The Rules of Engagement

The Battlefield Is Your Mind

thoughts running through our minds are our thoughts and not suggestions, projections, prompting, or urges emanating from him. He begins his warfare strategy by bombarding our minds with a cleverly devised pattern of little nagging thoughts, suspicions, doubts, fears, wonderings, reasonings, and theories. He moves slowly and cautiously, deliberately and patiently. He will never say, “ You are sick,” “you are poor,” “you should leave your church,” or “you are never going to make it.” He will say, “ I am sick,” “I am leaving this church,” or “I am never going to make it,” because he really wants us to believe that the thoughts he places in our minds are ours. I remember returning home one night after ministry. I sat on the edge of my bed, and all of a sudden, “I” felt sad. Thoughts started racing through my mind, and my internal dialogue was incredibly and unusually negative. Since I am a basically positive person, initially I dismissed it as fatigue. However, the thoughts became so overpowering that I began to entertain them as if they were mine. I wanted to leave the ministry and forget about everything and everyone. Then the Holy Spirit rose up in me and instructed me to fight against the thoughts. I took on a posture of prayer and spiritual warfare, commanding the spirit to go. After binding and loosing and releasing the spirit from its assignment, I heard a whoosh sound and felt a presence leave my bedroom through the window. The thoughts and emotions I claimed as mine were really spirits of depression, death (trying to abort my ministry, purpose, and destiny), and frustration. This is how deceptive the weapons of the enemy are. Remember: when spirits come, they come to give diabolical counsel to your mind because this level of warfare is spiritual, not carnal. 2. The mind is the greatest battlefield. The spiritual struggle presented in the story of this lost son further proves the value of our minds. It is not any outside, physical need that causes the son to ask for his money. He is at war within himself between the good that God has for his life and the bad that the enemy has strategically planned for him. The mind is the greatest battlefield. Within it the fate of a man’s eter nity is decided, souls are lost or won, and destinies are fulfilled or fizzled out. Here is a simple principle you can apply as you learn about beating the enemy at his own game. If you don’t really know what to pray about, observe what the enemy is doing and pray the opposite.

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