The more the experiences you have, the more difficult it is to remain in a place of humility because there's a tendency to think because of my experiences I have a greater revelation, greater insight, greater [knowledge, 00.04.25] and actually it projects - self-importance comes out and this does not build people. It puts them down and it divides them. I can remember being associated with certain streams of churches and they had certain teachings. Those teachings promoted self-importance, certain doctrinal emphasis; we're the people of God. We're the end time people. We're the sons of God. We're this, we're that, we're whatever, and it produces a self-importance. It's a vain imagination and it actually hinders unity; it hinders us being effective for Christ, so there's all kinds of vain imaginations lead to all sorts of things, lust, witchcraft, all that kind of stuff.
And so we talked about last week how to deal with vain imaginations, and I said that there were two parts to it: one part of it is the warfare to discipline and sort through what you're thinking and manage your mind. We talked to you a little bit about that and one of the things that happens so commonly, I guess this would be the most common thing that happens everywhere, is people make assumptions. A thought comes into your mind, you assume something about the other person and fail to check out whether what you've assumed is true. Before you know it you're in a vain imagination: they don't like me. They're not treating me right. They're this, they're this, they're this. Most relationships break down because of vain imaginations and people just never ask questions, check the facts. So you have to discipline your thought life and last week we shared with you some of the keys how to cleanse your imagination from pictures, how to take hold of thoughts as they come and to deal with them.
Today I want to share something that goes a bit deeper than that. I want to talk about the renewal of your mind, the renewal of your thinking, the cleansing of your imagination by renewing what's going on inside you. I want to share with you a few things that will help you because when we think about the renewing of the mind many times we think well I know what all that is about, but it's up to the Holy Spirit to take away the things that are bad in my life. And so if I just open up to the Holy Spirit, He'll just remove the bad things. Of course that's not true. He doesn't work that way at all, so what I want to do is I want to do this in two or three steps. I want to first of all explain to you how your memory works. I want you just to understand how God designed you to work, because He's not going to violate how you're designed to work, so if we just understand how our memory works, how God has wired us to operate, then we're going to look at how the Holy Spirit initiates healing of things that have been painful in our lives.
Then I want to look at what your part is in renewing your mind, so three things. So we'll look at the first thing then, is first of all I want to look just about how your memory operates and it's quite helpful. It operates on the basis of three things: one is impressions, two is repetition and three is association. I'll explain each of these in a moment. First of all your mind operates or your memory operates off impressions. That's how a memory is stored. How does it work? What happens? Well when you have an experience it's stored in your mind as a memory, so every experience you've ever had there was some storage of it took place in your mind. The information is passed into your mind along electrical paths called neurons. They're just like an electrical circuit, that's all it is. The information comes in, passes on and goes into your mind and then it's stored inside there.