12 Reprogram Your Mind

got to stay on offense—your greatest defense is a strong offense.

Give the Holy Spirit some time to work His healing in these areas of your life. Give Him time because you have been carrying these burdens for many years. God can bring healing instantaneously, but it may take time to appropriate it or integrate it. It must become a disciplined experience and a willful appropriation of His cleansing and healing.

Let’s Begin Healing Now

I want to pause at this moment and pray for you. As I do, I want you to search your own heart for any area where you need emotional healing. You need to have your memories healed. Be honest about it. Quit running from it. Face up to it. Allow God in the days ahead to heal it by leading you to the right person, counselor, or pastor who can help you. Take Christ back to the experience, walk through it, and anoint it with His healing, love, grace, and forgiveness. Then, once and for all, you can walk away from it.

Father, right now I pray that Your Holy Spirit would speak personally and intimately to us. There are many different skeletons in our emotional and mental closets that have haunted us for years. You know every one of them. You were there when it happened. Therefore, Lord Jesus,

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You are the only one who can go back with us to that experience and bring healing to it.

All our sins were nailed to the cross and Your Son’s body, and by His stripes we have been healed. Father, we know that You want to heal us mentally and emotionally. I pray right now for every person reading this for the liberation of any emotional scars, bad memories, and damaged emotions. There are some that You can heal right now. I claim this healing in the name of Jesus Christ by the power of the Spirit and by the cleansing of Your Word.

Lord, others can start this process by a commitment. I pray that we would either claim the healing now or commit ourselves to the steps of obedience needed so that we might be mentally and emotionally whole. Cleanse the thoughts of our minds by the inspiration of Your Holy Spirit.

Father, I thank You for those who have accepted Your grace at their point of need. In the name of Jesus Christ, I pronounce them forgiven, healed, and loosed from their emotional memories, that they might be freed to be your children. I claim this in the powerful name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

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Thus far we have been deprogramming. We’ve been going through mental catharsis and getting out the garbage. Now it is time to reprogram.

Jesus shared a parable in Luke 11:24–26 about a demon that had been removed or cleansed out of a certain person’s life. This cleansing needed to be followed by the filling of the Holy Spirit and the Word. In this story, the filling did not follow the cleansing. The reprogramming didn’t follow the deprogramming. So, the demon came back and brought seven of his cohorts.

We must reprogram and make sure that, in the process, we so fill our mind with all of God’s truth that there’s not any room left where Satan can inject anything else negative. Let’s now learn how to reprogram.

Jesus states in Matthew 4:4 that “man shall not live on bread alone, but on a few of the words that come from God’s mouth.” Wait—is that what it says? No! “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” God did not have a couple hundred good verses that He wanted us to know.

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God wants us to know everything that He has spoken to us. We must learn to live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Everything that God utters is of absolute importance.

Jesus likens God’s Word here to bread. What bread does for us physically, God’s Word does for us spiritually and emotionally. We eat bread, which is food, resulting in physical growth. We should partake of every word that proceeds from the mouth of God because it results in spiritual growth.

Here is a basic principle: Whatever you feed, grows, and whatever you starve, dies. It’s a fundamental principle of life. Any area of your life that you feed will grow, and any area of your life that you cease to feed or you starve will eventually die. We are often zealous in feeding our bodies and emotions, but are constantly starving our spirits. Therefore, we become individuals who are physically overnourished, emotionally unbalanced, and spiritually malnourished. We’ve become very lopsided individuals!

Three times a day, we feed our physical selves. We also go through all kinds of things to feed ourselves emotionally, but we starve in the spirit. As a result, many of us are large physically and emotionally, but we’re spiritual pygmies. What God wants us to do is reprogram our inner selves.

When Paul prayed in Ephesians, he said, “I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with

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power through his Spirit in your inner being” (3:16). This is because “though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16 nasb). Our “outer man” is dying, and one day it’s going to be in the ground and will return to dust.

Healthy Food and Healthy Marriage

Healthy bodies have healthy appetites that feed on healthy foods. Likewise, healthy minds will have healthy thoughts. This will result in healthy attitudes and healthy living. So, our goal is to keep a positive mental focus as much as possible.

American businesses and media are always pushing healthy foods and buying natural products, foods that have no impurities or preservatives. God’s Word is spiritual food for us. It doesn’t have any additives or impurities. Peter said the pure unadulterated Word is what we’re supposed to eat (1 Peter 2:2–3). Unlike health foods, however, God’s Word has preservative power. It will preserve our spirits with eternal life.

So, we need to partake of God’s food. This is what Paul is saying in Philippians 4:8: “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy— think about such things.”

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How many negative things do you read in this list? Are any of them negative? Not a one of them! So, what is he saying? Program your mind. Fill your mind with truth—what’s honorable, just, pure, lovely, gracious, excellent, and worthy of praise. There won’t be room for anything else.

A dear friend of mine became a Christian later in life. Her husband was an alcoholic and is still not a Christian. Due to all the negative things that had transpired in their marriage, she had tremendous animosity and resentment toward him. All these things built up in her and she just could not forgive him. She couldn’t relate to him as she knew she should as a wife. She fixated on his alcoholism, and it colored everything that she thought about him and did with him.

I read this verse in Philippians 4 and told her to make several lists. At the top of each page, she was to write down one of the words: true, noble, right, and so on. Then, I told her to start focusing on the positive things in her husband—even in his current condition.

On the first list, she needed to write down everything that she could think of about him that’s true, past or present. Anything true that she saw in his life, she needed to add to the list. Then think of anything that he has ever done that was noble and write that down, and so on through the words of this verse. Once the lists were done, she needed to start thinking about these things.

A couple of months later, she came to see me. This

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