Have you ever been scared while watching a movie? It is actually ridiculous when you think about it. You are sitting either in your home or a theater and something happens on a screen and then you react by either screaming or jumping, or both. Now, you are in absolutely no danger whatsoever, what is happening on the screen is not happening to you, but you react as if it were.
Why do we react this way? What causes us to freak out? The ultimate answer is our mind. Our mind controls our body and our emotions. When you sit in a movie, your mind makes your body believe that it needs to jump or scream. You actually are in no danger, but for a split second your mind thinks you are, and your body follows as well. Our mind is a powerful thing, and we must understand this power in order to rightly use it to worship God.
The Bible tells us that we are in a spiritual battle (Ephesians 6:12). Now many believe that this battle is about their circumstances, behavior, or relationships. The ultimate battle for the Christian is not found in any of these things, but is found in the mind. The mind is ground zero for the spiritual battle that we are in. It takes place in our thought life. Satan knows that if he can get us to think wrongly or believe wrongly then he can paralyze our spiritual growth.
When a Roman soldier was all geared up and ready for battle, an attendant would bring his helmet to him and place it on his head and help him secure it properly. The soldier understood that his skills in fighting would be rendered pointless if he were to take a blow to the head without it being protected.
It is interesting that in Ephesians 6:17, the helmet that is to be worn in this spiritual battle is the helmet of salvation. I take that to mean that the greatest protection for our minds is to rightly understand the great truth and security of our salvation and its effects upon our everyday lives.
We wear this helmet of salvation in two basic ways. First is to understand that we are saved, and the great depth of what that means. I am always amazed when people tell me that they don't like to get into deep doctrinal discussions. It is in the understanding of these deep doctrinal truths of salvation that we are strengthened and encouraged. Doctrines like regeneration, justification, and propitiation are vital for us to study and understand, so as to grasp how great this salvation truly is.
The second way we wear the helmet of salvation is to renew your mind daily
(Romans 12:1-2). This is not something you do by a short little prayer in the morning to get a little protection. This is not a casual thing. It is meditating, studying, and thinking on the Gospel, and the promises and truths of Scripture in order to use them to defeat the attacks of the enemy. Satan will fire fiery darts and the shield of faith will extinguish them (Eph. 6:16). However, faith can only function around the truth in which we know. That means that we cannot have faith in what we do not know. We must know truth in order to believe truth.
Jesus commanded us to love the Lord your God with all your heart, MIND, and soul. And I feel like many times we neglect loving God with our mind, and thus we think wrongly and our emotions and body follow. Unlike being scared in a movie, which has no real consequence, except for the ears of those around you, wrong thinking in our spiritual lives will have us fighting spiritual battles without our helmet properly secured and therefore we take massive blows from the enemy.
N.T.S.
Interesting idea here... "faith can only function around the truth in which we know. That means that we cannot have faith in what we do not know. We must know truth in order to believe truth."
ReplyDeleteWhat is difficult about religious "truths" is that humanity makes them personal. If we are honest with ourselves our ultimate truth or ultimate belief comes from within each our own selves. We are all our own key witnesses in our trial of belief. We read the bible how we want it, we speak the gospel how we want it spoken, we live a christian life how we see it is meant to be lived and hear God how we want to hear him.
Truth has always been a difficult thing to believe for me because the faith elders I have had in my life all say mixed things or live out mixed ideas and call them "truth".
Great post! I have been challenged by this very thing lately. Thank u for sharing!
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ReplyDeleteThanks for the encouragement everyone and I hope my posts are a blessing. Aaron, I understand your concern with truth, but truth doesn't come from people, elders or laymen, it comes from the Word of God. Our preaching, our beliefs, our lives of faith, must be based on Scripture. We should be devoting ourselves to careful study of God's Word in order to know how to preach, what to believe, how to live.
ReplyDeleteOur lives ought to be characterized as ones who are truth seekers. We should not be those who simply say truth is too hard to find and stop there. I agree that we all have areas of our lives where we interpret Scripture in light of our experience, but our desire should be to admit those areas and go back to God's Word to get it right.