1.) Build or strengthen your spiritual life. We need to energise our inner man, our spiritual man; because we overcome sin by a greater power, not by just trying harder. So, energise or build up your spiritual life. The Bible tells us in Jude 1:20 – “But you, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit.” I encourage people to pray strongly in tongues every day, and build the amount of time they’re praying in tongues, because when you’re praying in tongues, you are building and strengthening your spirit man. So I think it really helps if a person energises their spiritual life.
2.) The person needs to renew their imagination, or their mind. This is the biggest one of all. It’s one that people don’t really do very frequently. The word ‘renew your mind’ means to literally ‘renovate’. You renovate your mind by meditation. Notice what it said in Ephesians 4: “Be renewed in the spirit of your mind.” Romans 12:2 says the same thing: “Be transformed by the renewing or renovation of your mind.”
So how do I do that? Meditation is how you do that. Meditation is picturing or imagining God’s truth. You need to see the truth of God. So your imagination is a very powerful way of accessing the realm of God. In 1 Timothy 4:15, Paul writes to Timothy and he says: “Meditate in these things, and give yourself to them, and you will profit.” Now, your mind cannot take hold of anything abstract. If I say to you for example, God loves you. That is abstract. Yeah, I get it with my head, but I don’t feel anything in my heart about that.
So if I ask Christians – Do you believe God loves you? They’ll all say: yes, God is love. God so loved the world. Quote all the verses. But if I ask a different question – Do you feel loved by God? Do you experience Him loving you? Then people go quiet, because they don’t experience it, except when they come to a meeting. It’s not really what happens in their life. In their life, they pray, but don’t feel God at all. Coming to a meeting, they’ll start to feel God, starts to get touched, weep. It’s a long time between Sunday and Sunday. So meditation is using your imagination to picture the truth of God. Constantly repeating every day, it gets into your heart that this is what the truth is.
So, let’s take this, suppose the person’s struggling with rejection. So they believe – “No one loves me. I’m not accepted.” Now, that is a lie that gives room for a demon to torment them; and while the lie stays in the heart, it will keep affecting the way the person sees everything. Lies can only be displaced if you reject the lie and embrace the truth; but if you’ve believed all your life that you are not accepted, that you are rejected, then when I tell you that God loves you, you won’t believe it. Meditation is the biblical way of bringing truth into our heart. So I need to not just say the scripture “God loves me”, I need to picture it. What would that look like? What would that feel like?
If I will imagine the truth, repeatedly imagine the truth, and embrace the truth, it will start to form in my heart as a belief. Because this takes time and discipline, most people don’t bother to do it, they just have repeated problems. So if you want to get a truth in your heart, you need to take the scripture, memorise the scripture, and then imagine the scripture being true. Every day, use your imagination to see it, to reach out and embrace – this is the truth. Hold it in your heart as long as you can. Then go back there again, and again, and again, until that truth rests in you, and it comes alive in you. Pictures are how your inner person works.
If I asked you this question, tell me what is the most comfortable place in your house, where you love to go and rest? Then, if you were to close your eyes – “Oh, yes I’m there right now. I can see it.” It’s a picture that comes to mind. So you have a picture, and that picture is always associated with the same thing – with rest. So, if I’m going to change my inner belief system, I have to change the pictures.