The Battle for Your Mind

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Let's begin with prayer. Lord God, this day is yours. It's another Sunday where we celebrate your resurrection, Lord Jesus. A day that we want our minds to be renewed and strengthened by the amazing power that you have, Lord, for us in your word. And so we ask, Lord, that you would open up our hearts and our minds and our ears to hear today. And Holy Spirit, that you'd be working through your word in powerful ways in our lives, Lord. To release us in ways that we are still held captive. To free us, Lord, in love and service and joy. To give us peace. To give us the wholeness that you so intend for your people, Lord Jesus. And we thank you for that. We thank you for the different churches in our area, many churches, Lord, that proclaim your gospel today. And we thank you that we are not alone here at Thrive, but across this entire region. Your church reigns and your church is growing. And we pray, Lord, today that your gospel would come forth strongly across all sorts of places and in all sorts of ways. And not just, Lord, through what happens on Sunday morning at a church building, but through the week, Lord. Through your church, through each of us as witnesses in our community and world. So bless this time as we are gathered together in your word today. And be with our mission team in Haiti right now, Lord, as they celebrate with the church there. And proclaim your goodness and grace that transcends, Lord, all languages and cultures and expressions. And we thank you for that. All this we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. All right. We are in a new series this week called Mastermind. And for the next three weeks, we're going to be talking about how you can change your mind. Do you ever change your mind? Okay. And change your thinking. And when you change your thinking, you also can change your life. And we're looking at how that works in the life of one person in particular. And how he was a witness to that in the life of the apostle, the missionary, Paul. You ever heard of him? His mind and his thinking was pretty well messed up for a while. But then he met Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus. And things changed. And we're going to be looking at that. So you can follow along through the You version of the Bible. There are notes for this. And Mastermind here at Thrive Community. We're going to be looking at 2 Corinthians 10 3-5 today. For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey Christ. So in this text, this is kind of going to be the key text for the next three weeks in one form or another. There are three Greek words that occur in chapter 10, verse 4, where he says, The weapons of our warfare are not of flesh, but have divine power to destroy strongholds. And these three words, the first one is stratoiometha. Stratoiometha. Do you see that? Can you say that? Stratoiometha. You read it from left to right. Unlike Hebrews, you read it from right to left. Boy, that's really confusing, isn't it? But we'll get to that. The next word is okoromaton. And the third word is dunata. That one's the easiest one, right? Not denata, but dunata. So stratoiometha is where we get the word in English, strategy. And that's the word in that text called warfare. He says we have a warfare, a strategy, a method. And this is what we're focusing on over these three weeks. What is the strategy that you and I have in Christ to overcome the obstacles in our life, in our thinking? The second word is that okoromaton. And that is the word for strongholds. It can also be translated as a prison. Okay? So people are in prison without even knowing it, is what Paul is saying. And we're going to get into that. And then the final word we'll look at a little later is dunata, which is dynamite, is where we get the word dynamite. I've just dated myself. Any remember that? Brooke, do you have any idea what that was? No. Dynamite. Good times. Look it up. That's the name of the TV sitcom. I don't know if you've ever heard of that one, Good Times? Deborah? No? Okay. So it's... Was that at the same time as All in the Family or no? It was after All in the Family. It was a little later. Okay. Anyways, we watched dynamite. That's the word for divine power in this text. Okay? So we're going to look at the strategy that we're going to go through. The prisons that we can get ourselves into. And then finally we're going to also look at the power, the divine power that God has for us. So these are the three points. The first is the prison that is called your mind. Okay? The second is the strategy for freedom. And the third is living in that freedom. So the prison of the mind. So...