July 14, 2019 AM
Dr. Michael Catt - 1905
#2 in series
Battle for the Mind
Be Alert
Selected Scriptures
OVERVIEW
As you read the New Testament, it is clear there is a battle for the mind. The enemy wants to fill our minds with half-truths, deception, and temptation. We are told in the Bible to renew our minds, but that doesn't happen without personal discipline. We can't win the battle over the world, the flesh, and the devil with our minds in neutral. There is practical instruction available in the Word of God for living a life full of truth, victory, and power. In the first message, we laid the ground work for this series about the mind. We examined the mind in its darkened, defiled state and learned how to renew our mind under the authority of Christ. Without Christ, we miss the will and purpose of God for our lives. The natural mind can’t work properly because God is missing.
For further study, this series is available online at sherwoodbaptist.net/messages.
It’s easy to get out of balance. People do it in every area of life. It can lead to obsessions, hoarding, and over-indulging. Because we no longer have a biblical standard in education, politics, or economics, we’re out of balance.
I. BE ALERT TO THE ATTACKS ON YOUR MIND
Satan has no new strategies, but we still fall for the same ones Adam and Eve fell for.
“As Christians we are not only to know the right world view, the world view that tells us the truth about what is, but consciously to act upon that world view so as to influence society in all its parts and facets across the whole spectrum of life, as much as we can to the extent of our individual and collective ability.” – Francis Schaeffer
II. BE ALERT TO THE TRUTH OF GOD’S WORD
“The mind is the divine element and links us to God and draws us upward. Our flesh is of the earth. It draws us down.” – James Montgomery Boice
Salvation is a change of heart:
The result:
“Our conduct should always be to us something which is inevitable in view of what we believe. . . . If my Christian living is not quite inevitable to me, if I am always fighting against it and struggling and trying to get out of it, and wondering why it is so hard and narrow, if I find myself rather envying the people who are still back in the world, there is something radically wrong with my Christian life.” – D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
III. BE ALERT TO YOUR RESOURCES IN CHRIST
Let’s finish this message with some practical truths that we need to apply on a daily basis:
If you’re dead to sin, then you need to inform your mind that you are free from: