The Battle for Your Mind
Senior Pastor Phil Vance
Highlights:
1. The Holy Spirit is the filter God gives us to help us think correctly, clearly, accurately and Godly.
2. What we think determines how we live.
3. Looking through the world’s filter we see Gods laws as demanding and depriving. Looking through God’s filter we see his laws as protecting and providing.
Discussion Questions:
1. How has the Holy Spirit acted as a “filter” to your thinking.
2. Remember together Pastor Phil’s filter illustration. What did that illustration mean to you personally?
3. How do we get our filtered thinking to become our obedient action? Have you ever struggled with making what we know to be the right answer our practical action and way of living? Pray for one another that what we know would become what we believe, practice and do.
Key Scriptures:
– “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord . “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. Isaiah 55: 8-9
– This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, for, “Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ. 1 Corinthians 2: 13-16
– Those who live according to the flesh have their minds set on what the flesh desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace. The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God. You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ. Romans 8:5-9