Written by Eric Brown, Certified Faith-Based Clinical Counselor
How do you heal a person? By transforming and renewing their soul-ish thinking concepts. Your true identity as an imager of God is that of a living soul, created to behold and reflect God’s divine life power through your body as God’s temple.
The Power of Belief & Inner Self-Talk
The mind, as the leading part of your soul, controls the emotions, and the emotions greatly influence your free will’s choices. Tell me what you believe and what you are speaking into existence through your inner self-talk. Also, tell me why you believe what you currently believe, and you can be set free!
Do you know the origins of your belief system? Where did it come from? Your word, as your inner self-talk, is literally your bond because, as a man thinks, so will his reality be established. Was your current belief system handed down from a fallible or infallible source? Does the foundation of your belief system even claim to be the only unique source of truth and reality (1-Oneness)?
Once you settle this belief issue, the end result of correcting your self-talk will be perfect peace!
The Need for Holiness Over Moral Goodness
You can only get away with using something improperly for a little while. Eventually, the misuse and abuse will catch up with you, and the damage will be catastrophic.
What is the purpose of the soul-life? To lead the body or to be led by the body?
The primary reason you are carrying a great burden of stress and anxiety is that you are living from your body, for your body, and toward your body’s urges of death. Instead, you should be living toward the inner new birth reality, where you have been blessed with every spiritual blessing. This comes through an unceasing lifestyle of communing with the indwelling Comforter by being consumed with God’s living words rather than some foreign source of words.
Words are literally seeds that germinate in the fertile ground of your soul’s mentality.
Due to the fall of Adam, your body has become the degraded flesh nature and is, therefore, a dead entity. It is a completely depraved vessel that can only lead you to a self-serving, rebellious appetite unless it is fueled by the Holy Spirit of God.
Even if your actions are morally good, they are still in rebellion because only the Spirit of God can accomplish true righteousness. God is not after moral goodness—He is after holiness!
God requires holiness from you at a level He knows you can currently live up to, not at the highest infinite level of His sovereign status.
The Cleansing Power of The Word
You must come under the influence of the Spirit of God, just as an obese person comes under the influence of food, a sports fanatic comes under the influence of entertainment, and a drug addict comes under the influence of drugs and alcohol.
Sadly, we have become addicted to and overly sensitive to the sensing abilities of the fleshly body and its hormonal surges. However, we must now train to develop our superpowers of holy spiritual discernment in order to keep our rebellious body of death in check.
The world is a contaminating Anti-Christ spirit. To fellowship with it is an abomination to God’s Holy Spirit! We are in the world, but we must not be of its order.
In the Old Testament, the priests washed themselves from earthly defilement in the laver (Exodus 30:18-21). Now, the washing of the water purifies us from every defilement.
Day by day, morning and evening, we need to come to the Word of God and prayer to be cleansed by the washing of the water within the Word. By coming to the Word in this way, we are cleansed from the defilement we accumulate through our contact with the world and its improper pursuits and fellowships.
Whenever you engage with the world in the course of daily life, you need to return to the Word to be cleansed. Although we may not remember everything we read, we are still washed by the living words and made clean.
Let us be encouraged to come to the Living Word again and again to be washed. Remember that Jesus is The Word of God that put on a body. Therefore, to come to the Word is to come to Jesus.
Scriptural Inspiration
Genesis 2:7,17
then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living soul. but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
James 1:6-8
But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded (double-souled) man, unstable in all his ways.
Matthew 11:28-29
Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.
Matthew 6:31-34
Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.
2 Corinthians 3:16-18
But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord as in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another higher degree. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.
Hebrews 4:6-10
Since therefore it remains for some to enter it, and those who formerly received the good news failed to enter because of disobedience, again he appoints a certain day, “Today,” saying through David so long afterward, in the words already quoted, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.” For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on. So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.
Ephesians 4:17-20, 23-24
Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the vain futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous (insensitive) and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ!— and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.
Romans 12:2 ESV
[2] Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
John 17:3, 6, 8-9, 13-17, 20-23
And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. “I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world. Yours they were, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. For I have given them the words that you gave me, and they have received them and have come to know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. I am praying for them. I am not praying for the world but for those whom you have given me, for they are yours. But now I am coming to you, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves. I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.
Isaiah 26:2-4, 8-10 ESV
[2] Open the gates, that the righteous nation that keeps faith may enter in. [3] You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. [4] Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is an everlasting rock. [8] In the path of your judgments, O Lord, we wait for you; your name and remembrance are the desire of our soul. [9] My soul yearns for you in the night; my spirit within me earnestly seeks you. For when your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness. [10] If favor is shown to the wicked, he does not learn righteousness; in the land of uprightness he deals corruptly and does not see the majesty of the Lord.
