Training your heart to see

Mike Connell

There's this fantasy and in the fantasy he's now his heart is flowing towards this evil picture or picture of evil, and the Bible says the sin has already happened. So in the heart, the heart is now stained. So when the fantasy is over and the person comes out of the fantasy, their life is now stained with adultery, so they now bring into their physical relationships what has been in the fantasy realm of the heart. Think about that. Women, you would know, if you've ever seen a man looking at you and he's mentally undressing you or he's got bad things in his mind going on. You can feel it. You can feel it it's that bad. Where did it start? It started in the imagination, so clearly what was in his imagination has now brought something into the world, into the relationship, which causes you to feel uncomfortable and aware something bad is in that person. Do you understand?

So your imagination is incredibly important because we design our future through our imagination. We create in our imagination, we are able to plan a different life with our imagination, or we can repeat the failures of the past. A lot of it has to do with what's going on in the imagination. So we need to harness our imagination and in the Bible it uses the word to describe this; it describes it, it's called meditation. In Joshua 1:8 it says if you will meditate in the law of the Lord day and night and it'll not depart out of your mouth and you observe to do it, notice what it says. You will make your way prosperous and successful, so saying to Joshua who's facing a huge challenge, He said I know the challenge is big. I know there are giants and big walled cities, but what I want you to do is to meditate in the word of God because as you do that and begin to speak your agreement about it, and go over and over and over what it's going to do, it will motivate you and form in you the faith to overcome.

So right through the Bible it talks about meditation as being an important key to prospering. In 1 Timothy 4, I think verse 15 or somewhere near that, Paul talks to Timothy. He says Timothy, I know we laid hands on you and prayed for you and imparted a gift to you, but Timothy what you need to do is to actually do something. Don't just leave it be, like wasn't it a great meeting? I got a prophecy and they laid hands on me, [blah blah blah. 00.36.37] He said don't do that. He said now I want you to meditate. I want you to use your imagination to picture yourself flowing as I have prophetically described over your life, and constantly day after day see it and acknowledge it and expect it. It will start to change and you'll start to prosper. So he always talks about meditating and giving yourself to the thing you're meditating on. If you meditate on sin you'll give yourself to sin; meditate on a plan for some project, you'll give yourself to that project. Meditate on a relationship developing, you'll give yourself to that relationship.

So what you're meditating on, we all meditate. It's just a matter of deciding what we're going to meditate on. So one of the things is this, is if meditation or if your imagination is a faculty that connects the spiritual world and the natural world, then that's where the Holy Ghost is going to talk to you. So when you're praying in tongues the Holy Spirit is imparting into you, He's imparting into your language and that comes up. You pray in tongues and then you stop praying, you'll suddenly hear the language in your head, so there's a flow starts. Now where God wants to communicate with you, He wants to actually put pictures into your mind or speak into your mind and it comes up through your spirit. So praying in tongues is a great way to stir your spirit, but you need to learn also to harness your mind. My experience with my own life and with the life of many Christians is they don't know how to focus their thought life.

So I want to just give you some simple keys that will help you, then we'll just look at a passage and let's just see what God will do. It shouldn't take us long, but let's just open our mind to just take a scripture. So here are a few practical keys on what you can do to train your imagination and it tells us to do this. In 2 Corinthians 4:18 it says now the things that are going on around us that are difficult and upsetting and challenging, it says all of these things are temporary and they will work for us. They will work on our behalf something that changes that changes us provided we do this; we look at things which are unseen, not at things which are seen, because the things seen are temporary, the things unseen are eternal. Now notice what He's saying. It's up to you to choose whether you focus your mind and your thoughts and your attention on the realities of that which are spiritual, or whether you focus them on the realities which are in the physical world.