The Power of Right Believing: 7 Keys to Freedom from Fear, Guilt, and Addiction (19 page)

Max’s story doesn’t end here. Interestingly, two years after I received his email, one of the naval officers that he had given my tapes to actually wrote us to tell us how his own life had also been amazingly changed by the messages. As Robby told us his story, he mentioned Max—how two years after his trip to Singapore, he’d become a well-respected officer in jet pilot training and a man who stood out among his peers. The love and grace of God that had liberated him had also transformed him into someone that (in Robby’s words) “had so much of God’s love and joy in him that people just wanted to be around him.”

What an awesome testimony of God’s grace! I remember being so encouraged by what the Lord had done for Max when I first received his email some twelve years ago. Back then in 2002, God was beginning to show me how the gospel of grace needed to go beyond the four walls of our local church in Singapore. And about five years later, God opened the doors for us, and we began our first television broadcast in America in April 2007. Today we are broadcasting in more than two hundred countries across more than sixty television networks worldwide and are reaching millions with the gospel of grace. There is now a grace revolution sweeping across the globe!

Every day we are being contacted by precious people like Max,
who write in to share how their lives have been utterly transformed as they began to believe right in the person of Jesus. Whenever Wendy and I read the emails and letters that we receive from the ministry team, we feel so deeply humbled and grateful to Jesus for everything that He has done and continues to do in these lives.

I believe with all my heart that you are next in line. Whatever you are in need of—a breakthrough, miracle, healing, restoration, or deliverance—is just around the corner. You may not even be conscious of it, but God has already begun a work in you and He will surely complete it in your life.

There are so many powerful truths in
Winning the Battle of Your Mind,
the message that Max listened to eight times in a row when he was in the submarine. I would really like to bless you with this message. Books are powerful, but there is something special about listening to the preached Word. If you are interested, please log on to josephprince.com/power to download the free audio message. I believe that this resource will help you to receive a fresh impartation to win the battle for your mind.

The Enemy’s Mind Games

The devil loves to play mind games. When I was a young, impressionable believer, I was taught erroneously that a Christian could
commit what has become known as “the unpardonable sin” when he blasphemes against the Holy Spirit. Just the thought that I could commit this sin put me under severe oppression. That one thought opened up all kinds of terrible experiences in my life.

I was really worried that I had already committed the unpardonable sin and was on a one-way ticket to hell. The more I tried not to, the more I would have all kinds of blasphemous thoughts about the Holy Spirit when I prayed and even when I was earnestly worshiping God. It was a harrowing experience, with the devil relentlessly oppressing and attacking my mind with all kinds of evil thoughts.

So what is the “unpardonable sin”?

The unpardonable sin is simply the sin of an unbeliever continually rejecting Jesus as his or her Savior. By not accepting God’s free gift of salvation, he or she is saying, “I don’t need Jesus. I can very well save myself.” This was what the self-righteous Pharisees were doing in Jesus’ day, right in His presence. Despite all the amazing miracles of grace that He performed by the power of the Holy Spirit, they stubbornly refused to believe that He was the Messiah. They even had the audacity to say that His power and authority came from an evil spirit (see Matt. 12:24)!

My friend, it’s therefore impossible for you as a believer to commit this sin because you have
already
received Jesus as your Savior. Furthermore, there is absolutely no sin that His blood has not already cleansed you of. Every sin of yours has been forgiven and pardoned through His finished work at the cross. It’s an immaculate work. Jesus did not miss a single sin.

That’s why the apostle Paul, who wrote two-thirds of the New Testament, never mentioned the “unpardonable sin” in any of his
epistles to the churches. Don’t you think that if Christians could commit this sin and lose their salvation, Paul would have at least mentioned it once?

Unfortunately, no one taught me about God’s grace then, and I lived under this dark cloud of mental oppression for more than a year. Can you imagine that—just one thought kept me in bondage for such a long time! And it was through that traumatizing experience that I learned about the devil’s mind games.

As I shared in the previous chapter, the devil knows how to use the personal pronoun to deceive you. Instead of blatantly telling me, “You have committed the unpardonable sin,” I kept hearing in my mind, “
I
have committed the unpardonable sin.” And because I believed wrongly that a believer could commit this sin, it reinforced the devil’s lies in my head. I would constantly hear thoughts like, “
I
have blasphemed the Holy Spirit,” and “
I
have committed the sin for which there is no forgiveness,” and “
I
have failed and disappointed God.” The enemy would always drop in the pronoun “I” even though all this while, it was he who was planting these wrong imaginations and sliding these blasphemous thoughts into my head.

I would be praying to God, and these wrong, sometimes vulgar, thoughts would come in, and my response then typically was, “Oh my goodness! What is wrong with me? I am a Christian—I shouldn’t be thinking these kinds of thoughts!” At other times, the devil would knock me on the head with accusations like, “How can you think these thoughts?” or “What kind of sick person are you?” or “How can you think such nasty thoughts against that person and still call yourself a Christian?”

Have you experienced this before? The enemy is an expert at
throwing thoughts into your mind and then backing off and coming at you as a legalist to knock you on the head with the very thoughts that he first put in your head.

Winning the Battle

The key to winning the battle for your mind is to learn how to separate yourself from the evil thoughts planted by the enemy. Those thoughts are not yours! You are not responsible for those thoughts any more than you are responsible for any profanity spoken by someone who happens to be in your presence.

In the same way, whenever the devil sows wrong thoughts in your mind, your part is to know that those evil or impure thoughts are not from you. Disregard them with a firm belief in your heart that the thoughts are not from you. Believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are the righteousness of God, and just ignore those thoughts like you would ignore a person who is spouting profanity in your presence. Don’t give those thoughts any weight.

My mental oppression lasted for a year because I always felt that I had to do something about it. Have you been there before, where you felt like you just
had to
do something? Well, I felt responsible for those thoughts in my head, and the moment I believed those horrible thoughts were mine, the devil got me right where he wanted
me—defeated, guilty, and feeling condemned.
Every major bondage begins in the mind
.

God’s Word tells us, “Resist the devil and he will flee from you” (James 4:7). Do you know what the highest form of resistance is? It’s to simply
ignore
the thoughts of the devil! Ladies understand this well. They know that the best way to resist a guy is to simply ignore him. Imagine a lady walking by a construction site where all the men start making catcalls at her. A cool lady will simply walk on by, ignoring their catcalls. She knows better than to respond to these guys by barking at them to stop.

As for me, when I was trapped in mental oppression, I would rebuke the devil every time a bad thought floated through my mind. As you can imagine, I ended up rebuking the devil
all the time
. At the end of the day, I was more focused on and conscious of the devil than of God! God doesn’t want you devil-conscious; He wants you Jesus-conscious. You win the battle for your mind by simply ignoring the enemy. Don’t feel that you need to do something about those thoughts. When the devil suggests things to your mind, just ignore him. Spiritual warfare doesn’t have to be combative. It can be restful, peaceful, simple, and easy. It’s all about seeing Jesus’ finished work.

The Answer Is Simple

Many years after my experience with mental oppression—in fact, after I was already preaching the gospel of grace—I came across
the autobiography of John Bunyan. As I read it, I discovered that he—this well-respected seventeenth-century English preacher who wrote the best-selling book
The Pilgrim’s Progress
—had gone through a very similar experience with mental torment where he also found his mind constantly plagued by blasphemous thoughts against God.

In that autobiography,
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners
, Bunyan shared how during that terrible season “all my comfort was taken from me; then darkness seized upon me; after which, whole floods of blasphemies, both against God, Christ, and the Scriptures, was poured upon my spirit, to my great confusion and astonishment… I often found my mind suddenly put upon it to curse and swear, or to speak some grievous thing against God, or Christ his Son, and of the Scriptures.”
¹

When I read that, I was astounded but also greatly encouraged that someone like John Bunyan had gone through the same thing I did.

But even more significant for me was how freedom and victory finally came to him. One day while Bunyan was passing through a field, still having thoughts and fears that he wasn’t right with God, “suddenly,” he said, “this sentence fell upon my soul, Thy righteousness is in heaven.” He went on to say, “I saw, with the eyes of my soul, Jesus Christ at God’s right hand; there, I say, was my righteousness; so that wherever I was, or whatever I was doing, God could not say of me, He wants my righteousness, for that was just before him. I also saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse; for my righteousness
was Jesus Christ himself, ‘the same yesterday, and today, and forever.’ ”
²

How do you win this battle for your mind? My friend, the answer is found in the person of Jesus. He is your righteousness. Your righteousness is a person. He is in heaven and He can never be removed, no matter what you have or have not done. Your righteousness is Jesus Christ Himself, and He is the same yesterday, today, and forever (see Heb. 13:8)!

So don’t be deceived any longer. The apostle Paul says, “I fear, lest somehow, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ” (2 Cor. 11:3). The gospel is simple. It’s all about Jesus. It’s not about you. Christ is our righteousness. Christ is our obedience. Christ is our sanctification. Christ is our justification. Glory and boast in Christ and Christ alone. The enemy will try to make it all about you. Keep it simple. Unlike Eve, don’t be deceived by his craftiness. Ignore him and simply focus on the simplicity that is in Christ.

Change Your Mind

The word “repentance” in the New Testament is the Greek word
metanoia
, which simply means “a change of mind.”
³
Meta
means “change” and
noia
refers to your mind. There are religious folks who have this idea that repentance means groveling in dirt and condemning themselves until they feel they have sufficiently earned God’s forgiveness through their contrition.

My question is, how condemned and sorrowful do they need
to be before they have genuinely “repented”? And after they have “repented,” should they fail again in the same area, does it mean that they did not really “repent” completely the first time round? I do not for one moment doubt the sincerity of people who believe in “repentance” this way. However, you can be sincere in your intent but still be sincerely wrong when repentance is not based on right believing that leads to inward heart transformation.

What I am saying is that you can beat your breast sorrowfully, put on sackcloth and ashes, cry your eyeballs out at the altar, and still go home unchanged. Sorrow doesn’t equal transformation. It is right believing that brings about true repentance (change of mind) and hence genuine transformation. It is impossible to truly repent the Bible way—to experience Jesus, His love, His grace, and His power and to allow Him to change your mind and your belief system—and still remain the same.

Can you see how man-centered teachings on contrition and repentance can sound so good, but in reality trap people in a permanent cycle of defeat and hypocrisy? Let me tell you this: if you are a born-again believer and you made a mistake or failed, nobody needs to teach you to be sorrowful. As a new creation in Christ, you already hate the sin and the wrongdoing. It vexes your soul, and there is a groaning for freedom. The truth is, you are looking for a way out of your bondage. The repentance you need—the change of mind you need—is to know that God has already forgiven you.
Stop condemning yourself and walk in His righteous identity to new levels of victory over sin.

Now that you understand what Bible repentance is, let’s apply it to winning the battle for your mind. When wrong thoughts come into your head, the repentance or change of mind that you need is to know that those thoughts don’t belong to you. Repentance in this situation is not about beating yourself up over those thoughts. I used to do that and it only left me more oppressed and defeated. No, give them no room to flourish by ignoring them while you continue to be established and secure in your identity in Christ. Fill your mind with His thoughts, His living Word, His peace, His joy, and His love.