Week Three – Wednesday,
April 9th – Keys to Answered Prayer #3

KEY TO CHANGING HOW YOU THINK

We often forget to think about how we are actually thinking. That is sort of like refusing to insist that the fox has to notify you if any holes and weaknesses pop up in the hen house. It is to the fox's benefit to keep you from knowing of these weaknesses so that he can take advantage of them. It is also to your unsurrendered soul's advantage to keep you from thinking about the wrong thoughts you are thinking.

I spoke with a friend in the ministry a few months ago, a friend who was very tired, discouraged, and struggling. She said, I just have to believe that I cannot believe anything my mind or emotions are trying to tell me right now.

Amen! When you are tired or discouraged, your soul sometimes goes into overdrive to convince you that every negative thought or emotion it is putting forth is true. It's true, it's all true! You're not going to make it; you're failing on every front. Listen to me. You aren't going to make it, you've never had a chance, and no one cares! At the first sign of fatigue or weakness on your part, your soul recognizes that it is the best possible time to attack your spiritual beliefs, your hopes and dreams, and your relationship with God.

Your thought life originates in your soul which consists of your mind, will, and emotions. When you accepted Jesus Christ as your Savior, your soul probably (just like at least 98% of all new Christians) backed up, dug in, and said, We're not going there! Until your soul has completely surrendered to God's love, plans, and truth, it will constantly try to take back territory in your thoughts and emotions that it once had control over.

I have had people tell me that they don't have any problems with their thought life, they just take authority over their thoughts and emotions. Unfortunately, this really does not work. Your soul may try to deceive you into thinking that it is subject to your decision to take authority over it-which it does by backing off on the wrong thoughts and emotions temporarily. All the while, your soul is planning to come at you another way.

The part of you that would allow you to take authority over anything is your will, and your will interacts closely with your thoughts and emotions. Rarely (if ever!) will your soul stand up against itself; and therein lies the key to understanding why the Keys of the Kingdom prayer principles can be so valuable to you! The prayer principles using the binding and loosing keys allow you force your soul to give up its wrong thoughts and its wrong emotional reactions and responses.

What does it mean when you say you are going to take authority over something, perhaps your own thought life?

In order to exercise any kind of authority, there must be a source ready, willing, and able to back up a delegated secondary agent of that authority with an adequate reserve of power.

Your desire to take authority over your feelings and thoughts is admirable, but you would have to fight yourself to do so. That is an internal civil war that you can't win. Your soul's will power will not stand (for any length of time) against the combined force of a negative mind and negative emotions determined to express themselves. Your will cannot control your inner thoughts and your emotions for very long.

The only answer is that you need to change how you think. The description from above of a source with an adequate reserve of power certainly fits our God. You need to understand exactly what God will back up according to your spoken words and beliefs as opposed to what God has told you to let go of in order to receive His help in changing how you think about things. You can try to take authority over an empty gas tank all day long, and your car still won't run. You can try to take authority over a stack of unpaid bills all week long, and they still won't be paid.

You can speak with the authority of Christ only when it furthers His plans and purposes-not when you just wish to get yourself out of something unpleasant or out of the consequences of your own wrong choices.

You are the one who is still choosing to make wrong choices, regardless of how you were raised. Wrong choices others made for you are in the past and should be forgiven. You do not have to allow your mind to keep recycling the effects of wrong choices other people made for you (as a child, as an employee, as an abused spouse, etc.). You can pray and bind your will to God's will, your mind to the mind of Christ, and your emotions to the healing balance and comfort of the Holy Spirit. Then you can loose, smash, crush, and destroy the effects and influence of all wrong choices other people made that have influenced your life.

Some people had the blessing of being raised by godly people who taught them how to make right choices. Most of us didn't. That doesn't mean you can choose to think wrong thoughts about or blame the people who raised you. You need to come of out of your own self-focus on this issue and recognize that when people fall short of being perfect in raising children, it is because they were raised by people who fell short of being perfect. And those people were raised by people who fell short of being perfect! At some point you have to recognize that trying to find someone to blame for shortcomings in how you were raised is going to take you on a forever trip clear back to the Garden of Eden. There is a better way to think about this!

God has left a highly effective instruction manual along with a collection of His love letters to encourage you that you can learn how to make right, godly choices. Right and godly thoughts produce right and godly choices which produce right and godly consequences. You are the one who has to want to learn how to think right and godly thoughts that will help you make the good choices. You are the one who has been told to take wrong thoughts captive in 2 Corinthians 10:5. You do this by choosing to stop thinking rerunning the negative thoughts if for only a moment, just long enough to pray and bind your mind to the mind of Christ and then immediately follow that up by loosing all wrong thoughts coming out of your not-yet renewed mind!

We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God; and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5, NIV).

Nowhere in the Bible can you read that God will use His power to override and change your thought life. But He has given us the Keys of the Kingdom which allow you to pray with all of their supernatural power (power is another word for authority) to clear wrong beliefs, wrong thought patterns, and wrong attitudes out of your soul. This makes room within your soul (mind, will, and emotions) to allow God's love to flow into you and take root within your inner being.

The closest thing to your being able to take authority over yourself is when you choose to both receive and to cooperate with the Fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of self-control (or temperance which means to choose to practice self-restraint) helps you to recognize and want to loose (eliminate) wrong patterns of thinking. Allowing your soul to keep recycling its wrong patterns of thinking will keep you from wanting to bind your mind to the mind of Christ to hear His right thoughts. You need to focus on the results of cooperating with the Fruit of the Spirit (which will be covered in a later Key). Keeping focused means you choose to not allow any worldly, soulish, or demonic distractions to interfere with whatever results you are expecting.

What are worldly, soulish, and demonic distractions? Attempts of others, your soul, and the enemy to convince you that you do not really want or will never attain what you are hoping to have. You keep these distractions from interfering by staying focused on your spiritual goal or goals, by binding your will to God's will, and by loosing any worldly, soulish, or demonic distractions that would interfere with God's plans and purposes to bless, prosper, and give you fantastic opportunities that will fulfill you and give you great joy.

Successful athletes exercise self-control as they are training because they have a clearly defined purpose or goal. Having a clearly defined purpose or goal for your Christian walk and destiny helps you to focus on thinking right thoughts. Not having any self-control and making wrong choices have a lot to do with not having a clear goal in your mind.

As Paul wrote his letter to the Philippians from jail, he said in Chapter 2:10 (The Message) that whoever had thrown him in jail had not shut him up. They had only given him a new pulpit to preach from! That is an incredible way to think about something that would floor some of today's Christians. Paul knew what his goal and his purpose were. If you were suddenly wrongfully thrown into jail, could you see that as an opportunity to have the opportunity of a jail ministry right down where the rubber meets the road?

I can hardly wait to continue on my course. I don't expect to be embarrassed in the least. On the contrary, everything happening to me in this jail only serves to make Christ more accurately known, regardless of whether I live or die. They didn't shut me up; they gave me a pulpit!

Paul is such an excellent role model for the right way to think about everything in this life all the way to your death, which is also your graduation to being present with the Lord in heaven. Paul's goal for living or dying is quite amazing. He did not worry about what he had not yet done in his life or what he still wanted to be able to see and do if he was to suddenly die. Instead he said the following (Philippians 1:22-25, The Message) as he thought about what his life was like:

As long as I'm alive in this body, there is good work for me to do. If I had to choose right now, I hardly know which I'd choose. Hard choice! The desire to break camp here and be with Christ is powerful. Some days I can think of nothing better. But most days, because of what you are going through, I am sure that it's better for me to stick it out here.

His thoughts about staying alive and finishing his work were focused on what would be better for those he would be influencing as long as he was with them. He decided they needed the message and the love he would share with them more than he needed to be with Christ in heaven. That is right thinking to the max! Ask yourself if you could choose to live or die today, what would truly most affect your thinking about making this choice?

What goals do you have for your Christian destiny? Is your goal just to tie a knot in the rope you desperately clinging to and hang on until the Rapture? What excuses pop into your thinking for not having a clear cut goal for your destiny and for your relationship with God? Here's an important goal for you right here: CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK. Changing how you think is also a key factor to enhancing the life you are currently living, not just the final goal of getting to heaven.

Having a godly goal makes it is easier for you to make right decisions every day because you can line up any choice you face with the parameters of the goal you have set.

In the natural realm, for instance, suppose one of your immediate goals is to fit into your old Navy uniform for a special honor ceremony at your church. This pre-set goal helps you focus on getting up and jogging in the morning. If one of your immediate goals is to find a way to volunteer in orphanages in Mexico for the summer, that pre-set goal can help you can focus on choosing whether or not you should sign up for that expensive, luxury cruise to Italy this year. Having a real goal helps you think right thoughts which helps you make right choices which helps you achieve your goal.

So what reasonable, actual, attainable spiritual goals have you pre-set in your mind? If one of them is get up early and read the Bible every morning, you are going to have to change how you think about crawling out of the bed earlier than usual. If one of your pre-set goals is that you want to take a missionary trip, then you need to start thinking about learning some of the language, learning something about the culture, and how to set up a budget to help you finance your trip. If one of your goals is to show love to others in a more tangible way, then find a place where you can especially show love to people others prefer to ignore.

While these are not necessarily goals you will act upon every day, every single action you take to move towards these goals will enhance your daily life and your relationships.

Bind your will to God's will and timing for your goal or goals, and then loose any worldly, soulish, or demonic distractions and reactions that would cause you to think you can't attain the goal. If God tells you this is not His goal for you in the time frame you were expecting, then He will help you understand that He has a better goal for you for right now. God loves to help you and support and provide for you to attain good, godly goals that line up with His will for your life. He may just not do it in your understanding of His timing.

Our ministry once received a very large donation from someone who said they had wanted to give a sizable donation to our ministry seven years earlier, but God had said not yet. This person invested the money and waited on God's further directives. This person had a goal that was submitted to God for His timing and His direction. Seven years later God told this person to sell and release the invested funds to our ministry, funds which had quadrupled by that time! God's way is always the best way.

This person's integrity and willingness to be in God's will however long it took to bear fruit is remarkable! This person could have gone ahead and given us the donation seven years earlier. Or because of the incredible growth of the funds, that person could have decided to hold back part of the funds and just bless us with the rest. However, because of integrity and obedience to God's directives, when the goal of donating to the ministry was eventually achieved, it was achieved four times greater than that person originally intended!

You finally see a goal for your life that you are sure is from God. Then He says wait or even harder, He says nothing. So you pray and hope and wait. If you do not know how to release the negative thoughts that can come from having to wait with no response from God, they can get pretty out of control some times. So what do you do with them? First of all, remember that you cannot take authority or speak control over your thoughts! You must focus on changing the way you think which requires some form of action.

God will not control your negative thoughts and emotional reactions for you!

The Keys of the Kingdom binding and loosing prayers can help you dislodge wrong thoughts that arise in you mind, wrong thoughts that can keep your answer and His supernatural help from showing up. Reading the Word of God can then help you plant new patterns of thinking in the area you have just cleared out of your soul. As you read the Word while praying the binding and loosing prayers, you will begin to see things in a new way of knowing how to choose what to do and then choosing to do it!

There was a time when our ministry was in a financial struggle and we still owed several hundred dollars to a big Catholic Retreat Center for a retreat they had allowed us to hold there. I am ashamed to admit that I began to rationalize that this massive, beautiful center could afford to wait for the money more than our ministry could afford to pay it at that time. My soul was very happy to rationalize making such a decision-after all, we would pay it some day. Filing that decision away as a to-do-some-day action, the binding and loosing prayers that I was praying daily suddenly caused a breakthrough in such rationalizations and justifications. As I was reading the Bible, a certain verse got right up in my face!

I read that I was to keep my word even when it hurt me and cost me personally to do so!

I couldn't get over to that retreat center fast enough to ask their forgiveness, show them that verse, and then write out a personal check for the full amount. I was the one who should have to wait for the money, not them. That was the issue, not whether or not it was hard for me to come up with that money personally. Every Christian needs to change how they think about following through on what they say they are going to do. Christians are far too lax about thinking others will forgive and God will forgive when they don't follow through and everything will be just fine. Are you the kind of Christian that people would describe the way they automatically describe this person: Jerry said he would help you in this project? He'll be there, I promise. You can trust whatever Jerry says he will do because Jerry always keeps his word.

I had given the people at the retreat center my word that we would pay the balance of the retreat costs as soon as the retreat was over. We went into the whole on that retreat and there was no money to use. This, however, turned into using other monies to pay other bills because the retreat center never complained. Then the day came when that verse got up in my face along with praying the binding and loosing prayers which caused me to examine and change my thinking. I came to the conclusion that no one else should have to wait for me to get around to fulfilling my promises. The Word of God was speaking directly to me saying that I had to keep my word, even when it really hurt me personally to do it!

It is amazing how many people allow their souls to distract them from identifying their wrong thought patterns for so long that they don't even notice when their thoughts head down the wrong road. Dear people, faithful in church and always ready to give, can shout amen and agree enthusiastically with everything the speaker is saying. Then these same people can get up and walk out after Sunday church, go to lunch with other Christians, and join right in with gossiping and criticizing the pastor.

If this describes you and you have real friends who care, they should lovingly point this out to you. If you would insist that you are fine and you love the pastor and you can't believe your friend just said that to you, you are in trouble. If you say you only wish the pastor could see what he is not doing right and then start doing it, it is you who are in trouble. If you say that you really weren't aware you were doing that, so it wasn't intentional and that doesn't count, you are in trouble. I saw a funny cartoon a few days ago of a lady ignorantly walking out of a public bathroom with her dress caught up in the back of her panty hose. The caption said, Ignorance does not change the facts!

You need to settle a goal in your mind and think about it. If you have the goal of truly being who God wants you to be, you will be able to admit you may have a problem with your thought life. You will be able to admit you may have a problem with the words of your mouth. You may also be able to admit that you don't always welcome correction even when it is made in love. This is not easy for anyone, and without a goal in mind, your soul can find dozens of ways to rationalize and justify the wrong words you have spoken out of the wrong thoughts of your heart (soul). If you truly set a goal of making right choices and thinking right thoughts, you can ask the Holy Spirit to help you. Bind your will to God's will and bind your mind to the mind of Christ. Then remember to be faithful in refilling your mind with the reading of the Word.

God is not asking you to find all of your own weaknesses and failings and correct them all by yourself. God is asking you to be willing to be aware of your shortcomings (as He or one of His special agents point them out to you and then want to do something about them. You cannot make yourself be kind or patient or gentle by commanding yourself to become these things, but His grace will work in you as you follow this pattern:

1. Pray with the Keys of the Kingdom to make room to receive God's Grace and His fruit
2. Take action on what He tells you and reveals to you
3. Practice (take action) what you learn from reading the Word
4. Enjoy the fruit of the experience you gain through doing this and share it with others

Every thought pattern and word spoken will bear fruit. Kind thought patterns and words will bear the fruit of kindness, blessing, joy, peace, and love. Evil or cruel thought patterns and words will bear the fruit of death, ruin, and calamity. The choice really is yours. The help you need to make the right choice comes from Him, and it will be freely given to the one who sets his or her goal as wanting to be able to change the wrong thinking in their souls.

Blessed Father, I am making a choice right now that I want to learn how to think right thoughts. I bind my will to your will, Lord, which means I am obligating myself to your will. I bind my mind to your mind, Jesus; and I bind my emotions to your healing balance, comfort, and support, Holy Spirit. Help me to understand how to change what I can change and how to surrender to you that which you want me to give up.

Show me how to represent your authority in the ways that please you, not in ways that my soul thinks will benefit it.

I loose, smash, crush, and destroy all of my unsurrendered soul's rationalizations and justifications about the wrong thoughts that I admit go through my mind. Forgive me for those wrong thoughts; forgive me for doing things that feed those wrong thoughts. I want to think on things that Christ wants me to think about. I want to do what the Apostle Paul told the Philippians to do: Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable-if anything is excellent or praiseworthy-think about such things (Philippians 4:8, NIV).

Forgive me for failing to take my wrong thoughts captive. I bind my mind to your mind, Jesus, and I loose all of the wrong thought patterns in my soul that I have never challenged. No more, soul! No more! I will be on guard and ready to loose whatever negative or false thoughts try to form in my mind. I want to practice thinking, speaking, and acting in love. I want to bless others. I know you have already made the choice to bless me, Father God, so I do not want to focus on what I think I need or want. I bind myself to your timing and I choose to learn how to be patient.

Help me to be a sweet fruit bearer. Help me remember that your Word will tell me what to do in every situation. Help me to always remember that you are with me even when you are working behind the scenes and I don't know what you are doing. I love you and I want to love others as you want me to. Thank you, Amen.

  
Copyright 2007 LSM :: All Rights Reserved :: Created by Exodus Design Studios