ALL IN the attitude

 Martin Luther, when called to stand trial at the Diet of Worms, gave his defense of “justification by faith,” saying, “Here I stand. I can do no other. I’m bound by my conscience. My conscience is bound by the Word of God.”

The human conscience works upon the data it's fed through thoughts, beliefs, allegiances, etc. Our conscience makes use of stored information or "memory" in responding to circumstances and situations.

“The conscience works on the inside as part of your soul," says Jordan. "It’s proactive; you don’t have to ask it to function. It’s mainly retrospective; it’s usually looking back at, ‘That’s what you did.'

“It encourages you to move to that which is right and away from what’s wrong. It convicts you of the wrong.

"The functioning in your inner man is of utmost importance but the difficulty with your conscience is it can be easily manipulated. Paul talks about a ‘defiled conscience.’ That is, you have a system of norms and standards but it runs on bad information.

“Paul talks about a weak conscience where it doesn’t have much information to go on and needs to be fortified.

"Not only can the conscious be misinformed, defiled, weak and evil (Paul refers to ‘an evil conscience’) but it can also be muted because it's been seared.

"It can be so consistently violated, where the wrong is affirmed as the right, that it does what Ephesians 4 talks about: ‘Who being past feeling have given themselves over to lasciviousness to work all uncleanness with greediness.’

*****

“Basically, you have three aspects to you: the mentality of your soul, the physical actions you’re going to take, and the emotions. The way you were originally created by God to function was for your mind and your will to decide upon a course of action, and then for your emotions to respond to what’s in your mind, producing the action. That’s the natural way to function.

“Sin corrupted all that at the fall of Adam and Eve, but with the ‘new man’ Believer, instead of thinking, then feeling and taking action out of your feelings, God says, ‘Now take the way you think, and take the actions, by faith.’

“It’s not based on your feelings because your old sin nature corrupts the feelings and distorts the feeling, and if you’re going to take action out of your feelings, well, you know your feelings are too dumb to trust, don’t you?

“The way emotions work is they are always followers. They have no intelligence, no intellect. They can’t discern fact from fancy. They can’t tell the difference between the past, the present and the future. They have no ability to do that. All that’s done in your MIND. Your emotions respond to what’s in your mind.

“You can sit here this morning and think about something bad possibly happening in the future and become just as anxious about it right now as if it already happened. It’s an unreal thought.

“You don’t have to live in this think-feel-act circle. Romans 12:2 says to ‘be transformed by the renewing of your mind.’ You need to look at life through God’s eyes. God says your mind’s like a computer. It can be programmed one way or another.

*****

“The real culprit in life is not the particular circumstances or trials we face; it’s the attitude we take toward them. If you can understand how God created you, and how He made you to work and function, you’ve got a real leg up on things.

“While your spirit gives you God-consciousness, the soul gives you the capacity to be conscious of yourself. Your soul is the seat of your personality—of you as an individual. It is the part of you, by the way, that you never share with anyone else. The soul is the seat of who you are. The Greek term ego actually means ‘I am.’ The essence of who I am; that’s the soul.

“Now, your body gives you the capacity to communicate with the world about you. It’s the vehicle in which your spirit and soul reside and carry it around.

“In your spirit is your mind. It’s what gives us that capacity of knowing. Human spirits give us the ability to communicate with one another. That’s what the Bible calls your mind. In the mentality of your spirit, you have mental capacity; a memory center, vocabulary, frame of reference you get from all the things you know.

That same level in the soul is called your ‘heart.’ ‘In the heart’—that’s a function of your soul. The mentality of your soul is your heart. Proverbs 23:7 says, ‘As a man thinketh in his heart so is he.’

“When it comes up over to your heart, it’s no longer a way of thinking; it’s a way of believing. Romans 10 says, ‘With the heart man believes to righteousness.’ It’s when you recognize the difference between knowing something and believing it.

“You say to a kid, ‘You know better than that!’ It’s the difference between having the knowledge of a thing and having reached out by faith—by an act of your will—and having brought that into becoming a part of you and who you are.

“I know many things about a lot of different things that I don’t make the basis upon which I live. I know a lot about theology, much of which I don’t believe. I’m not going to make it a part of myself. It’s in my mind; it’s in my understanding. I grasp it, and I understand what’s being said, but I don’t base my life on it.

“You hear people say that heaven and hell can be 18 inches apart—you can have a head knowledge but not a heart knowledge. What they’re talking about is a difference between something in your spirit and something in your soul.

“The idea is I bring it out of the realm of what I know and I say, ‘This is what I’m going to believe; this is going to become the foundation upon which I take my life action,’ and then it becomes a part of my soul; part of the essence of my being.

“It’s the will that takes that information from in my head and puts it in my heart. And so it’s vitally important to understand the will is the decision you make to take what you know and make it a part—make it the foundation—upon which you’re going to live."

(new article tomorrow)