But what's happened is between his own house and the neighbour's house imaginations have been running away and talking to him, and by the time he's got there he's absolutely convinced he's going to be rejected, convinced the guy hates him, is going to reject him and say no. He became very angry at it and by the time he gets there well that's it and there's an angry response. Now how many of us have done that? You've imagined something without finding what really is happening. You've assumed and then got this big imagination in your mind, and then over a few days of brooding on that imagination you're in a right state. When you go to meet the person, now you're wound up emotionally. All your emotions have been triggered off. Now you're walking after a vain imagination. Now notice what it says here. They didn't listen to God's perspective and point of view. They followed the counsel of their own imaginations, and they went backward, not forward.
So you can go backward, not forward, if you listen to the counsel of imaginations that are against what God has to say. You think about that. You say wow, I want to serve the Lord! I'm going to go out and have a real influence in my work, and then you go out there and some little thing happens and you've got this thing in your mind. You get wound up and really lose it. You've gone backwards. You didn't bring Christ to them; you brought your vain imagination and your wound up emotions and didn't do any good at all. This happens all the time. It's why people leave churches, why they break up marriages, they get this vain imagination about their partner, about their spouse, about someone, about all sorts of things. People get this imagination forms and it becomes so real in their mind it's like an idol talking to them and controlling where they go.
The Bible says the cause of it's really simple. Your imagination talks to you, make sure if you're listening to your imagination that it is in agreement with what God says. So the only reference for what you have for your imaginations is what does God say? Not what am I feeling, not what does it look like. What does God say about this? And you'll find that God tells you several things. He tells you not to judge matters before you've heard it [laughs] otherwise you'll look an idiot. It's what He says, so it's a real hard discipline not to judge things before you've heard both sides. So imagination's not real and when you let your imagination start going you begin to wonder what'll happen. How many have wondered what will happen to them? How many have got brooding over something, you began to wonder and wonder and wonder? You're walking after your imagination. That's what it says: you will walk after the voice of your imagination if you don't stop it and line it up with the word of God.
Unless we let the word of God get into our soul and spirit and heart, then ungodly imaginations will rule us and down we go, down that old path. How many have got old paths that you follow? Yeah, [well you 00.34.05] light your wick and there you go. Some people know how to light your wick too. [Laughter] Get's you going. The Bible says a man's got no rule over his own spirit like a city broken down without walls, so if we're going to move a church into dominion, into have influence and beginning to advance, we've got to deal with imaginations, foolish imaginations, vain imaginations contrary to the word of God. Okay, so a vain imagination will always lead you away from God, but God's imaginations, the word of God will lead you towards God. In Jeremiah 23:16 it talks about people speaking a vision from their own hearts, so here's the next thing about imaginations. [Laughs] We saw that imaginations talk to you; next thing is imaginations are prophetic.
They're prophetic in that they're a picture of your future. If you go down that imagination that's where you will go. You begin to start to think and meditate and picture someone and you're thinking the worst about them, boy you're in for a conflict. You cannot avoid the conflict because it's prescribing where your future's going. That's why we want our future to be determined by dreams in harmony with God's plan for our life. We want to be open to the prophetic because the prophetic is God's dream about my life and where my life is destined by God to go, and that's why it says where there is no prophetic revelation - Proverbs 28, where there's no prophetic revelation, where there's no unfolding imaginations, visions and dreams from God, it says that people perish or you miss the opportunities God designed for you. You can't see them when they come because you're following an imagination.