Alright then, so we'll just go - so it seems that - we'll just look at the screen now. So you have a screen on which God speaks to you and which dreams come, ideas come, things come, and notice what it says here after the fall of man. Verse 5, it says God saw that the wickedness of man was very great, and every imagination of the thoughts of the heart was evil continually. Every imagination, now your Bible may have translated that word differently but it is the word imagination and it means this. It means to squeeze something into shape like a potter would mould clay, so your imagination if I could just use another picture to describe it is like this. Your imagination is like a potter with clay pressing, squeezing, moulding until you form something. So when you get away into your thoughts and you begin to dream and imagine, you begin to shape some things inside your mind. You frame up things inside and you have a whole realm that you can escape right into.
So your imagination is you form things in your imagination; you shape things in your imagination. If you were say for example, you were trying to design this building then you'd begin to think about the building and you'd begin to shape the thoughts until they crystallised and they came clear, then you'd put them on a piece of paper. Or you'd put them on paper and while you're putting them on paper you're working on the thing and you're thinking about it, and in the end you've got a picture of what it should look like. They say a picture's worth more than a thousand words. I'll give you a picture, you're oh! Exactly, I know exactly what that is. So language, our language works best through pictures; the spirit world operates off pictures. Pictures come into our imagination. Hence the imagination's so very, very important and notice what it says here. It says the imaginations of the heart were evil continually, so an unsaved person, they are completely opened up to all kinds of imaginations and those imaginations will be contrary to God and will pull them completely away from God.
You think about this: why is it a person has struggled to come to Christ? Very simple; the Bible says the God of this world has blinded their mind or their imagination. They can't see the truth. They're not open to it until prayer and intersession breaks the power of that. Getting the idea? Okay, we'll move on now. So imaginations have a voice. They talk to us. Your imagination, once you've got it now, it's a picture inside of some possibility, something could happen. Read in Jeremiah 7. Now your imaginations talk to you. They're not just sort of passive in there. They don't just stay quiet. Once things have got into your brain and into your head they start to talk, and they talk to you and if that imagination is a demonic imagination it'll be talking to you and taking you where you don't want to go. Think about that.
Okay then, let's have a look here and read in verse 23-24 and this is what God's saying: Now this is what I commanded them, saying obey My voice, I'll be your God, you'll be My people. And walk in all my ways I've commanded you, that it may be well with you. But they did not obey or incline their ear, but followed the counsel and the imaginations of their evil hearts, and went backward and not forward. So notice here they followed the counsel of their imaginations. Counsel means a voice, so your imagination will speak to you. It will speak to you about possibilities, or it'll speak to you and arouse feelings of fear. Many imaginations stir up feelings of fear. You think what fear is; fear is a strong feeling. It's also a spirit, but it comes around your life as you begin to imagine a possibility of the future. So what happens is your imaginations talk to you, so just for example you've got embedded in your heart some beliefs of rejection or someone does something and you begin to imagine in your heart that they actually reject you.
The more you think about that the more it talks to you. How many of you have ever imagined a conversation before you had the conversation? Yeah, we do it all the time, so you're thinking about some situation you've got to go to and then you begin to think how it might go. Then imagination's talking to you, and before you know it you're wound up into a right royal state. I saw a video clip one time and this guy, he started out to go from his home to his neighbours to borrow a rake. As he walked out of his home to go to the neighbours he began thinking about how the neighbour would respond, and he began to have this picture imagination begin to form that the guy didn't like him and he was going to say no. He started to feel angry and stirred up, so by the time he got to the neighbour's he was so wound up that when he knocked at the door and the neighbour opens the door and says hello, he says you know what you can do with your rake! [Laughter] And the guy's whoa, what happened? Where did that come from?