We are engaged in “spiritual warfare,” fighting against forces of evil, from the “world, the flesh and the devil.” The battlefield of that warfare is often in our own mind and feelings.
“The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:4-5, NIV).
Notice the words “strongholds” (fortresses) and “thoughts.” The fortresses are made up of thoughts—think of them as small castles in your mind.
Housing Our Thoughts
The source of good and evil is in the spirit. Thoughts and emotions are in the soul realm. However, there is a third level, and that is the brain. The brain is in the physical realm. Brain cells are the organs in the body that contain the thoughts of the mind.
As I write this, I see words appearing on a computer screen. For those letters to appear, they must be stored up somewhere on a silicon chip, either in my computer or in a cloud of storage bank computers.
So it is with our thoughts. Words and mind pictures must have a bodily unit which “house” them. The units of the brain that embody those thought streams are called “synapses.” Synapses are matrices of brain cells that contain our thoughts, much the way a computer holds information in storage.
These groupings of brain cells containing words and pictures are like a fortress or a stronghold. What we do or say imprints physical storage banks in our brain cells. These may be good or bad, but they are there. When we want to change our behavior, it’s as if we are reformatting the synapses, and reprogramming those brain cells with correct information.
Everything we think, say or do forms a block of cells in our brain—a “brick” in the wall. Each synapse contains an electro-magnetic charge. This is the spiritual power of good and evil resident in bodily form.
Spiritual Rearranging
We can’t just have nice intentions floating around. We have to focus our words, thoughts and actions to physically change these mind fortresses. We wage war against these blocks of brain cells.
We fight this war using spiritual weapons. Our weapons are correct, Spirit-led words, thoughts and actions. We submit to the will of God; meditate on Scriptures; speak the truth (out loud) and act in obedience to Yeshua.
The point is that spiritual warfare is real. The strongholds of the mind are much more real than we ever realized. Therefore, we must change our words, thoughts and actions in a more real way than we ever realized.
To break down the strongholds, we must keep speaking and acting in love and righteousness until the physical composition of the cells in our brain are rearranged to that of love and righteousness. We keep going until every thought is correctly aligned to the obedience and purity of Yeshua. {eoa}
Asher Intrater is the founder and apostolic leader of Revive Israel Ministries and oversees Ahavat Yeshua congregation in Jerusalem and Tiferet Yeshua congregation in Tel Aviv. Asher was one of the founders of Tikkun International with Dan Juster and Eitan Shishkoff and serves on the board of the Messianic Alliance of Israel and Aglow International. He and his wife and full-time partner in ministry, Betty, have a passion for personal prayer and devotion, local evangelism and discipleship in Hebrew and unity of the body of believers worldwide.
This article originally appeared at tikkun.tv.
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