Casting Down Imaginations

 If you love Me you will obey Me. One commandment is to cast down imaginations and every high thing that exalts itself against God. Why?

What does that mean?

It means that if God, who contains any one of three different personalities that we know as Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, doesn't entertain a thought, neither should we. 

Our task is to surrender to giving up our thoughts to think His. This is what many call sanctification but it’s not mindlessness. It’s learning to know His voice and obey it. 

Knowing Him is a huge part of any growth you or I will enter into. Jesus is our means of coming to know the Father. He is the one by whom we are washed through His blood to be regenerated so the Holy Spirit can renew us to the original intent of why we were created. 

Following our own thoughts and imaginations guarantees we will not be saved. Jesus asks us, what good will it do you if you gain everything the world can give you but lose your own soul?  We have to take up our cross (the source of death to our way) and follow Him, daily. 

In being created with the ability to think and reason and grow and learn with a free will, ultimately, all that has power that is good or is of God in our life that we come to abide in depends on if we have surrendered to live in the mind of our creator and redeemer. Only in surrender will we ever understand what love is, live in and out of it, or how He can have His perfect work finished in us. 

What is the perfect work? The perfect work is that we come to live in perfect love so we can be like Him. That perfected love guides us to submit to Him in truth so we can be changed by the Holy Spirit into His likeness and His image. 

The world has created a Jesus that makes us feel good but the changes and transformations that must come to pass for us to live in the perfection that He demands is a path of suffering. Dying to one’s desires and affections for all we have built up that we call good but is evil in the Father’s eyes is a painful process. Living in the truth is all that can set us free from deception. Father won’t make us do it. 

We are just like Jesus who had to learn obedience by the things He suffered. If we give ourselves to imaginations and build them up which is creating a high thing (something that appeals to us that we make into something our thoughts are consumed by) they lead us away from the thoughts and the truth of our Father.  Thus, Isaiah 55 declares we must repent of our wicked ways and thoughts for in them our thoughts are not His thoughts and our ways are not His ways. 

It takes a lifetime of submission and following Jesus to finish the work of being transformed into His likeness and His image and each of us in Him only makes up something like the cell in a human body.  Jesus has taught us that it takes the whole Holy Nation to represent Him in His fullness and stature and He will be all in all of us when His work is finished. Consider that God rested on the seventh day and He knows the end from the beginning. The work is finished in His mind. It has to become finished in us. 

He has Sons in heaven and on the earth. Some of us in the Body of Christ have lived on the earth and moved to heaven. All of us who are surrendered in the earth whether we live a few years or 100 have been placed here to come to know Him and surrender to live in Him so we can be saved. But that’s not the final goal. The final goal is that in the changes that bring sanctification and maturity He can live through us and we can truly represent Him as He is. 

Depending on our surrender and our obedience He can live through us to show Himself and His goodness to others. Our hope is that He becomes all in all. 

We must learn to cast down our imaginations that lead us away from knowing and obeying Him because they leads us into following the father of this world. 

This is not the destiny that will bring us to His way of being perfect as our Father is perfect that Jesus spoke of.