with the gravitational force of the truth of the word of God.
We're creating all kinds of complications for our lives and for those that we're in relationships with, our children, our spouse, our friends, people at work, whatever it might be. Only you can do something about that situation, that condition, but God gives you all the help you need. The weapons of our warfare are divinely powerful, is what the scripture says.
God will encourage you today, even though the battle is really tough and even though the stakes are really, really high, God has given you everything you need to fight this war and to have a prospering soul. A prospering soul would end up helping you have a balanced range of emotions because you're grounded by the truth and the facts of God's word and the facts that you face each day.
You're not blown off course by all these lies, these strongholds, these speculations, these lofty things raised up against God's knowledge or these uncaptivated thoughts. You can stay in a position of balance. I want to encourage you today to take a look at those diagrams, stick with us. I'm going to give you in this next podcast episode the keys to success, people who succeed in having a healthy, prosperous soul and who continue to live in that health, have certain habits that they do.
I'm going to tell you what those habits are in this next podcast. Until then, thanks for joining me, John Medder and the prospering soul on our podcast. Hope you tune in for the next one.