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Fantasy, an Addictive Drug (2 of 4) Mike Connell 17.08.2008 am
[Music to 00.00.24]
[Mike Connell] Father, we just open ourselves to all that you have for us today. There's a gratefulness in our heart. We say Lord, You're our strength. We say come today, minister to us, help us unlock in our lives things that need to be unlocked. Father, I pray clarity to speak, clarity of Your word into our hearts; not just the word but Lord, the spirit of it. I pray Lord that every person here today who's become locked up in some part of their life, unable to explore the prophetic dimensions and the realms of possibilities in God, that today would be a day of unlocking that and bringing release in Jesus' name. Amen. Lord, we open our heart to You. Great presence of God here isn't there? Great presence of God. Why don't you give someone a high five and just talk to someone, say hello to them and be seated. Thank you musicians.
Good, good, good. Okay, 2 Corinthians 10 and we're going to pick it up at verse 3. I want to share with you some things that the Lord spoke into my own heart some time ago that were extremely helpful for me and I don't think I've ever preached them. I just have got them in my diary. I got out my diary from a little time back and opened it up and there were these things, and it's very, very current for right now. Last week we were talking about the imagination and when we were sharing about the imagination we were sharing some things about God's design for us. We shared these things, that God has created us in His image, so therefore we are creative people. We have the ability to create. We saw secondly that we have the capacity to create as we can sexually create, we can have a child, we can produce a new life that's an eternal being. That's a very creative fact.
And secondly, with our imagination we can create ideas that then become realities in the world, so all the inventions you've ever seen were in someone's imagination before they were in the earth. So your imagination is part of the creative faculty; it's connected to your spirit and so the dreams, the things that God gives you will go into that imagination. So your imagination is a wonderful, wonderful gift that God has given you. Your imagination is a capacity, a mental capacity God has given you to form pictures of a future or of a reality that's not yet happened, so imagination's wonderful, a great gift that God has given us. We can make mental pictures of something that is not yet existing, so it's great you can dream about the addition you'll have to your house. You'll begin to think about it, dream about it, walk in and out through it - it hasn't even turned up yet and then there it is, and so from your imagination was birthed something into the world.
Now we saw also that your imaginations have a voice. They speak to you, so imaginations can be good and they can be vain. Vain ones are empty ones and they lead you somewhere. We saw how if you just let your mind go along a vain imagination that's not at all true, you will end up where you don't want to be and wonder how you got there. We saw also how imaginations are prophetic. As you yield to them they can begin to form a future and create a reality you haven't seen, so that's the powerful thing about our imagination. Of course the final thing we saw was that when God speaks to you He puts a word into your spirit or a picture in your spirit comes into the imagination. You begin to see it in the same place you imagine things. Now I want to look today specifically at the issue of fantasy, a misuse of the imagination, an addictive drug. Notice what it says here in 2 Corinthians 10. We'll just pick it up here: For the weapons of our warfare - though we walk in the flesh, we don't war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for the pulling down - notice this - we have weapons that with the power of the Holy Spirit are very, very powerful.
They're mighty in God. Notice this. Now these are all are referring to the same thing: the pulling down of strongholds, casting down of imaginations, every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. So notice these things, it's all really He's trying to use words to say the same thing. He's talking about thoughts, imaginations, high things that resist God working in our life and He calls them actually strongholds because demons can enter them and we become a - we have a mindset that stops us progressing. Many of us here today have mindsets that stop us moving in God. You love the Lord, but nevertheless in spite of loving the Lord you're committed to the Lord, mindsets, patterns of thinking which exalt themselves against knowing God will stop you progressing. It's really helpful then if we can identify them and work out what we need to do to bring them down, to stop them or to deal with them.