Spirit Led Imagination

The following article was published here in a previous form. I have rewritten it, improved it for your edification. It is long but if you will endure to the end, learn, believe and use what it teaches, your life will be improved permanently and for the good

Lazy creatures that we are, we seek a way to avoid doing the hard work of living for God and hope in vain for a shortcut to victory. Early in my Christian life, I heard that knowledge of biblical principles was sufficient to change my soul and transform me into the image of God’s Son. I was attracted to such a teaching because it required little of me except the amassing of biblical information and allowed me to avoid looking too deeply at myself. While I am an advocate of knowledge and of great learning, it is the use of this God knowledge that makes the difference. Knowing alone is not sufficient to change a man, he must put his knowledge to good use and in doing so He will be blessed and will bring glory to His Maker and Savior.

Knowledge Applied Through Imagination

The gaining of knowledge, true or false produces only the potential for impact, blessing and glorification of God. It is the actual use and application of these principles that brings blessing and glory to God. It is the application of God’s word that is the focus of this article. This article explains how the Holy Spirit uses our human imagination to enable us to see the absolute good that God is seeking to bring about in our lives. Our natural tendency is to imagine everything that can go wrong and how hard and bad everything might be. It need no longer be that we are slaves to negative images of loss and pain. We have been empowered and commanded to lay the old way aside and put on a new way of thinking in Christ.  For us to manage this change, we must learn His divine methods for enlightening the soul and enabling us to use what He has promised.

Battlefield of the Soul

To begin, it is important to realize that all use of God’s word takes place in and through the soul of the believer in Christ. The soul of the born again believer is the tool the Spirit uses to manifest the message and plan of God to the world of unsaved humans. He used the soul of the human authors to write the inspired text of the Old and New Testaments. He uses the soul of the Spirit filled believer to read, understand, believe and apply the word to human experience in any age or time in human history. The soul of the Christian is literally the battlefield of the spiritual war between God and the devil. In his great book, The Invisible War, pg 137, Barnhouse writes, “There are hundreds of millions of battles being fought every day in the invisible war. The field of each battle is the heart of man.”  Barnhouse is discussing the war in the hearts of mankind over the gospel of Jesus Christ, whether man will believe in Him for salvation or reject His saving work and be damned to eternal perdition. His premise for the whole book is that God’s enemy and ours, the devil has continued his assault on the human race and especially those who trust in Christ. Barnhouse makes it clear for us that the decision about who to believe occurs as God’s message is processed through the human soul and either accepted or rejected.

The Spirit uses our Human Faculties

The writer of the book of Hebrews aids us in understanding how the Spirit uses the human soul to spread the message of God. In Heb 5:14, he discusses the milk and meat of the word and how the meat of the word is used for spiritual exercise by the adult believer to develop his human faculties.

Hebrews 5:14 But solid food (meat) is for the mature (adult), who because of practice (use) have their senses (faculties) trained to discern good and evil.

When the adult Christian learns, believes and then applies the truth of God’s word, his faculties are exercised to the discernment of good and evil. The word faculties is what interests us here. The Greek aistheterion literally means the mental organs of the mind, the visual and verbal faculties of the soul that enable us to think, envision, discuss and act upon whatever we have placed into their inner regions. The faculties of mind (nous), heart (kardia), human spirit (pneuma), conscience (suneidesis) and the mind’s eye (ophthalmos) are all involved in the metabolizing of the spiritual food of God’s word. It is these same faculties that the Spirit uses to form the mind of Christ in us and then through us to express His message to others.

Why Study Human Faculties?

Why is this important to study imagination and human faculties you ask? Simply because it is part of the biblical record and every word of God is important? That in itself would be enough but there is more reason to consider this great topic. It is because the bible calls upon us to use our human faculties, illuminated through the human spirit by the Holy Spirit, to apply the word of God to life experiences. If we don’t understand the role of our faculties, then we will be unable to fully use them to fully live the abundant life left to us by the Lord Himself. Many is the believer, sitting passively in the pew waiting on the Spirit to inspire him to some great work. Having been taught the principle of Grace that says “God does all the work and man is the beneficiary”, while a true principle, a believer can wait in error until Jesus returns for the Spirit to inspire him to do what scripture has already commanded, when he already has the ability and mandate to act now, using his human faculties. One such situation was facing the Jewish Christians of the first century when James, the pastor of the First Church of Jerusalem, wrote to them about what to do with the great persecution and famine they were facing. Let’s look into his wonderful writings and see what he expected them to do.

God Honors His Word When We Do It

First, let us be reminded that God’s promises are guaranteed by His essence. His veracity guarantees their validity and His omnipotence guarantees that He will be able to do what He promised. God honors His word regardless if any man know it or believe it. Yet He honors it in the believer’s life, not when we know it but only when we do it. James, the pastor of the First Church of Jerusalem saw his congregation struggling with great adversity from persecution. He also saw that what they had learned they were failing to use. They were good hearers of the word but not faithful doers of the word. His passionate plea is as applicable today as it was then:

Jam 1:21-25 Therefore, get rid of all moral filth and the hatefulness that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you. 22 Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. 23 Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror 24 and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. 25 But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it– he will be blessed in what he does.

Spirit Led Imagination

While it seems like James begins his discussion of doing the word in vs 21, it is actually one of the themes of the whole book. In vs 2, when talking about the great adversity they were facing, he speaks to them about the use of their human faculties, about what was going on in their minds and especially what they were doing with their imaginations.

James 1:2 Consider it (Guide your mind)  pure joy (cause for celebration), my fellow believers, whenever you encounter various kinds of trials,

The English word “consider” is the Greek word hegeomai, which literally means to guide/lead the imagination/mind. Hegeomai comes from 2 Greek words, the first is ago which means to lead/guide; the second is oomai which means mind or imagination. In English, the word hegemony from this same Greek word means to lead another or to be in a leadership position. What James told his people who were struggling with depending on God in the midst of adversity, was to purposely guide their imagination using what the Spirit had taught them so that they could see adversity as an opportunity for God to do good. The word means to take the pieces of your personal puzzle, the situational pieces and the biblical principles and combine them in new and creative ways. Hegeomai means to envision your situation under the management of God and visualize all the good things that God is going to bring about. Rather than imagine all the negatives possibilities that might come about or visualize all that might be lost in these adversities, the Spirit leads our minds to see the good that God is doing.

God Uses Human Imagination

Our imagination is simply the creative use of our mental faculties to combine known pieces of knowledge in new and creative ways. We take the information we have and put the pieces together to form a picture we have yet to see. We imagine scenarios we have yet to play out and embrace. Normally, most of us use our imagination to visualize the negative, the horrible, creating scenes of loss and images that evoke sadness or fear. When we are still dominated by our earthly agenda found in our old worldly belief system, any kind of situational adversity is imagined as a hindrance to this agenda. If we are trying to get debt free, then any monetary loss from an adversity is decried as a loss that hinders our goal and ought not be. It is only when we can see our life under God’s management and control that we can do the opposite and visualize adversity as His way of exercising our faculties to faith and to endurance. This visualizing, according to James is where doing the word actually begins, by imagining God doing good in our life.

God Makes Good from Everything

The principle and promise of Rom 8:28 is one of the greatest insights gleaned by mortal man and one of the most powerful statements ever written on paper. (FAR)

Romans 8:28 And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.

We know, meaning that we have learned, that God causes, meaning that God Himself is in the management of the affairs of His children and controls the outcome of all the events of their life. He cause all things, not some things, but all things including the most difficult of adversities we will ever face, to work together, meaning all the different pieces of the situational puzzle are brought together in new and exciting ways by Omnipotent God who is able to do anything He pleases. He causes all things in our life to combine creatively for good (agathos). Here we must stop and look deeper into the meaning of the word good. The Greeks spoke of two kinds of good. The first is kalos, meaning pleasant, enjoyable, desirable, beautiful, the kind of good we hope for each day we awaken and venture forth. The other is agathos, meaning that which is good for you, that which furthers God’s plan even when it has no immediate pleasure associated with it. For example, in the plan of God, the cross of Jesus Christ was good, agathos good in that it resolved the sin issue for all mankind. In no way and by no means was it kalos good, pleasant, enjoyable and so forth. Jesus did not enjoy it in any way and willed His own death immediately when it was finished. Yet, in the mind of God, it was the most good ever accomplished by a man and He has rewarded Jesus with the highest blessings ever given for His willingness to submit to God’s good.

Now, in the following discussion of good, realize that we are not saying that God makes everything we experience into a pleasant, fun time. Yet, He takes all that we endure and uses it for our growth and His glory, the ultimate good and in this we can consider our adversities an occasion for great joy.

Imagination, the Beginning of Application

So, James tells us that application of God’s word begins in the mind and is a function of the imagination. He says that when adversity comes, guide your imagination to visualize the good that God is seeking to bring about through it as we just saw in Rom 8:28. Visualize the growth, the increase of inner strength, the increased capacity to endure future difficulties and the peace of mind that God is bringing about in your soul. As hard as adversity can be, the acquiring of these inner virtues is well worth the cost of pain and suffering it brings. It is normal for our old belief system to hate losses in the material world or the loss of an important relationship. Yet it is these very losses that God uses to enable us to shed our materialism and embrace spiritual ideals.

Reject the Negative Scenarios

The first move toward application of the word is to reject the negative possibilities that immediately come into your mind related to the events of your life. As you begin to write a sad story about all the losses you will endure, tell yourself that these negatives, while possible are a lie in that they mean nothing. Decide to look at these negative possibilities and reject them as the important issue at hand. Realize that the loss of earthly goods is of no consequence to God who can return all of your stuff many times over as He did with our brother Job.

Imagine the Good God Intends

Second, use your imagination to explore all the wonderful blessings of growth that might happen out of this event. When our daughter ended up in the hospital with pneumonia, my wife stayed with her for several days, leaving me home with the three youngest. When it was over and they were back home, we listed over 15 positive outcomes that had occurred because of the event. These positive outcomes were good things God wrought using the opportunity afforded by this adversity. Throw away your fearful images and words and embrace the possibilities that might occur if an omnipotent God were at the helm of your life. If God was in control of your life (and He is) what good could possibly happen? What limitations does He have apart from the ones we put on Him with our insistence that all blessings come in the form of earthly possessions.

Embrace the Good

Third, visualize yourself entering into these possibilities and see yourself enjoying total victory rather than total defeat. Imagine yourself receiving the good things God has designed to come out of every adversity and see yourself celebrating as each one comes into your possession. Feel the joy that comes into your soul as you see each blessing and thank God for what He might do, can do, wants to do and surely will do when it is time.

Putting it all Together

Once you have rejected the negative images of loss and fear that enter your mind, then having imagined the right images given to you by the Holy Spirit, then when you have embraced these right images by believing them and finally when you have imagined yourself actually experiencing the benefits of these possibilities, you are ready to take a mental position about the event and take appropriate action in response to the event. This is how application happens and how the Holy Spirit leads you to be a doer of the word. There is no shortcut to application if you are going to obey the command found in this verse. James does not command us to simply be faithful as we endure adversity, he commands us to be joyful about it, to celebrate it and that requires that we hegeomai, guide our imagination to anticipate God’s good even before He brings it about.

Imagine an Example

Several years ago Hurricane Ike roared through the coastal city of Galveston and brought massive flooding. Many people stayed behind instead of evacuating. Imagine a man, in his home as the water was rising and he is beginning to wonder if he will live through it. As the water continues to rise, imagine that a bible floats by and the man decides to pick it up. As he picks it up, it flops open to the book of John and he reads John 3:16. (God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten son that whosoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life) Then the wind blows, the page turns to Ephesian 2:8-9 (For by grace you are totally and permanently saved, not from yourself, it is a free gift of God so that no one can boast) and the man reads the passage. As he considers what he has read, he puts his faith in Christ and is eternally saved. Even though he is losing every material thing he owns, he has just secured his eternal soul. Can you visualize the eternal good that came from this temporal disaster?

If you followed this story in your mind, using your imagination to visualize what happened in the story, then you have just used your human imagination to apply the word hegeomai. You have visualized the good that God intends to bring out of every difficult event of life. It is this function of imagining the good that our loving God is bringing about that enables us to enter into the life of joy,  power and victory He has prepared for us. It is this proper use of our imagination that prepares us to reach spiritual conclusions, believe them and take spiritual actions.

Now that you can see the good God is bringing about instead of cringing in fear from what you might lose, you can begin to strategize about the most effective action to take that will bring blessing to you and glory to God. Your mind has been guided into the truth and now you are ready to take effective action.

Knowledge of the truth is necessary for the Holy Spirit to be able to give you truthful images of divine intentions. Without accurate knowledge, you have limited what the Spirit can reveal to you. Consistently filling your soul with truth opens up incredible options for the Spirit to empower your imagination to visualize the will of God. This is why a good church that teaches these kinds of principles is so important for us to find and faithfully attend. It is when we commit to rejecting the lies we often imagine about adversity, commit to allowing the Spirit to show us all that God is doing and allow Him to show us entering into these great blessings that we are actually at the beginning of doing the word of God. It is from this place of absolute conviction and confidence that we can move into doing God’s will and experience the victory he desires for us.

Allow God to show you what he wants to do with you and for you. Imagine yourself doing what He has called you to do even though it will be hard. Imagine that hard is not impossible and that He will enable you to perform what He promised.