First from the book of Ephesians chapter 4 reading from verse 22. All says that you should have put aside being controlled by your old lifestyle, the old human frailty that's being corrupted under the influence of deceptive evil cravings. You are to be continually rejuvenated spiritually in your mind and you should have put on the new person who under the influence of God was created in righteousness and true holiness.

And then another verse that brings it into focus Romans chapter 12. This is one and two. I urge you therefore brothers and sisters because of the compassions of God to offer your bodies specifically as a living sacrifice dedicated completely pleasing to God which is the logical thing for you to do.

And do not allow yourself to be molded by the world system but be in a process of being transformed by a total renovation of your mind. That you may confirm through testing what the good pleasant and complete will of God is. Now the scriptures tell us in that first passage that we have put off the old life.

It's a step that we took when we received Jesus as our personal savior. It was a choice we made. We put the old life behind us.

Okay and then it says that we after we did that we then received and put on a new person. The new you created in the image of God that God has provided for us through Jesus. Both of these are once only steps.

They're a choice that we made. I put off the old life. I put on the new life.

Now if we just left it there you may think well that would be nice wouldn't it. But you know I still find myself struggling with some of the old habits. I still find myself battling to overcome sinful desires and weaknesses in my life.

So if I've put off the old life and I've put on the new one why am I not already perfect? See that little verse sandwiched in the middle is the part that we need to understand. You are to be continually rejuvenated spiritually in your mind. That second passage Paul says you are to be in a process of continually being transformed by total renovation of your mind.

You see our mind is the battleground. Our mind is where the problems occur and our mind needs a lot of work. It needs continual work and that process will continue until the Lord comes.

We receive our new bodies and we're permanently in his presence. So throughout this life we are in a process of renewing our mind. Now the word mind in English is translated from several different Greek words in the language that the Bible is written in and actually English is probably one of the few languages that has kind of one word mind.

Which embraces all sorts of things like imagination, thoughts, intelligence. We kind of lump this all under the word mind. Growing up in English I took this for granted and I remember the first time I was standing preaching through an interpreter in a foreign language which was Swiss German at the time and I boldly said and mind and and the interpreter stood there and he for a moment he wasn't sure which word to use.

Of course there's more than one word for mind in that language and probably many other languages are the same. I think even Afrikaans has different words for what we would call mind. So what am I referring to when I say mind? See we need to understand that very clearly otherwise we're going to miss the point of what this renewing of the mind is all about.

Now we've learned that God has made us to be a spirit and a soul and a body and in the soul lies mind, emotions and will. Sounds pretty simple doesn't it? I have a spirit then I have a mind, emotions and will and I have a body. That's just one mind but you know our very experience in life shows us that mind can change and psychologists have through research separated two different kinds of mind which they call the conscious mind and the subconscious mind.

I'm sure you've heard those terms. Well you know isn't mind mind? What do we mean by conscious mind? About subconscious mind and then we are told that the subconscious mind is a whole lot stronger than our conscious mind and it controls us from deep inside without us even being aware of it. If you've studied any of the self-help teachings of this world and I've studied probably all of them, most of them come down to this one basic principle that if you can feed and control and program your subconscious mind you will automatically become a success because your subconscious mind will drive you to automatically do the right things and to succeed in everything that you do in life and so they teach you many different ways to do that.

Some have even suggested you play tapes while you go to sleep. I tried that. I just had a very restless sleep.

When I woke up in the morning nothing was in there. It just didn't get in there. How do we get it down into that subconscious mind? Okay so what the psychologists tell us, what does the bible tell us? Let's have a look at this more from a scriptural point of view.

The scriptures teach us that the spirit that God put in us is the path that God communicates through because God is a spirit and therefore in order for God to communicate with man he put a piece of himself into man, a spirit, and God's order was that your spirit should control your soul and that your body would do what the soul and the spirit tell it to do. So God made man to operate and if we did that we would be the efficient machine. And God made us to be.

Now our body makes contact with the world that we live in. It should be in submission to the spirit and the soul but sometimes it's not in submission at all. It actually dominates and controls and when that happens the bible uses the term known as walking in the flesh, not in the body, in the flesh.

That word flesh essentially means living a life dominated and controlled by the desires of your body. So we can walk in the spirit where we are ruled and controlled by the influences of our spirit or we can walk in the flesh where we are dominated and controlled by the desires of our body. Okay now the soul is the channel for the spirit.

What is in our minds affects our feelings, our emotions, and what is in our emotions controls our wills. You know we use this term willpower. It's a oxymoron or a misnomer.

There is no power in the will. The will actually is the weakest part of us. The will actually submits very quickly and readily to our feelings and desires.

I think we all know that when you see something you really want it's very hard for your will to say you shouldn't get that, you can't afford it, it's bad for you, don't eat it, you'll get fat. Because the emotions say oh that is so good, I really want that, I really want that and the will says okay whatever you want I will submit. Goes like a lamb to the slaughter.

So how do we control our emotions? We can't because our will has no power over the emotions. Our emotions are controlled by our mind. When you think of something your emotions are stirred and your will then responds.

See if you're a foodie as many South Africans are, the thought of food is in your mind. You can smell it, it's getting close to lunch. Can you smell that sizzling steak on the bride there or whatever your favorite food is.

The emotions are stirred, the will says let's get out of here, stop preaching, I want to go eat. See that's the way God's made us. It's our natural.

So you may think that your will is the controlling part of your soul but actually it's not, your mind is the controlling part of the soul. Okay but the trouble is there's two kinds of mind. And here's how those two kinds of mind arise.

You see you have your spirit deep within, the body on the outside and sitting between the two is the soul. Now there is a link, a joining of both of these. Where the body joins the soul, it does it through the brain.

It's what we call our conscious mind, our thinking process. The thoughts that we think, that we choose to think, that we have some degree of control, the active part as we go out day by day. That's the conscious mind.

Okay the subconscious mind is where the soul joins the spirit. It lies below the surface of consciousness, it's subliminal. See now these influences, they affect us not so directly like the conscious mind and we have no control over them because they're below the surface.

Our will cannot control the subconscious mind. It can only control the conscious mind. Can you see that? Okay now here's an interesting thing.

Even when your conscious mind is not active, your subconscious mind is still functioning. We look at a person who's lying in a coma and we think they're unconscious, they don't know what's going on and people walk into the into the room and they make comments about the person only to find out later when the person comes around that that unconscious person could hear every single word that was spoken. You see the subconscious mind is not affected by the conscious.

It lies below the surface. It picks data up all the time. Now that can be quite frightening isn't it? Very careful when you're around a person who's unconscious or in a coma that you say something thinking they're gone.

Their mind of the soul and the spirit are still very much alive even though the brain is out of action. Okay now the holy spirit works through our human spirit. They're not the same thing.

They're two different spirits. They are very closely intertwined that sometimes you you're not sure what's coming from which but it's possible for your spirit to function independently of the holy spirit. So if God wants to work through you, if he wants to speak to you, if he wants to influence you in any way, he'll always do it via your spirit.

I've been listening to a guy who who's probably one of the first to lay out the concept of journaling. A brother by the name of Mark Verkler. He's one of the big names out there.

He's got a whole university, written a lot of books and he said how for years he wanted to hear the voice of God. And he kept asking people how to hear the voice of God. Nobody could tell him how to hear the voice of God.

He was waiting for this booming voice to come out you see. Until he discovered that God actually speaks in spontaneous thoughts that flow from deep within. See because God speaks always through your spirit.

Now God can speak direct to your mind which we call an external manifestation or an external anointing but that's a very special circumstance. But God is in you if you are a believer and his holy spirit is trying to speak to your spirit 24 hours a day. If you want to hear the voice of God you don't need to ask him Lord please speak.

He is speaking all the time. You just got to tune in your receiver to the right frequency so that you hear that voice. Okay so the holy spirit works in your spirit so that your spirit in turn can now influence your soul bring your body in order and cause you to live the kind of life that God intended.

But where's the battleground? Spirit influences the mind of the soul. Now the Greeks had a different word for that mind to what they did for the conscious mind. When the scripture speaks of the renewing of the mind it uses the Greek word nous which speaks of the imaginations and the inner mind the subconscious mind.

Paul knew about the subconscious long before the psychiatrist and psychologist discovered it. The other mind which is our general thoughts is deanoia. Some cult leader decided to form a whole branch of so-called mind methods which he called dianetics.

Ever heard of dianetics? The great big cult that follows the dianetics. Very subtle. What are they called again? It's one of the big cults.

It'll come to me. Okay they took the word dianoia and turned that into a study of the mind and they use mind bending techniques. Many people follow it like some of the big movie stars all into this cult.

Scientology, Scientology. L. Ron Hubbard the founder of Scientology wrote a book called Dianetics the New Kind of Brain Surgery which is based on the word dianoia. Okay but the nous is the deeper mind through which God works.

Okay now how does this operate? The Holy Spirit works through our spirit. He pulls everything that he has into our spirit. Our spirit then in turn pours it into our soul and that allows it to influence our lives.

The bible calls that walking in the spirit. That's the way we're supposed to be living as believers. Now when you walk in the spirit it brings stability, it brings peace and it brings security within.

The whole world can be falling apart all around you but inside something stable and secure holds you. How do we get there? Simply by inviting the Holy Spirit to take control. Say oh Jesus I ask you to live your life in and through me now.

Holy Spirit I submit to you and I ask you to take control of my life and to live in me. As I go out today you speak through me. You put ideas in my mind.

You work through me. I invite you. See when you do that something takes place deep within.

It's not conscious. You're not hearing God shout at you all the time. It comes a deep inner peace.

When that's there you'll go into work and that person that always rubs you up the wrong way and gets you riled before the day starts doesn't affect you anymore. It's difficult to explain. It just comes a inner peace, inner control.

See that's walking in the spirit and we can all do that. We don't have to grow into it and be super spiritual and very close to God and free of sin. We simply invite the Holy Spirit to take control and we come to that place of security and stability.

Now that doesn't mean your conscious mind is under control. Your mind can be going crazy with all the weirdest thoughts. Things are happening all around you.

The world is falling apart. Your mind is trying to figure out what to do but your heart says it's okay. Got it under control.

Don't worry. I got it under control. See the two are totally different.

And sometimes when we listen to our conscious mind we think where is God. Lord where are you? What's happening? Everything is going wrong but listen, listen folks to the voice of your spirit, your inner heart. That is where this begins.

And we've got to learn to bring that other part under control. It's a warfare. It's a fight.

It's a daily battle. And the scripture uses that term warfare. It says this in 2 Corinthians 10 reading from verse 4. For the weapons of our warfare are not fleshly but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds, casting down imaginations and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God and bringing into captivity every thought for the beings of Christ.

It's not automatic. It's a fight. And you've got to take your weapons and wage your warfare.

You've got to take control of your mind and bring your thoughts into captivity. Though deep within. He's got it.

And you've got it. You've got the peace. You've got the assurance.

You are not moved. But your mind is going crazy. You're going to have to do something about it.

Bring it under control. It's not going to happen automatically. Now for us to function this way, our soul has to be efficient and in the right condition.

Before the power of the spirit can come out, manifest through our soul into the rest of our being, it needs a channel to work through. If your soul is not in a condition that the power of God from the Holy Spirit via your spirit can be released, it'll hit a wall. It's just been a bump.

It's like God's power is there. There's a laser beam, but there's a shield in the way because your soul is blocking it. So we've got to change the soul.

We've got to condition it. In my teaching on way of blessing, I call this building a template for the soul. I taught it in quite a lot of detail, but I really couldn't tell you fully how to build that template.

Not until now. Today I'm going to show you how to build that template for your soul. And when you build that template, it's like you formed a beautiful opening for the power of God to come through as it's blocked.

God wants to renew your noose, the subconscious. Now, when we think about memory, we tend to think, well, what is your memory? My memory is where I remember things that happened in the past. Not entirely.

Not entirely. How about memorizing words? Memorizing lists. By the age of 11, I memorized all the books of the Bible.

I've quoted them for you before. I won't do it again. But I can give you all 66 of them in a row like that.

I never forgot it since I learned it at the age of 11 in my Sunday school class. Now, where does that kind of memory get stored? Then there is memory where you remember something that happened, where you can picture the whole scene in full color. You can hear the sounds that were there.

If there was a smell, a distinct smell in the air, you can almost even still smell it or taste it. You can feel what you felt. All of your emotions and everything are alive.

Now, that's another kind of memory. I'd like to show you that these kinds of memories sit in different parts of our mind. You see, when we memorize data, knowledge, it's in the conscious mind.

Your brain is actively involved in that. They say that you have memory cells in your brain, which are like a tape recorder or a hard drive that actually stores that information. You sit down to write your exam at school.

You start jogging that hard drive and saying, hey, yield up some of your data, please. You try and recall it and get some of it back. But you're doing all of that consciously.

It's in the conscious mind. However, memory that is stored in the subconscious mind never carries data. It carries the five senses.

It carries pictures, sounds, tastes, smells, and it also includes all of your emotions, positive or negative. You see that? Now, let me prove this to you. Think of the last time you read your Bible.

Hopefully, that was last night or yesterday. Maybe you do that once a day if you have a Bible reading. Okay.

Now, firstly, can you even remember which passage you read? And if you did, can you remember what it was about? And if you can, could you quote me some of it? No, I only read it once. Okay. Perhaps you watched a movie last night.

It was a movie, and what inevitably happens in a movie is we get wrapped up in the movie and we kind of become part of the movie, don't we, as though I'm living in the movie. Now, tell me what happened in the movie. Can you recall right now any of the key scenes of that movie? Can you visualize and see the people? Can you hear what they said? And you only watched it once.

Why is it so easy for you to remember that and you can't remember the words that you read in the Bible? Because it goes to two different minds. Each of them function very differently. Scientists have tried to categorize these, and they tell us you have a left brain and a right brain.

And the left brain is very logical and systematic, and that's where you learn facts. The right brain is very emotive. They say women are more right-brained.

They don't think logically. Not true. See, they think in pictures.

They think intuitively. See, it's not left or right brain. It's actually conscious and subconscious mind.

It's a different part of our being. Everything that's happened in your life is stored there in your soul, in the mind of your soul, in that deep recess that you cannot access directly. It lies below the surface of the conscious mind.

Now, what kind of things get recorded in the subconscious mind? Well, the first and most obvious thing is pictures rather than words. Okay, so you can remember pictures. You can more easily remember a picture.

They say a picture's worth a thousand words. It's true. However, if you were only watching pictures, you wouldn't remember so much.

We tried watching a movie with the sound turned off. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Without the sound, the movie means nothing.

Then they add the musical sound effects behind it, and music is another whole thing. I'm not even going to have time to cover today, but it has its own power to get things back into that inner mind. Now, let me tell you what you remember instantly.

It's not a picture. It's not what you heard, and yet it's both. You see, if you've looked through a photograph album, or you've looked through magazines, and you've seen pictures, some pictures impress you, some you just see them, and they're gone, and you don't remember them.

But when you watch the pictures in a movie, why did you remember those pictures? Because they were more than pictures. They included action. They included sound, speech, everything that goes with it.

They included full emotional content, which the chances are you got stirred up in, oh, I wish somebody would kill him. Oh, I hate him. Come on.

That's what it's designed to do. Oh, that emotion is that you remember that ogre in that movie. Oh, he got what was coming to him.

Thank God. Eventually, they got him. Now, I'm building up to something for a very important reason here.

When you see something that is pictures, with sound, with all the senses, if possible, includes action, includes something out of the ordinary, includes emotion, it goes straight into your subconscious, boom, without repetition. Try and memorize the scripture. I had my favorite.

If you abide in me, my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it shall be done for you. It's not a very long verse. You know how many times I had to say it over and over and over again before it finally penetrated my brain and stayed there? And if I didn't repeat it for a week or so, I forgot it again.

I had to repeat it again and again and again. If you've ever done scripture memorization, that's hard work. It's very rewarding, but it's hard work.

So, how much of the Bible do you remember? Well, how then, if the Word of God is so important to us, how do we get that into our memories? It will affect us permanently. You are absorbing information every day when you go out. Every day when you go out in life, you are seeing, hearing, and experiencing life.

With everything that goes with it, all the emotions, all the stresses, all the negatives and the positives, they are getting fed in, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. At the end of the day, you have X number of hours of data input that's gone into your inner soul. And your soul actually has to do something with that.

It has to arrange it, categorize it, index it, lay it out systematically for recall. Did you know that? Say, well, you got how many years? How old are you? Boy, me, I've got many years of data stored there. So, every day when I experience things, at the end of the day, God's made it that we have to go to sleep.

While we're asleep, he's arranged for a function called dreaming. The scientists call it rapid eye movement sleep, during which you dream. And during that phase, your inner being is taking all of today's data and finding where it can fit it in, into the catalogs of what's been there before.

Here's an event. What does it link with from the past? Where can I file it under? Okay? And sometimes we get data that says we've already got a copy of that. Or, you know what? Today's copy is actually a bit better than last week's or last year's or the last 10 years.

I think we should update our data and put today's data in and get rid of the stuff that was there before. You know what happens when that takes place? All that stuff that is getting rid of comes out in a dream. We call it junk dreams.

Don't you wonder why you dream absolute garbage sometimes? Because your inner psyche is taking all that new data that got fed in, rearranging, keeping what's needed, and throwing away what's not needed. And if you didn't dream, you go mad. You don't need lots of hours of actual sleep for physical rest for your body.

You can get away with a couple of hours quite comfortably. But if you don't dream and spend hours in dreaming, and it takes hours for all that rearranging to take place, if you don't allow that, if you force yourself to stay awake, eventually your soul will start to make you dream while you're awake and you'll start to have hallucinations. You'll start dreaming while you're awake.

It's been proved. So it's very important that what is stored there in that subconscious is good stuff. Trouble is, how much good stuff are we putting in there? We go out into this world and we are exposed to the filth and the evil and the hatred and the strife.

We listen to the radio and we hear them discussing the hatred and the strife. We switch on our televisions and we see the news, which is loaded with hatred and strife and negativity. And then we chill out by watching a movie which is filled with the three roots of the flesh, bitterness, lust, and covetousness.

Somebody's got to die or get killed or hated. There's got to be sex and there's got to be money. That's what you're feeding into your inner soul all the time.

So your spirit comes and says, I want to now send some stuff out through the soul. Well, the spirit is not wanting to send sex or bitterness or lust for money and things. That's not his motivation.

He's getting blocked. He needs some opening. What does he need? He needs what he showed us in his word.

Now, how do we bring our souls to the place where that template is formed and where the Holy Spirit can now flow out freely? Well, the first thing we've got to do is we've got to deal with the events of the past, the bad events of the past, the hurtful and painful events of the past, the bitter events of the past, all the people that harmed us and the people we got bitter against, the people who humiliated and put us down and created insecurities in us. And all of those negatives, they've got to be removed. It's called transforming.

Transformation by the renewing of the mind. Now, we had a seminar last year called Transformation. That was the year we learned some things.

We found out that God, by his power, can change us inside, can take away all of the bad content. Not the memory, but the bad content of the memory. We can now still review those events in our minds, but all the negative emotions, all the hatred and strife are taken out.

You realize that that process of inner healing is one of the most important parts of renewing your mind. You say, well, yes, I was there at the seminar, or I was prayed for, and I've dealt with all my hurts of the past. Thank God I put it all behind me.

It doesn't trouble me anymore. Whoopie doo, I've arrived. That's what the scripture says.

It says you are to continually be transformed by the continual renewing of your mind. It's a continual process, folks. It hasn't ended.

You only dealt with some of the major things that were there. You've got years and years. You ever try to sit down and write your life story? I tried it recently.

I'm getting old. I need to leave something behind. I said, let me write my life story.

Man, my life has been so full. You know, I'm going to take a full set of encyclopedias. I can't even remember all of it.

Hey, can you remember what happened last year? Day by day, you can't. There's too much there. There's so much in us that still needs to be healed and still needs to be transformed.

Now, the scripture doesn't say go ahead and transform your mind. It says be transformed. It's a passive thing.

It's something that needs to get done to you. The Holy Spirit is the only one who can do that. So if you think you're going to do this in your own strength, it's not going to happen.

You should be continually going back there and saying, Lord, what else is there in me? What have I still got there? It's blocking you. It's blocking your power from flowing through me. Now, every day you're adding more.

Every day you're having hurtful experiences, negative experiences, and positive experiences. And you know, it's not what's happened. It's not the pictures.

It's not even the events. It's the emotional content in them. It's how it affected us.

It's our feelings, our stresses, our fears, our anxieties, our depressions. These are the things that get locked up with those memories. And we're now accumulating on a daily basis new things that are going to block the power of God from flowing out of us.

The Holy Spirit wants to rule and pour forth his fruit of love and joy and peace. We'll just invite him to do that. Are we going to do it continually? Well, some people, they try it a little bit different.

They say, I'll tell you what, I will take some drugs. I will deal with it. Psychiatry has got a little thing they discovered.

They stick two electrodes on your brain and pass a huge electric current through it. It's known as electroshock therapy. And it actually destroys half your brain cells, your memory cells, so you forget everything that happened.

But sad to say, it doesn't affect the inner mind. It just erases the memories, so you forget the hurtful events in your conscious mind. But your heart has not been changed.

You may take drugs. You may take alcohol. And to numb your brain and escape into that make-believe world as a temporary thing.

And again, you're only affecting your conscious mind. Because when it wears off, bam, it's back. And what is deep within you is still there.

So Paul writes, and he compares these two. In Ephesians 5 verse 18, he says, do not continually get drunk on wine, which leads to excess. But rather, continue to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

And that's a continuous present tense. Continue to be being filled. Continue to be in a process of being filled with the Spirit.

You see the same thing. The renewing, the filling of the Spirit is not a once only event. We've got to keep letting the Holy Spirit fill us and overflow us.

Well, there's one thing we can do. And this is the crux of my message today, where I'm getting. And I'm only just going to touch on this subject, because this subject is so big, that I'm probably going to be teaching a whole series on it eventually.

We can create new events from the Word. I say that again, we can create new events in our lives from the Word. How do we do that? We use a process known as meditation.

Meditation. Oh, that's that spooky thing where you get in there, let your mind go blank. Let those thoughts come.

Oh, it's all Eastern mysticism. They'll teach you how to do this. All the big self-help people out there saying, I spend time meditating every day.

Because of that, we've thrown away meditation, not realizing it's actually an absolutely scriptural term. The word meditate is actually in the Bible, in the Old Testament, and in the New. You know some of these.

Joshua 1.8, this book of the Lord will not cease to come out of your mouth, but you will meditate in it daily and at night, so that you're sure to carry out everything that's being written in it, for then you will cause your journey to be prosperous, and you will succeed wisely. Now, meditation means changing your thought processes. Paul speaks about it.

That one is from the Old Testament. In Philippians 4.6, it says, be anxious about nothing, but in everything through prayer and petition, with giving of thanks, let your requests be made known to God, and the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will keep watch over your hearts and your minds, noose, in Christ Jesus. Well, how does this happen? Paul gives us just a hint.

He says, finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever sounds good, if there's anything moral, and if there's anything worthy of praise, meditate. Meditate on these things. Now, I hope I proved to you meditation is scriptural, and not only that, it's actually a commandment.

Have you been obeying the Lord's command to meditate? I'm going to look up transcendental meditation and sit there going, um. That's not what it's about. Now, I've heard people speak about meditation.

I've heard some good teaching on it through the years, but what I'm going to teach you now, I've never heard taught. This is the first time you're going to hear it, and I don't know if anybody else will ever teach it to you this way, but I've laid a foundation now to help you understand where I'm going. In order to meditate, you must take the Word of God.

That's what God told Joshua, meditate on the scriptures, and you must apply the five senses to the Word. If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it shall be done for you. What do you see right now? A lot of words.

You're going to have to change that passage into pictures, into sounds, into feelings, taste and smell if you can. Now, that's not going to happen automatically because your left brain thinking just sees the words. It sees the phrases, and I've taught how to analyze the scriptures and break them down, very left-brained, and try and pull the truth, and that's wonderful, but how do we get it down there? See, we can get it up here by studying it, and that's what Bible study does.

The Bible study is not enough. We've been learning on our Thursday evening sessions here, our fellowship meeting, to take the Word and to turn it into something more real to us. See, we've actually been trying to teach you a simple process of meditation.

So, you've got to take a scripture and you've got to convert it into a picture, but a picture is not enough. Now, for years, I've said that's enough. If you can just create a picture.

See, if you abide in me or if you remain in me, well, we need a picture here. What does this look like? Very difficult to understand. Here's him and I'm in him.

You may have to take some illustrations from life of something being inside of something and remaining there, but there's no action to it, and without action, it's not going down yet. It's going to be very transitory. You see, it's not easy to remember a picture.

If you close your eyes now and try to deliberately visualize, even a person that you know well, you've actually got to think now. You can sort of see them in your mind, but you've got to think if you want to make that a real picture. Try and remember your mom.

She dresses different every time. Wears a different wig, different clothes. Sometimes she smiles.

Which picture are you going to remember? Remember the fight you had with her last night. Ooh, yes, yeah, she was screaming at me. Can you see it? See, because there was action to it.

There was emotion in it. You know what I'm talking about? See, those are the things we remember. That's why we remember movies even more than we remember, okay? Sometimes we remember a book that we read because we build our own pictures and see the event in our mind.

But it's got to be an event, folks. It's not enough that it's just a picture. It must be an event.

Well, what event is created now when you read that scripture? If you can create an event out of that scripture, that scripture will go straight into your inner mind and you'll remember it. You'll remember it perfectly every time because you'll remember an event. If you can add emotions to it, add your own feelings, just like you do when you get involved in a movie and read yourself into the movie, pick up those emotions.

If you can do that with the word, then you have finally learned to meditate. Well, let me give you first the first step that will make it easier for you to do that, okay? If you just close your eyes like people seem to teach meditation and try and visualize something, I challenge you to take any image you like, even something you know well, and keep it in your mind for an extended period. You'll hold it there maybe for a few seconds and some other thoughts are going to come passing by.

Some noise is going to distract you. Some responsibility will interfere and you'll find, oh, I was thinking about that. Okay.

Let me think it. Let me think it. Here it is.

My boss is saying to me, I'm going to give you a raise because you've worked so hard. Oh, it's like a good dream somebody wakes you up. You wanted to carry on dreaming.

It's hard. Here's the first thing that will help you remember it. Speak it.

Speak it. While you are speaking, your mind builds pictures. Okay.

I'm standing here behind this wooden pulpit today. It's taken me up to about a year, this pulpit, and I'm walking from side to side of this pulpit. See, now I can remember so much more just because I said it.

Just because I said it. Okay. So, if you abide in me, what does that mean? I see that God has taken me and put me inside Jesus and he's holding me close with his arms right now.

Can you see that picture? See, because I'm speaking words. If you say those words, I see him and he's holding me. He's holding me very close.

I can feel my head up against his chest. I can smell his clothes. It's a nice smell.

I feel so secure. Oh, I hope he just holds me for a long time because it feels so good. I feel so safe.

Can you see the difference? I'm abiding in him. Next time you read that scripture, remember that picture. The scripture will come straight back to you.

You may not even remember the exact words and different translations have different words. I've re-translated it if you remain in me. He goes further than that.

He says, and my words remain in you. Which words? They are rhema words. They are live, spoken words.

So, as Jesus holds me, as I'm there close to his chest, holding me close, he speaks to me and his words go right into me. Oh, oh, such lovely words. What is he saying to you? Well, that's your choice.

What is he saying to you? I love you. You're very special to me. I have great plans for you.

I want you to have good sense. Let those words penetrate you and hold on to them. So, I'm abiding in him and his rhema words are remaining in me.

Every time I get into that situation where he's holding me close and I'm abiding in him and he starts speaking his words to me, he gives me a promise. He says, if you will do this continuously, ask me for whatever you want. So, what are you going to ask him for? There you are, close in his arms, telling you good things and you say to him, Lord, this is what I really want.

According to that scripture, his answer is going to be, you've got it. You've got it. It's yours.

Now, don't you find that a lot easier to remember that verse with all those pictures? See? I'd like to do a meditation version of the Bible. It'll take me the rest of my life, no longer. But I'd love to take key scriptures like that and paint little word pictures.

I'm going to do it. I'm going to start doing it. I'm going to start taking some key scriptures and I'm going to give you Les Cross's meditation version of the Bible.

You can take that and use some of your own ideas and change it. But you're going to remember the word in a more powerful way than you ever. And not only are you going to remember it, you're going to feel it.

It's going to change your emotions. And you know what? It's going to build a template in your soul that when the Holy Spirit comes, he says, Oh, yes, there's something I can work through. The more of those you put in, the wider the pipe gets.

The more of his power he can pour through you. So, I don't have time. You shouldn't do that with scriptures all the time.

You'll spend three hours watching a movie. Come on. We'll spend hours doing the things we find fun.

How much more are we going to gain when we take the time to meditate his words? Now, how do I know that all of this is having an effect on me? How do I know? Sometimes you don't see it yourself. Just ask the people around you. Paul says in 1 Timothy 4 verse 15, writing to his spiritual son, Timothy, he says to him, Meditate upon these things.

Give yourself wholly to them so that your progress may be evident to everyone. And people start saying, Hey, what's happened to you? You know, you used to scowl all the time, but now I see you smiling a lot. You don't seem so uptight anymore.

You know, you always seem so stressed. You always had those lines on your face. What happened? What happened? You seem to have a peace about you, a calm about you, you know? Okay.

You're not going to reach perfection, folks. I don't ever think you've arrived because you will be tested. The enemy will test you.

People will test you. You can't bear that she's got everything under control and I'm still frustrated. They will find some way of pulling you down and attacking you to see whether you've got is real.

It's a warfare, remember. You can come to that place where his peace and his love and his joy are flowing in you. To live the abundant life God offers, your soul has to be conditioned.

That can only happen when you invite the Holy Spirit to take control. Now, you can facilitate that by building some templates for your soul through a process of meditation in which you take the Word of God especially and convert it into pictures with speech. The word meditate there means not only to think but to matter.

You matter to yourself, you say it, you speak it, you think it, you speak it, you think it. When you do that, you build a little event. Remember that you're looking for an event, not just a picture but an event.

Well, you can take any event you like. If the scripture sparks off in you something that you really desire, see it happening. See it happening.

Say, the Lord's promised me this. This is what I see happening to me. I see that event.

Oh, I'm living in it. I'm enjoying it. I'm feeling the emotion of it.

I can almost taste it. It's going to go right down there and it's going to stay. You're going to check out some of that junk that you've been adding in there every day for years.

Now, if you do this daily, your life will be transformed. As your mind is renewed, you will start to live a life of walking in the Spirit. I remember this is a process that's going to continue to take place until Jesus comes.

We're not going to arrive, but we should get to the place where we start to see some degree of success, where those things that controlled us before are not controlling us anymore, where my irritation comes under control. Yes, I will get plenty of temptation to get irritated, but eventually I get to the place where I say, is it worth it? Is it worth me getting uptight because this person in front of me has taken so long to pull away from the robot? Is it worth it? Or can I just sit here and praise the Lord and say, I've got a few extra minutes to worship you. Hallelujah.

Praise you, Lord. Praise you, Lord. Honestly, if you let him, you'll take all the stress away.

You'll no longer be pressured. You'll no longer be full of fear. You'll just hear his positive words speaking in you all the time.

It goes through this continual process of your inner mind being transformed and renewed. In doing that, it will transform your whole life and bring you to the place where you can live that wonderful, successful, abundant life that the Lord has for each one of us. Father, I thank you for your word.

I thank you that your word is always so positive, Lord, and that if we'll apply it the way you teach it to us, we will see results. We will see success. I pray for each one that's heard this word today that the word itself will have penetrated their hearts.

Some of the pictures that were painted have sunk in. It will stay. It will displace some of the junk that's been there.

I pray that your people will be motivated to continue to feed in the good things, to displace the bad, and to trust you and reach out to you on a daily basis for that inner transformation, for the healing and the displacing of those things that are holding them back, until we rise up as a mighty army, victorious in you, Lord, taking this world for you, showing the world what it's like to have what you've given us, that we appreciate it, that we walk in it, that we become grounded in it. I know, Holy Spirit, that you're going to do just that as each one invites you and allows you to do that. Thank you for that in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Post A Review For This Book