POWERFEED YOUR SOUL WITH TRUTH, BELIEF AND REPETITION.
Every moment of every day something in our soul is being fed and something is being starved. Because we live in a fallen world influenced greatly by the presence, power and corruption of modern media, the natural course of living everyday life inevitably feeds the world's values into our soul and starves the Spirit’s values.
As a result, we Christians are in danger of being swept out to sea by the riptide of modern culture. The challenge of discipleship in the 21st century is to devise a way to meet this danger by
power feeding our souls large doses of the things of the Spirit sufficient to offset the power of culture.
To power feed our souls means to take spiritually rich truth and information through our minds often enough and effectively enough (using video, audio, creative memory techniques, etc.) that the input offsets the inevitable feeding we get from the world just by living everyday life.
To power feed our souls, we must do three things:
- We must power feed our soul with essential truth
- We must power feed our soul with essential beliefs
- We must power feed our soul with essential repetition.
- Essential Truth
The first thing we must do is to power feed our soul with essential truth. We must learn the essential body of information necessary to live an authentic Christian life.
There is some truth that is so important, so fundamental, that if you don't know it, you cannot grow to maturity in Christ. You will flounder in the backwaters of the Christian experience wondering why it is not working for you.
After thousands of hours writing a 10-volume series of books for Thomas Nelson over a five-year period (
What You Need to Know series), I boiled down that very large body of information to an essential foundation of information, called
The Brave New Discipleship System, that can be used for a lifetime of spiritual growth.
You can see it at
www.bravenewdiscipleship.com. This is a “hard copy" product, DVDs and workbooks, that were created primarily for discipleship and small groups ministries in local churches. If you are a pastor or leader in a local church or other discipleship ministry, I urge you to
take a look at them.
But for individuals studying on their own, I will have that same information available in the option of an online membership site later this spring. If you have subscribed to my blog, you will automatically be alerted when that site is ready. If you have not yet subscribed, you can do so with the "Free E-Book Signup" form at the top of any of my blog posts.
Most people find it challenging to master what the Bible says and how to live it. Yet, while the Christian life cannot be reduced to the snap of a finger, it can be made much clearer and easier than it often is. We can help you learn what you need to know – faster and easier – giving you the biblical foundation for a lifetime of spiritual growth.
So that's the first thing we must do. Power feed our soul the essential
truth necessary to live an authentic Christian life.
- Essential Beliefs
The second thing we must do is power feed our soul with essential beliefs.
Unfortunately, there are some things we may know but don't really believe.
For example, Philippians 4:19 says, "My God will supply all your needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus." So, if we saw the question on a test, "Your God will supply all your needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus, true or false?" We would check: "True!"
Yet when we are faced with a true financial crisis, it is typically greeted with surging anxiety. Why is that? Do we not believe God will meet our needs? Or perhaps we believe He might meet them on a level He considers adequate, but not on the level to which we've become accustomed.
Our emotional reaction betrays our level of true belief in the acceptability of God's will for us.
Therefore, we must isolate those difficult and challenging truths that we might not yet fully
believe, and give them extra attention.
- Essential repetition.
Third, we must power feed our souls with essential repetition.
To transform our lives, we must renew our minds (Romans 12:2). To renew our minds, we must capture Christian truth that is
essential to master in order to grow spiritually. Some of that truth may be
difficult to understand or
hard to obey. We must take the truth, including the difficult truth, through our minds over and over again until we know it and begin to understand and obey it.
Repetition is the key to mental ownership… and repetition is also the key to driving the truth deep into your heart, where it changes your fundamental attitudes, values and behavior.
God has created the brain to need repetition, to change through repetition. That is why the Bible tells us to be so careful about what we let into our minds (Philippians 4:8), and to meditate on the Word day and night (Psalm 1:2).
So, if you have ever struggled, as I have, to enter into a deeper, more satisfying relationship with God… if you have ever struggled, as I have, to mature in Christlike character… if you have ever struggled, as I have, to make a greater impact on others, and to have a greater sense of purpose and meaning in life, then this three-fold strategy to power feed the soul can be life-changing. I know it has been for me!
God does not renew our minds if we are passive. We must be engaged! We must power feed our souls sufficient to offset the power of culture.
If you power feed your soul essential truth, essential beliefs, and essential repetition, it will guide and accelerate you spiritual journey and help you achieve your God-given potential.
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