Strongholds 9 Time to Tighten Up

[HKHaugan]

“We use our powerful God-tools for smashing warped philosophies, tearing down barriers erected against the truth of God, fitting every loose thought and emotion and impulse into the structure of life shaped by Christ. Our tools are ready at hand for clearing the ground of every obstruction and building lives of obedience into maturity (2Cor.10:5-6 The Message).”

During WW2 “Loose lips sink ships” were poster words used to make people aware that careless loose talk involving ship movements could endanger lives and the war effort. Apply this to other kinds of ships, relationships. Gossip is a form of looseness that can create havoc in relationships. The use of expressions like “I thought you already knew this or I wouldn’t have said it’ or “I thought you ought to know” or “the Lord told me to tell you” are impulses to give the impression of having superior authority, understanding and judgment. Social compromise is an equally impulsive way of momentarily skirting a sensitive area giving the impression of wisdom. These are all spun out of strongholds and strongholds are fueled by fear.

Apart from God and because of consequent sin it is inevitable we will experience ‘loose thoughts, emotions and impulses’ the operative word being ‘loose.’ Thoughts pop into our heads, thoughts borne out of the blue. They can be as destructive as murder or as constructive as insights. Emotions arise at the slightest provocation. We can be mad, sad, glad or afraid at the unexpected appearance of a facial expression or a confronting statement. Impulses to act are momentary and seem to have no logical source. “It just seemed right at the moment” is our lame excuse. It is this random nature of mind, heart and spirit separated from God that illustrates our inconsistency and instability. It is also the reason God gave us a law and structure to recapture and place our fragmented experience into the kind of order that would bring it back into line with Him.

Then finally, of course, it took Jesus coming to give us someone whose entire being is totally consistent, stable, spontaneously right and complete. He never wavers. He is a perfectly integrated combination of mind, heart and Spirit. He never has moments of insecurity, doubt, erratic thoughts or questionable behavior. He was never a ‘boys-will-be-boys’ child or a young man who ‘sowed wild oats’ or had the need to be ‘macho.’ He didn’t spend time fantasizing nor was He a wishful thinker. He was who He was from birth to death and simply the same person before, during and after His life on earth. The marvelous thing about Jesus is that in Him what your see is what you get, what you get is who you can trust and who you can trust is what stabilizes you not only for this world but into eternity.

His life is the structure that enables us to take those loose thoughts, emotions and impulses, face them, analyze them, throw out the negative ones and retain those consistent with God’s intentional plan for each of us. The structure of Jesus’ life is our measuring rod. How He thinks, decides and acts removes the looseness and realigns the thoughts, emotions and impulses of our mind, heart and spirit. It’s much like the piano tuner who comes in with his tuning fork, gets the right key and retunes each string until it is in harmony with all the rest while retaining the uniqueness of tone and note in each string. In the same parallel the Lord returns our ear to hear, to know, to play and to sing our part in God’s great chorus and symphony.

Consider Jesus’ mind. He thought God’s thoughts. He was instructed in God’s Word. His decisions were spiritually grounded and His actions were consistent with His thoughts and decisions. No matter how He was confronted He was always the same person. It was His enemies whose fears and conspiracies were loose, random, impetuous and impulsive designed for social and political self-preservation not spiritual preservation. The Pharisees, Sadducees and priests were geared to momentary worldly security not eternal security. Jesus stood on eternal values, obedience to His Father’s will and always consistently walking in the Holy Spirit.

The clincher in all of this is that the structure of Jesus’ life, into which we fit all our thoughts, emotions and impulses, is alive because He is alive and present through faith. Actually faith is the living structure of who He is. The Spirit is the power of His faith and the Father is His focus. It is Jesus into whom we fit all of our thoughts, emotions and impulses and it is the Holy Spirit He has given us who guides us through to Him. He is the invisible Counselor, the third person of God, the Spirit of Truth who sorts out the thoughts, emotions and impulses and turns them into paving stones He uses to rebuild our way of responding like Jesus. As Paul says, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose (Rom.8:28 The Message).”

So what we do is to repent for the looseness that sin exploits, pray for the power of the Spirit to make us conscious of Jesus’ presence and let the Word fill the places where the looseness has corrupted us. Then by faith we allow the Holy Spirit to reshape us at the moment of our mind, heart and spirit encounters. We are always going through those encounters because sin distorts our perceptions. If we are not experiencing this process then we are not growing spiritually. This process of repentance, confession, forgiveness and fitting our lives into the structure of Jesus’ life is biblically called salvation and sanctification. This is the gift given us through His Cross and Resurrection. Amen? Amen!