Mike Bickle emphasizes the importance of loving God with all our mind, explaining that this involves engaging our thoughts through meditation on the Word, seeking revelation from the Holy Spirit, and processing our past and future with a biblical perspective. He highlights that our emotions are influenced by our thoughts, and by deliberately setting our minds on God's truth, we can cultivate a deeper love for Him. Bickle encourages believers to actively pursue a vision for their spiritual future, as this shapes their present relationship with God. He warns against the dangers of an unharnessed mind and the necessity of renewing our thoughts to align with God's will.

Father, we ask you now in the name of Jesus for the release of the Spirit of Revelation. We ask you for the release of impartation upon the mind and on the heart, and we thank you in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, session four, I've been really invigorated by this session personally, in my personal life. This one, we're focusing on loving God with all of our mind. Jesus said in Mark chapter 12, you shall love the Lord your God in He named four spheres of our life. He says with all the heart, that's the affections, the emotions. With all the soul, that's the personality of which the main vehicle of expression of our personality is our speech. Thirdly, with all of our mind, and that's what we're going to focus on tonight. And then fourthly, with all of our strength, which is our resources. And the reason God calls us to love Him in these four ways, because that's how He loves us. With all of His mind, this is just indescribable, the implications of God loving us with all of His mind, all of His strength. Now we can only love God with all of our heart as we seek to love Him in the other three ways. Now the reason I'm focusing on all of your heart, because the unique part of the human design is affections. There's no record in the Bible that angels have affections. That is one of the glorious unique distinctives of the human spirit. We can feel love in a supernatural way, a deep way, forever. As a matter of fact, the Bible tells us the capacity of love we will feel will be God's own love for God. That's the measuring. That's the measuring line of the love, where this thing is going. So the unique dimension of the human spirit is affections. Other parts of creation have a mind and strength and personality. Now the difficulty with our affections is we cannot control them directly but indirectly. You cannot just will affection and emotion and then within the hour you have it. You can choose to have affections and then you can feed your mind accordingly and later the affections are formed. You can choose them but within the hour they're not present necessarily and usually not. But then through the engaging of the mind and that's God's strategy, loving God with the mind and the soul and the strength, with the mind being the the primary lead in this transformation process, our emotions can be exposed to the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit. Now what we want is our emotions alive with love. There's no greater delight, no greater power than having emotions alive with love. The problem with many is they focus on the emotion instead of setting their emotions and then stirring their emotions through their mind. They just wish their emotions were different. They don't actually set them in a determined way according to the Word and they don't feed their emotions in a biblical way through the mind. They just wish their emotions were red hot and they're depressed that they're not and they leave it there. We don't have to. We could follow the biblical pattern and we can see our emotions stirred up in a supernatural way by the power of God. Now the point of this session and we won't go through all the notes as as our custom because I like to always leave you with something to study on your own. The point of this session, the focus, is to define what it means to love God, some of what it means to love God with all of our mind. Paragraph B. Now loving God with all of our mind includes several different expressions of our mind. Number one, we include, we love God with our mind by meditation on the Word. Now everybody knows that. But beloved, meditation on the Word to our emotions and our mind is what fuel is to the car. It is impossible to do this without meditation, regular meditation. Yet it's the common experience of most believers to never get around to this on a consistent basis. It would be like a person having a very expensive car and never putting gasoline in the car. Honestly. We have this most amazing reality called the human spirit. It's the most expensive designer car, so to speak, in the creative order. Nothing is like it. But it will not work without being refueled by meditation of the Word. Now the devil will do everything to keep us from that. Guilt. I don't understand the Bible. It's always boring anyway. I don't know where to start. I'm too busy keeping us in a messianic complex, solving everybody's problems because we're the only one that knows how to do it. Just keeping us busy in a, in just a whirlwind of activity so we never put fuel in the car. Because he knows the power of it. Another way that we love God with all of our mind, we take time, and it takes humility to do this, to actually ask for revelation. It's not enough just to meditate on the Word, but to ask the Holy Spirit for the supernatural intervention to add to our, the human effort of meditation, supernatural dynamics. And some people read the Word their whole life like the Pharisees. They're, they're scholars, but they don't have any supernatural activity moving on their heart with the Word of God. So I don't want to just know Bible information and even talk to the Lord about it. I want a supernatural activity, the whisper of God moving on my heart. Another part of loving God with all of our mind is coming into agreement with God in terms of processing our past. Our past is such a major part of our life and our mind. Matter of fact, most of your mind is related to the past. Most of what's in your mind is not what's happening in the immediate ten-second present. Matter of fact, what I said a minute ago is already in your past. And yet people do not take seriously the stewarding and the valuing and the understanding of their past and how important it is. The miracle of memory is quite an amazing reality. We're going to get into this in a minute. And the place of the miracle of memory, how God redemptively uses it and His design for it, and how the devil wants to move in and use this miraculous, fantastic capacity of the human spirit to whip us and to torment us with this thing called the miracle of memory. But many never identify how unique and glorious memory is. And how, how prevalent it is to their human makeup and its function. But there's another thing that I want to point out here. It's not just the miracle of memory processing our past. And there's a good way and a bad way. There's things that we forget and things that we remember. And we have to have, we have to be precise about both of them. We are called to forget and we are called to remember in processing our past. And the other issue that I want to point out is the picturing of our future. That's called hope. The Bible calls that hope. Our present, the way we think and feel today is anchored in how we deliberately picture our future. Now again, like the past, many people are just kind of ambivalent about their future. They don't think that much about it. They just, they just want to be happy. Like, you know, I want to be happy. Well, break it down. What do you want? What do you picture 10 years from now for your life, a hundred years from now, and a million years from now? You know, I don't know. I just want to be happy. I don't want to be in pain. I don't want to be left out. I don't want to be bored. I don't know. And a lot of folks are very ambivalent about their future. And setting our future, creating a vision from the Word of God for our future, is a dynamic part of loving God with our mind. It's using our mind in a biblical way, it's called hope, to stir our spirit up in the present tense. Now we have to do this in a deliberate way. The processing of the past and the picturing of the future. Paragraph C. Now Paul the Apostle, he gives this personal, emotional expression. We get insight into his heart, his experience of the Lord is what I mean. He said in Romans 11 33, oh the depths, oh the depths of the riches of the knowledge of God, oh how unsearchable are God's decisions. His judgments are his decisions. Unsearchable, which means they're, the magnificence of them have so many layers of wisdom and meaning that unfold over time. They're unsearchable, meaning we can't get to the end of them apart from the aid of the Holy Spirit. And even apart from the ages unfolding, no matter how much we understand of God's ways in this age, a million years from now we will say we barely understood, and a million years after we will confess yet again we had no idea of the levels and dimensions involved in what we knew a million years ago. Our testimony will continually be updated. Paul's heart came alive in this loving fascination with God and God's ways. Beloved we can live in that adoring fascination now, not just in the age to come. Paul touched it now. It is our portion to have an element, a fascination touching our spirit. And I don't mean every minute of every day overwhelmed and awestruck. That's not what I mean. Because there's a, there's a real dimension of being faithful in the routine of the mundane. But there's moments and there's an element of fascination. There's a journey we are on of discovery, of adoring discovery of who God is. And Paul was on that journey and that's a journey I am on and you are on. And it's a deliberate thing we're on. Meaning it's not just, we're just trying to get an anointed ministry and make an impact. That's good. We want an anointed ministry. We'll make an impact. We just, it's more than we just want things to go good. We have the right and the inheritance to have an element of fascination every step of the journey. Not every minute of every day, but as an element of our journey. Paragraph D. Moses cried out for this. Because I want to know your ways. I want to see your glory. I don't want to just see what your heart's like. I want to see what your mind is like, your ways. I want to know your strategies, your thinking. And as again they unfold, there's levels and dimensions. It is fascinating this thing called God's leadership over our lives individually and over all of history and what He's orchestrating. Paragraph E. Now we have to go after this supernatural element. It's not enough just to read the data, though the reading of the data is critical. And the turning of the data, the information in the Bible into prayer and talking to the Lord about it. But we want to ask the Holy Spirit for a supernatural element. And beloved, you have not, because you ask not. He will give more if we ask Him regularly. Proverbs chapter 2. He said, apply your heart to get this living understanding. Verse 3, cry out for it. Verse 4, seek for it like hidden treasure. And if you do it, verse 5, you will find it. Proverbs 2 was a passage the Lord marked my life with in a very dramatic way when I was 18 years old. I haven't preached on Proverbs 5 in several years, but I remember from about age 18 to through my 30s, I preached on this thing on a regular basis. It was one of my real pillar passages as a young man. I want to challenge you to find your name on this passage. I said, Lord, I want to seek for you as treasure. Not casually. Not on the, not on the go. Just, and if I get time and a free hour, hey guess what? I'll sit down and talk to you a little bit. But rather than grabbing a little free time with God when it appears, you do it the other way around. You're proactive. You form your entire schedule around your quest for treasure. You do it the other way. You don't take some time if it happens to come, but you take some other things in life if they happen to come. I mean this for real. I don't want to put myself forth as a hot shot here. But when I was 18 years old, I was really serious about this. 19, 20, 21, 22, 23. And I look back these many years later. Beloved, I have no regrets about the time I put a, I only wish I had to put more in. But I put substantial time in, in the last 30 years in the presence of God. Missed lots of opportunities. Lots of ministry opportunities. Lots of economic opportunities. Lots of social opportunities. But when I look back over 30 years, I am really glad and would not mind if I would have been even more focused. My point being, see your name in this passage. Go after it like hidden treasure. If there was gold, if there was a, there were a billion dollars worth of gold, hypothetically, hidden in the building, and they said, you can tear every single brick apart from a building. Take as much as you want. The first one that finds it, it's theirs, no questions asked. You'd probably stay up late that night. But for the Word of God, will people shift their schedule and be inconvenienced? Well the wise man, the wise woman does. Paul said in Ephesians 1, I don't cease to pray that living understanding, the supernatural element would attend our mind. We'd have living understanding. Paragraph F. Now the setting of the mind on loving God, there's positives and negatives. There's the removing of the wrong. Negative mindsets diminish love. You can be very sincere in your quest to love God with all of your heart, all your emotions. But if you won't bring your mind into the process in a deliberate way, you will always be frustrated at the emotional level in your capacity to love God. Because your capacity to love God, my capacity to love God, is directly related to what I do with my mind. There's a ceiling that you will run into if you sincerely want your emotions on fire and red hot, but you don't engage your mind in the process of loving God. You'll hit a ceiling and the ceiling's really low by the way. Sincerity is critical, but it's not enough. We have to mix sincerity with earnest pursuit that is steady. Not that we don't have bad days or bad weeks, but it's steady through the years and then a supernatural element as well. But the Holy Spirit will give it if we ask for it. There's a setting of the mind. If to love God, when I cleanse my mind of wrong thinking, it is an act of love. I do it deliberately as an act of love. Not kind of, well I hope God, you see this as love. He says, let there be no question about it. I take this as love, loving me with your mind. We remove wrong paradigms that diminish our capacity to love God with our emotions. Shame is a big one. One way we get rid of shame, of course breaking our agreement with our compromise, but then holding our confession at the truth of what Jesus did on the cross. Many people, they break their agreement with their, their compromise which means they repent. But then they just wallow months in shame and self-induced probation to sort of pay back God for the compromise by just suffering a while. Beloved, we can't afford to pay God back for yesterday's sin. We need to confess it. Really confess it. We did it. We call it sin. Don't make it something else and use Bible verses to prop it up as something that's okay. Call it sin. Repent of it. Ask for forgiveness. Push, delete and get right back into the journey of loving God within the hour with all of your heart as a first class citizen in the kingdom. The devil wants you to take some journeys for a week or two or a month or two or year or two into self-imposed spiritual probation called shame. It's a waste of time and it minimizes love. It does not help anything in our relationship with God. Bitterness, lust, ingratitude is one of the biggies. I've sought, certainly not to the degree that I need to or want to, but I've sought to stimulate my thinking to produce gratitude. By, to think about the past in ways where I see God's hand in His goodness. There's a verse in Song of Solomon, chapter 2, verse 6. And it talks about with God's right hand, He embraces me. And the, and the allegorical interpretation of the right hand of God is the things we can discern that God does. But then the bride says, with your left hand you're, you, you hold my head. Which means I can't discern it. It's out of sight. I can't get my eye or mind around it. The, the activity of God we don't notice. You can't imagine how many disasters the devil has planned for you. Spiritually, physically, financially, that were cut off by the invisible hand of God. So I want to know His right hand. That's already a volume of material. But I want to know about His left hand, the things I haven't seen. So I like to stop before the Lord and say, Lord talk to me. I don't need to know the date or the time that you delivered me. But I like to take time to meditate on where I would be in sin, in my physical body, in pain, and torment, and economics, if I were not obeying you and the devil had his way. I tell you it produces incredible gratitude when you think, I don't quite know where I would be, but I know it would really not be good. And we, we stop and we think about it. But anyway, ingratitude is something we want to war against, because ingratitude is because our minds have not been engaged in loving God, in a way where we fed our spirit with the information that produces gratitude. Paul talked about in Romans 5, the setting of the mind. Paul talked about the setting of the mind on the things of the Spirit. He talked about in Colossians 3, the setting of the mind. Beloved, there is a deliberate choice to put information in your mind on a regular basis. That is critical, because it's the doorway to our emotions. Your emotions is what you want alive in power. That's what you feel and that's where you, I mean you're in, you, you can't be touched. When your emotions are alive in joy and love, I tell you the devil's commercials have no power. But when our emotions are passive and lethargic and depressed, the devil's commercials have a lot of power. And we can't just make our emotions red hot, but we can steer them by what we put in our mind. But we've got to connect the two realities. Our mind is what stirs our emotions. It's the way that our emotions get stirred up for good or for evil. Let's go to the top of page two. Top of page two. Now this is a subject that absolutely fascinates me. The vastness and the power of the human mind from God's point of view and from the view of eternity. And it's, is, I find as I understand a little bit, just ever so little, about the vastness and the power of the human mind in God's design. When God designed the human spirit, what he put in his design when he created the mind is absolutely magnificent. The point being, he wants love from that glorious reality called the human mind. And the devil wants it. And as wise people we guard the mind because it is such a powerful potential for good or for evil in our experience. Now God created us in his own image, paragraph eight. Now one aspect of being created in the image of God is the vastness of the human mind. And we won't understand that until eternity unfolds. Although science has studies now that are remarkable of how the most brilliant genius is using less than one percent of their mind. The capacity of their mind. The truth of the, the real truth is, they're not using a fraction of their eternal potential. But that's a subject that's so out there I don't even know what to do with it. But science has identified this reality. But that's kind of a neat scientific fact. You know you kind of, you know, I've seen a documentary or two on that over the years. And they, wow, that's neat. But the point isn't just that it's neat. The point is, if that be true, how important is the mind that we take the reins of it and employ it in the right way? If that be true, how dear to God is the human mind? And how strategic to the devil is to capture the human mind? And one of the reasons that people are pretty ambivalent about their minds, they don't know the place it has in the human design. How critical and how powerful it is in its potential. Now the, I have here paragraph A. It's like a mysterious internal universe. Beloved, there's a universe as vast on the inside of your mind as there is an outer space up above. There is a world as vast and complex that is eternal on the inside of you. That will last forever and forever. And at the very center of this creative genius is what I call the miracle of memory. The miracle of memory. Now the human mind, once it's formed in the mother's womb, never stops. Forever. Forever. I mean, billions of years from now, once the human mind is formed, it never, ever, ever stops for billions and billions and billions of years once it's formed. Now the language of the human mind is pictures, images. There is a technology, if you'll allow me to use that terminology, on the inside of you, far more sophisticated than the technology that is being developed in the nations right now. Far more sophisticated. Because this technology is vast in its capacity and it has emotions attached to it. Far beyond if, you know, just, I'll just get out there. Trillions and trillions of gigabytes is what the memory of the human spirit, the human mind is. Because billions of years from now, you will have experience day by day through the billions of years and you will have recall and remembrance of it because of the vastness of your memory. Forever. Now our memory's pretty, not so great right now. At least our conscious memory. We, we can remember, you know, a certain amount. Some things we like to forget because the devil torments us. But when we get our resurrected body, there will be a recall of events that are in our, quote, our hard drive, so to speak, that are far beyond what we know. And science and medicine tells us now that our memories affects us at a subconscious level in ways we cannot fully grasp. Now once the mind begins, the pictures begin, the movie studio begins and it never, ever goes out of ever. You have pictures running in your mind from now to eternity and often there's a running dialogue. Not always are, is there dialogue and conversation, but often. There's a whole movie studio, an eternal movie studio inside of you. Now it's not just true in the resurrection of the righteous. Those in hell, their memory will never go away. They will remember billions of years from now, not just their decisions on the earth, their torment in the billions of years as it unfolds. And the pictures, the studio, the movie studio in their mind will continue to activate and, and, and be processed in the, and the conversations that will often go along with them in their mind. Like we have conversations that go with these, with these pictures. Now you go to bed at night, your body, you sleep, but your mind still has pictures. It's called dreams and you only, you only remember a, you know, I don't know the real number, but I've seen studies on this and can't really recall the actual numbers, but it's something like a tenth of a percent of your dreams or less. You're dreaming all night long, everybody is. Pictures are moving, never stops, never stops. Now in this eternal movie studio, this is not meant to be humorous, but you are the producer, the main actor and the main customer. It's really true of your movie studio. You are the producer of it. You got a lot of help, a lot of people giving advice, demonic commercials, the Word of God, evil people and good people speaking, speaking good words and bad words. But you are the ultimate producer. You are the main actor and you are the main customer forever of your movie studio. God says, I want to be loved by that studio. I want you to create images under my leadership and my Word and the confession of your mouth that woos your heart into the bonfire of my goodness and my love and my beauty. Now the imagination projecting even the future and the memory, which is the past. Imagination would be future oriented, what you want things to be. Memory is past. I believe one of the reasons God created this endless visuals is to help us commune with Him and to have ceaseless prayer forever. That was the highest reason and undoubtedly there's many levels of reasons as to why God has called this. So when we think of the human mind, I think of the glory and the vastness and the dignity of our creative design. Do you know truly how awesome you are? You think, well that's fun. No, no really. David tapped that in Psalm 8. He said, you know, he was, he was, his mind was blown away by how important and how glorious the human spirit is to God. Psalm 8. You can read it on your own. Go to paragraph E. Now here's the fantastic opportunity we have in the grace of God. That is a wasted opportunity by many people and many believers. It's fantastic. Here it is. Supernaturally, by supernatural power of the Holy Spirit, we can erase the bad movies and we can replace them with ones that give life and peace. In other words that stir our emotions with such good feelings and pleasure. And that please God and that He'll reward us forever with them. I want to say that again. Because of Jesus going to the cross and the giving of the Holy Spirit, you can erase the bad movies and replace them with new ones if you want to. And you can do it to the degree that you want to. Now there's a process and there's a pace to it. Like many say, okay, I have the degree. I want it all done tonight by 10 o'clock. The Lord would say, no, you don't get to pick the pace of it. But you get to pick ultimately the amount of the re-filming that you want to do in your studio. I'll let you do that, but you got to do it my way through my procedure. It's the most fantastic opportunity imaginable in this age. But many believers never seize the opportunity. They're just too busy coming, going, chatting, coming, going, working, resting, spending, coming and going. And the Lord would say, you have a fantastic opportunity if you want it. Because if you re-do these films, they will bring peace to your emotions and power supernaturally. Now it's called in Romans 12, the renewing of the mind. And we have Titus 3, 5. It's by the washing and the renewing of the supernatural activity of the Spirit. The painful memories of circumstances that were done to you as a victim. The shameful memories of the circumstances you engaged in as an agent. You chose them. I chose them. They can be washed and renewed if we want them to be. They won't happen automatically. Our memory I'm talking about. But they will in time if we want to. And their impact on our emotions, we will experience it if we want it. Paul talked about Ephesians 4, about how unbelievers walk in the futility of their minds. He says, their, their understanding is darkened and therefore their emotions are darkened. Many believers have really dark emotions. They love Jesus. They're on the way to heaven. But between now and the resurrection, when they meet, or when they meet the Lord, they live in such downcast, dark emotions. And they've just, just acclimated to it and decided this is how it's going to be. And they've given into it. Beloved, we don't need to give in to darkened understanding and dark emotions. God has called us to love Him with our mind. And if we do that, verse 20, we can be renewed in the atmosphere of our mind. The Spirit of our mind is the whole atmosphere, the whole ethos of our inner life. It's a super, paragraph F. It's a supernatural possibility to love God with our mind. I want this. Of course you want this. But just as I'm going a few more minutes here, just in your heart, you say, Lord, I want this. I want to supernaturally love you with my mind. I'm not going to wait for my emotions to be stirred up because I cannot directly make them be stirred up. Some religious contexts will get you all, get the fervor going. You get everybody going and stir up the fervor. But that is not a supernatural movement in their heart. That's not necessarily good or bad. But it's not the same as the Holy Spirit activity. But there is a Holy Spirit activity and I want it. Look what it says in Romans 8, paragraph G. Romans 8 verse 6. To be spiritually minded, oh I love this, is the anointing of life. It's anointing. Life, put the word anointing. Peace. And the word peace, put feels good on the inside. To the spiritually minded, not every minute of every day, but it can be progressively more. The rule of their emotional life would be peace. That is the supernatural. I mean it's a, it's a light on the inside. It's not perfect until the age to come. Beloved, I want more of this. Now you can't fake out the Holy Spirit. It's not the sort of thing you do when everyone's watching. And then later you drink in darkness and hope it balances out as mostly light. It doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way. You can't fake the Holy Spirit out. You can't fake out angels and demons. You can fake out people. But you can't fake out the Holy Spirit. And he says, I'm not punishing you. I'm just, I'm just honoring your free will. If you want darkness, I will let you have it. I don't want you to have darkness, but I will not violate your free will. So it's not an issue of punishment. It's an issue of the Holy Spirit honoring the free will of the believer. He says, if you want it, darkness out, you can have it. But I'm here if you want the other. But it's not the sort of thing where you invest in light a few hours a week or a few days a week. And then on the weekends you do darkness and hope it balances out later. This is a 24-7 venture. Light is. But beloved, there's nothing like life and peace. Life means anointing of the presence of God on the emotions. It means more than that, but that, it includes that. This is what I want. And this is what you want. This is what Jesus wants. He wants to become our first thought. And what I mean by our first thought, this is kind of spiritual romantic language, but you'll follow it. Most of you will. Like when we first begin to seek the Lord, thinking of Jesus is an effort. Like I'm gonna think of Jesus if it's the last thing I do. And we're just in darkness and guilt and shame and lust and pride and anger and debating with our enemies. And we're gonna get them back. Oh yeah, Jesus. Yeah, that's right. I love you, Jesus, sir. Oh, this is so much effort to love you. I love you, Jesus. I'm gonna get that guy back. I can't wait to go to that party. I feel so bad about yesterday. I feel so rotten about tomorrow. I'm so afraid about yesterday. Oh yes, Jesus, I love you. I love you. It's such an effort for him to be in our mind. But the time comes where the spiritually minded's life in peace, he's the first thought. I don't mean he's the only thought. I don't know that anybody has that until they, the resurrection. But when they take that deep breath, there's an I love you in their spirit. And there's a feeling of his pleasure looking down upon them. As the first thought, they get off track. They'll get into a bad mindset. But often the first rebound is to think on God and to interact with him. Beloved, that's what it means to have the spiritually minded for their minds to be life in peace. That is within your reach in this lifetime. For him to be the holy daydream. You're, you're driving. You're walking down, you know, just to the shuttle bus. You're coming. You're going. You're waiting at the coffee shop. You're in between something. He's the daydream of your heart. Meaning, oh that I could have an anointing to love him. You picture yourself. You dream and you're in the drama. And the drama isn't that you're the hero before man. But you're anointed with love and you're captured with him. That's a holy daydream. He, he wants to be that. That is possible in this life. I don't mean every minute of every day. But he can be our first thought in our daydream. The sweet escape. That weariness of lust and pride and fear and bitterness. And oh they're gonna get me. I know they're going to. It's gonna go bad. That fearful, oh I got so many bad desires. I got so many fears. And you know the, what do you call it? Manipulating, posturing, positioning, conniving. All of the way the human spirit moves. There's a sweet escape from that. And that's into this thing called the spirit of life. Life and peace. He's our great getaway. One of the songs that Misty sings in her worship sets. He's our great escape. Our great getaway. When we can, in our mind it's not a retreat from real life. That's not the point. But it's a, it's a retreat from fear and lust and anxiety into presence. You take a deep breath and you're thinking of him. And you have positive thoughts and light about how he's thinking about you. Beloved, you, you want to say right now, we're going to pray. And we're going to come back to the notes. We're not going to finish them all. But Father we, we want this now. Lord we want this lifestyle. We, this is my inheritance to love you with all of my mind in this way. I want it. I want it. I want it Lord. This is my inheritance. Jesus' name. Paragraph H. If we're not loving God and pursuing it, none of us do it. We all come short. Our love for God with all of our mind is not, it's fragile, but we stay with it. If we don't do it, beloved, our mind is so powerful it is very, very dangerous unharnessed by the Holy Spirit, even for a believer. I've been, you know, in ministry for over 30 years. And I've watched many on fire people in their 20s. Many. I'm not trying to scare you, but I am trying to sober you. On fire revival. You know, anything for God, age 20 to 25. By the time they're 45, they're addicted to immorality and drunkenness and bitterness. And that thing back in their 20s was a faint memory. Because they did not take into serious consideration the power and the danger of their mind unharnessed. They just kind of went along and, you know, I've seen this for so many years and I hate this. This false doctrine of grace that makes people feel comfortable and compromised. And it makes them feel good about not going hard after God. Saying, well it's grace. You know, it's the chill out kind of just kind of go with the flow. Whatever happens, happens. And if I connect with God, I do. Hey, it's grace, grace, grace. I've seen so many in that mindset for so many years. They end up 10 and 20 years later not calculating the power of the danger of their human mind. And how powerful it is and how powerful demons are. I want to use the grace of God. I want to preach it in a way that gives us power and confidence to forget our shame from yesterday. We have confidence. We repented and it's within the hour we have confidence to go full blast for God. That's grace. And we feel motivated to do it even though we don't necessarily feel a lot. But we're motivated. Beloved, that's the grace of God. The power and the motivation and the courage to go hard. Not the confidence to be comfortable while you're compromising. I've seen that version of grace for years. It is absolutely dark. I want to say that unequivocally. It's dark. The people that proclaim it, they think of it as cool and it's liberty. There is no liberty except on his terms. It's the only liberty that exists. Many, many believers, many of them. I've known thousands of them over the years because I've always, near always, for 30 years, I've pastored a church. Almost always several thousand people for most of the 30 years. So I've always had a large group of folks and watched them over the years. When I look back, I am heart sick over the majority that I have witnessed that were on fire for five years. And they did not stay the course because they got into a deceived concept of what grace was and what it wasn't. And it's about the power of the mind. The mind is so, so powerful. Paragraph I here. It is criminal. I want to say this as a shepherd. I know it's a little startling and, but that's a little bit of a point. It is criminal. The waste of the human mind that is happening across the earth, especially in the body of Christ, because we have the Holy Spirit and the Word of God and we believe in it. It's criminal. The power of the human mind to be renewed. The Holy Spirit's willingness, the power of the Word of God, but the believers who love Jesus, but they just never get around to stopping the clock to sit down or putting a pause on all that they're doing is what I mean by stopping the clock to sit down to actually do this on a regular basis. I think it's criminal. Your mind is too powerful. It's too dynamic. It's too, it's awesome. And the opportunity is too awesome to just let it go by. Top of page three. The close relationship between knowing truth and loving God. Now I'm going to skip this whole section, but what I want you to know, it's pretty good. No, it says actually, truthfully, it just says the same thing I've been saying over and over. That's my gift is repetition. It says the same thing, but a little different angle here or there. Why did I write it? Because it just felt so good to write it. I mean, I just, I didn't need to. It just like, I just want to say it again. So there it is. So you can read that on your own. If that interests you later. Romans number four. We're all going to just spend a minute on each of these last two points. One is loving God with all of our mind related to the past. And the next one is loving God with all of our mind related to picturing the future. Both of them are dimensions of loving God that do not happen with your mind, that don't happen automatically. You have to engage over and over again in love with the mind in these two arenas. They're vast. Now we love God with our mind in the past. We forget, and I got several principles there. They're very simple principles, but I have found that some of the simplest things, many people kind of live life in a hurry, and the simplest things they miss. It's quite simple. There are things we are to forget, through the grace of God. And in the past there are things we are to remember. Our natural response is to remember what we're supposed to forget, and to forget what we're supposed to remember. And the devil works overtime to see that we're motivated in that way. So you can just read that on your own. Go to page four. I just want you, because we, you know, 12 sessions on this. We got a lot more areas to cover on this loving God with all of your heart, mind. The first commandment restored to first place. There's so much that, you know, I'm leaving a bit of it for you to study on your own, if you're interested in it. Okay. I'm going to take you to paragraph G, top of page four. We're talking about the past. Now here's what I want to, the miracle of memory. Here's what I want to put in your mind. This idea. The past is an essential, well not just an essential truth about who we are. It's a very dynamic reality about our eternal life, is our past. There is this supernatural, eternal miracle of memory. Now let's look at it in just the righteous side, so I don't confuse you. I'm talking about righteous memory. We will be living for billions of years from now in the gratitude of events that happened the day before. Our memory, matter of fact, I hope this is not too philosophical. I'm not really a philosopher, but you only live in the present for the 10 seconds you're in the present and then it's forever in your memory. Meaning I'm only this minute, moment for a second, but this moment will be forever part of my testimony with God where I'm agreeing with God and loving His Word and that's where we're at. And a billion years from now, another billion, another billion, your memory, your righteous memory and God's memory of your deeds and your love, they're very real to Him. They'll be very real part of your entire life is memory. Matter of fact, the judgment seat of Christ is about your memory. It's about what happened yesterday. Your past is huge. I'm talking about our righteous past. Our unrighteous past, you know the answer. We deal with the cross. I, I skip that part. It's, it needs to be said, but you do know the basic truths of the confession and applying the blood of Jesus. I put that in the other page three. But here, I just, what I'm trying to grab your mind is the value and the prominence that the past has. Meaning, I want to, I want to remember it in a right way. I want my mind engaged. I want to take advantage of this dimension of my creative design. A lot of folks, just the past is the past. And now negatively, that's good. But positively, they just don't think much about it. They don't love God in context to it. They don't relate to God in it. And over and over in the Bible, it says, remember, remember, remember, remember. Talking about the good things God did. And even our responses to Him. We're not to have proud, full confidence because of our past dedication. But we're to have gratitude based on memory. Anyway, I just want to point that out to you. The devil wants to cut across this. He wants our past to be a whip against us. God created it to fuel us in gratitude forever. Let's go to, uh, top of page five. This is the last point. Loving God by picturing the future. That's another mental dimension of love. It's a dimension that you choose or you don't choose. Meaning, it's not done for you. It's not automatic. If you do it a little bit, you get the benefit a little. If you do it a lot, you get a lot of benefit. It's up to you. But it does directly affect your ability to, your capacity to love at the emotional level, with all of your heart. Loving God with our mind, picturing the future. It's called hope. Paragraph A. We love, we'll just do a little bit of page five and then we'll end with that. We love Jesus today related to how we think about our future. Beloved, your feelings about God today are dynamically related to your picture of the future, whether your picture is clear or unclear. Now I'm not talking about your ability to picture how big your ministry will be, who you'll be married to, how life will work. I'm not talking about the circumstantial details. I'm not picturing that. And there's a little value of having goals in those areas. I mean there's value in that, but that's not what I'm talking about right now. I'm talking about picturing the way you carry your heart with God 10 years from now and 100 years from now. I mean in the resurrection, because you'll be alive for billions of billions of years. You'll be around in 100 years and a million years and a trillion years. Why not have a vision for it? Because it's you. It's the same you. It's not going to be a different you 100 years. It's the same you. Why not use the governmental place you have over your own spirit? God gave you the right to rule your own spirit and choose to engage yourself now in what you want to be at the heart level with God 10 years, 20 years, 30 years from now. Lamentations 1. Israel did not consider her destiny. Therefore her collapse was awesome. We need to consider our destiny. My destiny is more than what I'll be in ministry, what I'll be in relationships and my family and friends. It's more than what I'll be economically. My future, my destiny is also what I will be in the anointing at the heart level with God. I'm talking about picturing my future of my inner man. And all those other dimensions are important too. You can't be quite as precise on circumstantial issues about planning the future though. There's a value in planning it. Hold, you know, hold it with an open hand. But you can, you can with confidence of the Word of God plan your future for your inner man with great confidence that God wants to give you the anointing for love and meekness if you want it. What we believe about our future and our commitments to our future dynamically influence our capacity to love God right now today. What I am doing at age 53 years old, when I'm thinking of 63, 73, 83, if Lord willing, I am picturing my heart being at a higher place of connectedness. I picture that clearly. Not every day, all day, but many, many times. Started doing that when I was 18, 19. Pictured when I'm gonna, you know, I'm 30. Like, will I ever make it at 30? Oh man, 30 seemed like so far out there it was like never, ever going to happen. But I used to think, I remember I was in college. I used to say things like, when I'm 30, you know, the college is a, wow, 30, gee whiz, man. I go, what are you talking about? And I went to, I said, when I'm 30, I'm going to love the Word. I want an anointing on my spirit. I went, da, da, da, da, da, da. So my picture of my heart 10 and 20 years from now really affects what I'm going to do tomorrow afternoon and Sunday afternoon and Monday afternoon and Tuesday afternoon. It really does. Your picture of the future will determine how you spend time tomorrow. Without a clear picture of the future, what you want in the inner man, your time tomorrow is easy to waste. But with a clear picture, boy, you're going somewhere tomorrow for four hours, for eight hours, for 12 hours, whatever. You got 12 hours tomorrow. I actually got 24 hours tomorrow. It matters what you do in your increments of time. Really matters if you got a vision for the future. Paragraph B. We live carelessly with our time without a clear picture of what we want to be. Now the, the famous verse that you all know, without a vision the people perish. That's the King James. But the New King James says it, like many other translations, without a, without a revelation or without a vision, a life vision, the people cast off restraint. Now the King James says they perish. What it means is they live without discipline. If you don't have a vision for tomorrow, you can waste time today. If you have a vision for tomorrow, an hour today matters to you. I don't mean you're, you're panicked over an hour, but you're careful about an hour. I don't want to throw an hour away ever. That doesn't mean I want to be highly productive in ministry every hour. I want to rest well. I want to exercise. I want to relate well. But I want to spend all my hours doing one of those five or ten things with purpose and meaning, even if it's resting. I want to rest so I have strength to pursue. I don't want to pursue God and have a ministry so I get enough money so I can rest. I'm, it's exactly opposite. I want to rest so I can run hard the majority of my life. I want to rest well. I want to eat well so I have strength to fast and pray later on that week. So I want to give you a vision of resting so you can have strength to be focused and alert for the majority of your life. Not the other way around. Let's get into the big time so finally we can do CS to the rest of our life. No, it's exactly the opposite. You rest in order to have strength to run hard. Very opposite of how the American mindset is in some sectors of our nation. Paragraph C. Our commitments define who we are. Matter of fact, if you don't have a clear picture of where you want to be at with the heart level, where do you want to be at the heart level? Do you want to know the Word deeper? I mean specific. What books of the Bible you want to know in 10 years? You want a spirit of prayer? How much do you want to feel God in 10 years? What are you doing today about that? If you don't have a clear picture about tomorrow, you have an identity crisis today. I assure you. Great identity crisis in the human family. Not just the body of Christ, the whole human family. They don't know what they want to be tomorrow. They know they want to be millionaires. They know they want to be famous and their life to be easy. They do know that. But 99% of the people, it's not going to happen. So they're thinking, I don't know what I want to be. I'm not doing nothing. Beloved, you don't have to have any type of circumstantial setup in a unique way for you to succeed in life at the heart level with God. Paragraph D. Our capacity to love God today is related in what's engaged in our mind about tomorrow. This statement by Victor Frankl, who is a famous psychologist. Paragraph E. I just want you to see this. He was a psychologist that went through the Nazi concentration camps. And Freud was famous. And Freud's psychology was this, that Freud said, the past, the past, the past. Everything about you today is formed by your past. And he really overemphasized. I think our, our emotions today are affected by our past, but Freud really overdid it. And Victor Frankl, he had this different idea. He analyzed, after he got out of the concentration camps, he's in two of them, after Nazi Germany and World War II. He analyzed, as a psychologist, two different categories of Holocaust survivors. Or, I mean, he put them into categories. Those that were emotionally stable and those that were not. And his conclusion was the predominant factor of those that were stable had nothing to do with the amount of torment they walked in. It's not what happened to them in the past. It's what they believed about their future. That was the predominant issue of their stability. That's just purely natural. My point is, what you believe you will be 10, 20, 30 years at the heart level with God will dynamically focus and hone your life and give you purpose and settle the identity issue, regardless how big your ministry ever is. It's not about the size of your ministry. Go for the size of the heart and the ministry will take care of itself. Paragraph F. Our vision for the future includes setting our mind on goals for spiritual development. Paragraph G. What are your future goals for your spiritual development? Do you have concrete goals? What are they? Are they written down? Does anybody else know them? Are you accountable to anybody? Can you articulate them? Are they just, well, I just want to know God best I can between now and then. I tell you that is not a goal. That goal will just keep you in ambivalence for 10 more years. It needs to be clear. It needs to be concrete. I want to be a man of the Word. I want a greater anointing for humility. I want to fill your presence. I want to know the book of Psalms. I want to know John. I want to know the life of David. I'm going to know these things. I said these when I was in my 20s. I'm going to know these by the end of my 20s. Boy, I better get to work. Paragraph H. What are you determined to be? What do you believe about yourself about tomorrow? Beloved, I'll end with that. These are practical ways, practical ways you love God with your mind. And I'll just say, since it's the, I've said this over and over, but it's I think worth saying, ninth year anniversary here, you know, it's 25 years ago this year where the Lord spoke it audibly. 24-hour prayer. We had the sign on the wall for 16 years nearly. 24-hour prayer. People said, what's that? I go, I don't really know. Nine years ago, we started it. And the Lord's blessing has been on it in various ways. And so I run into people, you know, I just know thousands of people through the years. And they say, I hear this comment, this must be your dream come true. And I always tell them, no, my dream, my main dream is not IHOP. That's my assignment. I love my assignment. It's hard, but I love it. My dream is what happens in my heart with God that nobody can touch my dream. And if IHOP gets real big or real little, my dream never changes. I go, no, this is not my dream. If it was my dream, it would burn me out because I would overdo it or underdo it or compensate in weird ways. Beloved, our dream, the thing we set our mind on to love it with our mind is the plan in our heart to walk in the first commandment, first place in our life. Amen. 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