Good morning. So we're going to do something. It's going to be a little different. But you'll be able to roll with it.
It's OK. So I'm going to ask our amazing technical people at the back if they can bring up for me Deuteronomy chapter 6. And I'd like to see verse four, five, and six in the NIV just for continuity sake. If you could do that for me, gentlemen, Deuteronomy chapter six.
If you have the electronic means to look it up or the paper means to look it up, you can also look it up yourself. We'll do it the old-fashioned way. So I would like you to stand, please. Yes, stand up.
You've been doing it already. I know you can. Oh, there we go. So we are looking specifically for Deuteronomy chapter six starting at verse four.
Very good. The passage we are going to read collectively out loud together is what is known as the great shima. This is the culmination of all the commandments. This is what the Lord expressed to his people.
This is the relationship I desire to have with you. So together, starting at here, oh Israel, we're going to say it out loud together. Here, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord, your God, Lord, with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.
Excellent. We'll pause there. So the Lord instructs that they will love the Lord with their heart, with their soul. And with their strength.
Now let's see how quickly our gentlemen can do this in the back. You are amazing back there. I'd like to see Mark chapter 12 starting at verse 29. Mark chapter 12 starting at verse 29.
This is also a good exercise because for thousands of years, whenever the word of God was read, people stood for the reading of it. Both out of respect because it was the word of God being read, but also because it helps us focus. It gets our blood flowing. We're more attentive.
We're not going to do the whole sermon this way. So relax, but it is a good moment. Okay. We are going to start this.
This is now Jesus speaking, answering a question that was posed to him. So we will start to read where it says, here, oh Israel, here, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one and you shall love the Lord your God, with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. Okay. You can be seated.
Now using your cognitive abilities, was there a difference between those two passages? Yes or no? Yes. What is the difference between the great Shema as we read it in Deuteronomy 6 and the great Shema as the Lord Jesus Christ pronounced it in his response to the question he was asked.
What is the difference? All your mind. It's important to notice this. This is a difference which took place in culture.
It isn't just Jesus pronouncing it. It's one of the other gospels. Jesus asks someone what is the greatest commandment and that person responds as well this way. Because between Deuteronomy 6's time period and Jesus day, there was a growing understanding that we as humans weren't simply sort of our essence, our emotions, our physicality, our ability, but there was an understanding of this thing called our mind.
And I want us to think a bit about this today. I was over the last couple of weeks, I took out my old notebooks and was going through reading studies that I had done in preparation for sermons and I was reading one of the books that I have in the notes Bible study notes were from 20 years ago. And the topic was the battle for our mind. And as I was reading through the scripture passages and the things that I had written down, one of the things that struck me was that, oh my goodness, I thought there was a battle for our mind 20 years ago in 2005.
It is a very, very different landscape today. John mentioned it this morning as we were around the Lord's table. How connected, fixated, we are now to our technology to the point that we are dependent on it. We're talking about falling directions by Google.
A while back was invited to speak at a conference that was happening at a Bible camp in New Brunswick. I had never been there before. So I put it in Google Maps and I was doing fine. I came up from Nova Scotia.
I was going through New Brunswick. It was dark. It was a Friday night and I'm driving along and then it told me to turn off and I turned off and I was on this gravel road and I thought, well, we're going to some Bible camp. I guess that's not surprising.
And I'm driving through the woods on this gravel road and then all of a sudden it said, you have reached your destination. I was nowhere. I stepped out of the vehicle and realized that the road ended in a thicketish swamp and there was no lights, no houses, no power lines, no nothing. I was nowhere in New Brunswick on a Friday night in the dark.
But Google was happily telling me, you have reached your destination. And it's like, this is not the destination I want. But our minds are constantly being bombarded to give you a little bit of fact. When we think about our minds, we start physically with our brains.
Sitting in our skull and our brain pan is about 2.83 pounds of proteins, gray matter, that sits between our ears, one of the amazing proofs of God's handiwork that hopefully you will never actually see. But it's there. I saw it once. I had to get x-rays done of my whole head and I was looking at the x-ray and the doctors said, no, you have a brain because I could see it there.
It controls everything, a cluster of billions of cells. The average 70-year-old brain will hold over 15 trillion unique pieces of information. Billions of information being passed around in your head all the time. When you are awake or you are asleep from the moment when your brain formed and your mother's womb to the moment of brain death, your brain is always working.
It is the superior part of your body. Of all your physical parts, nothing works like your brain works. But that's just the physical thing. Then there is this thing called our mind which is more than just electrical impulses and stimuli.
It is something far greater. It is tied to who we are and who God's created us to be. Besides being a storehouse of data, it is the control center of our being where the basic directions of our lives is established. Richard Strauss made the statement, what goes on in our mind determines what we are and what we will become.
The information received there, the experiences encountered there, and the conditions that take place there all affect the decisions we make and the course of action we take. Your brain is so incredibly valuable, but most of the time we take it for granted. And one of the things I want to impress upon you this morning as we look into God's word is I want you to realize how valuable your brain, how valuable your mind is because others know how valuable it is. You know one of the greatest areas of occupation for psychologists is it's not hospitals, it's working for companies.
I have a friend who is a psychologist. Her employer is a consortium of banks because she helps them shape their programs, their policies and their advertising to most appeal and connect with what your perceived needs will be. Because they know if they understand your mind, they will get you to give them your resources and your money. The music industry hires psychologists, social anthropologists because they know if they understand how you think and how you perceive the world, they will be able to market better to you.
They also know that they can then shape your thinking to make you even more easy to market to. We need to be aware of this. So this morning we are going to take a look at what God tells us about our minds or look at a number of passages so you can flip along or you can note them down for later. I want you to be prayerfully focused as we think about this because I do believe this is the greatest battleground where we fight.
Right now is in our minds. Before we look into the word let's pray. Our Lord and our God we praise you that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. Lord we praise you that when you created us, you created us to be in your image and likeness, that you blessed us with gifts and talents.
Lord we also know that because of our sin we were separated from you that our thinking was darkened. Lord we praise you for Jesus Christ, our Savior who has come to pay the penalty for our sins, to save us and to restore us to our intended purpose. Lord this morning as we look into your word as we contemplate our minds and the battle that we are facing, Lord I pray that you would be speaking to us. Lord be glorified in all that is said.
We ask this in Jesus name. Amen. In Proverbs 23 verse 7 we read the words, for as he thinks within himself so he is, for as he thinks within himself so he is. And I have seen that played out more and more and more where someone is convinced they are this, therefore they are.
So one said perception equals reality for many people. I spoke once with a person who was convinced they were beyond redemption, that Christ sacrificed was not sufficient for them because they were such a wretched human being and they were so convinced in their mind that their sins were piled so high that God could be so repulsed by them that they could not believe the message of the gospel. Their perception had shaped the reality. We see how people will take a path of self-destruction.
It amazes me as I interact with people in the army we have bad habits in the army. In the army alcohol continues to be a problem, smoking and cannabis use is a problem. And I watch as young people come into the army, they are educated, they have been to school, they know all about how bad these things are. And so you see when they first arrive we have what is known as the smoke pitch.
Now there is only older people in the smoke pitch. The young ones don't go into smoke because they are intelligent and they know their bodies need to be healthy and the cigarettes have no benefit to them and these things, this past week I was looking out and there was a course running and they were having the breaks and people were finally going to the smoke pit and I went, wait a minute that is one of mine. And I went down to this guy and said, what are you doing? I am having a smoke.
And I went, you do realize that that is actively killing you, right? And he goes, well yeah, but this is what we do. You know the biology of what this is doing to you. And he went, yeah, as he pulls it out and lights it up and I am going, are you thinking?
Are you thinking what you are doing? I am struck by the people I see in the city who show the impact of fentanyl and other drugs where the influence of the addiction of a drug and their own minds perception of the reality that they are actively destroying themselves. When we understand our minds, we read in the first five chapters of Genesis, God gives us a picture of our mind that the human mind is capable of understanding administration for God gave us in the beginning dominion over his creation. So we had the ability to administrate.
He gave us the ability for creative thought. When he told Adam the name, the animals, this wasn't simply a make work project, it is demonstrating to him his ability to look and discern and make decisions to be able to develop skills. We were able to tend, we were able to make music, we were able to build all things that God gave us in our minds, to develop relationship ultimately to follow God. But our sin has broken us.
We are told in Ephesians 4, 17 and 18, so I tell you this and insist on it in the Lord that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. That the understanding of those outside of Christ is darkened. We read in 2 Corinthians 4 verse 4, the God of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers.
So they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ who is in the image of God. Titus 1, 15 and 16 tell us, do the pure, all things are pure, but to those who are corrupted and do not believe nothing is pure. In fact, both their minds and consciences are corrupted. Romans 8, 6 and 7 tell us, for the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the spirit is life and peace because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God, for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so.
Colossians 1, 21 tells us that once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. So it's important for us to understand that in our natural state, outside of the redeeming work of Christ, our minds cannot function as they should. This is important because this helps us understand how the world can be the way it is, why we make decisions as human beings thinking we are benefiting ourselves and yet we hamstring ourselves again and again. A number of years ago, actually this would be about 2003, I took a group of students to Dalhousie, my brother was working at the law school in the library and he was going to teach my students, my high school students research methods.
Now the internet was new back then. So we took this group in and they thought it was a great field trip, we were in the weldon law library and they were sitting there and my brother brought up on the screen and he said I'm going to teach you how to do Google searches back when Google searches were new. And he said let's do a topic here, we're going to talk about piracy in history in Nova Scotia. And so he put that in the Google search, he showed them how to break it down, how to put it in, how to put certain things in quotation marks because that needed to be a main thing that was there.
So they brought up some Wikipedia pages and they looked at one that was talking about Captain Kidd and his presence around here and so they looked at the page and the students were taking down information and then they looked up another one and they were taking down information and then the third one on the list was Captain M, the teacher of pain. And so they clicked on it and there was this description on the Wikipedia page about this pirate who prided himself as a teacher to bring suffering to all those he captured and so they're jotting it down. But as my brother is causing the screen to scroll up, a photo appears. It was a photo of me with a sword.
And so the students are jotting and then one by one they actually noticed the photo and of course had a good laugh about it but my brother said you need to understand now that your temptation is to believe whatever comes from there is truth. I've just shown you, it took me 15 minutes to go in to Wikipedia, create a Wikipedia page, put this information in there, all of it is fake. But you just jotted it down like everything else. That was back in 2003.
My brother took the page down so you can't find it. Now we even more so believe that in this thing called the internet that it's true. We contradict our doctors. Oh the doctor says this, let's see what WebMD says.
Let's see what Mayo Clinic says. We become our own lawyers. I was talking to a person who works with apps for contractors and he said a growing problem that is happening is that contractors, little companies who want to bid on big jobs are going to AI. So they go to chat GPT and say look I want to build a bid on this job, here's the info that I know, give me the quote.
And AI gives them the quote. And my friend will often sit with them and he'll say if you take that quote you will get the job. You will be so off budget that it will probably bankrupt you because all the information here is wrong because you don't know what to ask and AI gives you what you asked for. And people are making life decisions based on these things.
AI now gives us relationship. I read an article about a person who is tens of thousands of dollars in debt because they went on a site where they found a person who is their internet friend. And they'll have little chats and the person will share pictures and stuff. But every so often it's like oh well I want to have a phone chat with you but you need to pay, click the button.
Click the button. Click the button. You'll have thousands of dollars of clicking the button. Why?
Because the person needed community couldn't find it socially but a bought on AI became their community. This person is still starving for community. And now has a huge debt to pay. You see, not only are there those human speaking whose minds are darkened to make money who will take advantage of people to make money, we also have to understand that in the spiritual realm we have an adversary who is at work keeping people's minds blinded to the truth.
of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And our adversary is also interested in distracting us. I had an interesting experience. I, like probably all of you, have one of these that sits in my pocket.
It is everything now, isn't it wonderful? I don't have to have an insurance card in my car anymore because they'll give it to me on my phone. I can pay for things with my phone. Camera, hmm, do the teachers who said, oh you won't always have a calculator with you?
Ha ha ha, yes we do. And if I need the answer to anything, Google will tell me it may not be right, but it becomes consuming to us. We have a puppy in our house. He's 12 weeks old.
His name is Gunner. Gunner knows about these. Because this morning, it was just Gunner and I, first thing in the morning, and doing things around. And then I pulled up my phone to look up something.
Gunner was just basically bouncing against my leg and doing his usual thing. All of a sudden, Gunner stopped. He looked at me for a moment and then Gunner disappeared. Gunner's not allowed on the couch in the living room.
Gunner was on the couch in the living room. Why? Gunner already knows that when this comes out, I am no longer aware of him. And I'm going, 12 weeks old, you are better at understanding how this works than we are.
You know that this will consume my attention. It also is marvelous at distracting. Predictive AI. Oh, you were looking up that.
But let me give you this. Let me give you this. And a fascinating thing, a study was done that said that if you follow that trail, you found a video. Oh look, here's another recommended video.
It never goes the exact same direction. It will always veer off. Oftentimes, veer off into directions where morally, spiritually, you shouldn't go. It will veer off.
Why? Because there are those in the works who have intent. I always tell young people when they talk about encountering things like pornography online, you go, I stumbled across. I say, no, you didn't stumble across it.
It wants to be found. The people who are putting it there are putting it in such a way that it will find you. Because they want you to find it. Because they know how addictive it will be.
And it will grab hold of your mind. Now, I'm not being a lotite and I'm not telling you to get rid of all these things. But use your spirit controlled mind and discern. I will say to you, there is great value in reading the Word of God in paper.
Not just saying the fact as I used to demonstrate to students that I can be startled and drop this, it'll still work. Maybe not with you if you drop your iPad or your phone. But when I read this and I come to the end and I see the next part, I continue on. There are no pop ups.
No pop ups. No. Oh, what about this? And all of a sudden, oh, this thing popped up.
And oh, wait, did you notice? I'm amazed how many times I'll be trying to look up something spiritual on my phone. And all of a sudden, I get all these random pop ups. That seem to pop up more frequently.
Coincident that maybe, but I doubt it. No, no, no. You're spending too much time looking at this now. Look at this now.
We need to be careful. We need to understand that those outside of Christ, their minds have no defense against this. They don't. So don't be surprised.
We saw this. I had someone come to my office after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. And she was an interesting moment, the individual. The individual said, until I saw that this person had been killed.
And then I saw people celebrating it. And then I saw people trying to use it for political advantage, one direction or another. All of a sudden, I felt like I had just woken up from a dream. But is this what the world is really like?
And all of a sudden, I heard people saying things about this person and realizing that they were using little clips of soundbites and none of it was actually accurate. And she said, but I just have followed along. Because that's just the way it works. So what do we do?
Recognizing, as it tells us in Romans 7, verse 23, but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind, and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. There is the battle. 2 Corinthians 11, 3. But I'm afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent's cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere devotion to Christ.
Know that one of the challenges we have as human beings is that our minds had an original default. And that is to go in the way of the world. When we come and are transformed by the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, there's a transformation and a sanctification that is happening in our minds. But unless we submit to the spirit, our mind will always go back to its default, to its original programming.
And we can stray from our sincere devotion to Christ. 1 Timothy 4.1 tells us the spirit clearly says that in later times, some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. We're told that this will happen. So we need to be aware and looking.
2 Corinthians 11, 14 and 15. And no wonder for Satan himself, masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising then if his servants masquerade as servants of righteousness. I'm amazed by how many times online I will come across someone and they'll be sharing a devotion and they're speaking a message, giving a word of encouragement and I'm listening to it.
Oh, that's good. That's good. That's good. Whoa.
That just went off. One person was talking about all these great things, you know, that God is with you. God is your strength. God is this.
Whatever your heart desires is yours. It's like no. My heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it?
In Ephesians 5, 18. Do not get drunk with wine for that is dissipation, but be filled with the spirit. And the term filled there means to be completely controlled by, because if we're controlled by the spirit, we're not being controlled by the influences around us. We can discern them.
We can see them for what they are. For Jesus promised us in John 1613, but when the spirit of truth comes, the Holy Spirit, He will guide you into all truth. And this is why we were told in Romans 12, 2 and 3, do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world. But be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is, His good and pleasing and perfect will. We need to be in the business of having God renew our mind, because our minds are being bombarded. Anxiety has never been as high in the West as it is now. Yet for the majority, we have food to eat and shelter.
We have medical care. We have many of these things, which are our natural things that we would say that would be a source of anxiety. We have them, and yet we are anxious still. Why?
Because our minds are being programmed with reasons to be anxious. Be anxious. Be anxious. You know, this could happen.
There was something popped up about how something was going to smash into the earth. And this whole big news thing about it. Yes, within the next 2 million years, the earth is guaranteed to be obliterated by this massive rock. Really, and there are people losing sleep.
You were planning to still be here in 2 million years? Like just when you think about it, it's ridiculous. It's laughable. And yet all people here is the earth is in danger.
It's fragile. And what will happen to us? Because that's how we've been programmed. That's how we've been programmed.
And we need to renew our mind. Be able to look at these things we hear and say, the Lord has set His plans. And His plans are never thwarted. He has told us already what the end will be.
That a day is coming when this world, as it is, will pass away. And there will be a new heaven and a new earth. He has told us that if we are in Him, He will never leave us or forsake us. So we are never alone.
He has told us to gather together in community that this is a good thing and necessary for us. I was amazed even hearing those who purported to be people of faith talking about how the devil took the life of Charlie Kirk. I went, no. The word of God tells me that my days and your days are numbered.
No one enters or leaves this life, save as the sovereign Lord has preordained. Though it may be the actions of evil in the moment, the fact is that was the appointed moment when Charlie Kirk was to leave this life. And to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. If He knew Christ, then He stepped in to glory.
And we get anxious about what tomorrow brings. Sometimes I get anxious as I look at myself in the mirror and go, oh, I am older. I was on a Microsoft Teams meeting, and we were all talking at one point. I looked at a little picture that was me.
And I went, when did I become my dad? And I realized, I opened up the word of God and it says, oh, we are perishing. It's not going to get better in this life. But sometimes my wife will go, do you really have to lose more hair?
And it's like, oh, I just feel like it's a dear. Yeah, I need more aerodynamic in the front. It's like, it is going to be this way. But I also know that one day I will be with the Lord and everything will be made new.
We need, as we're told in 2 Corinthians 10, 2 to 5, that we need to take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ. And this becomes our necessity. That when each thought comes to us from without or within to say, is that true according to the word of God? And if the word of God says, it's not true, then it's not true.
But we need to do this consistently. We need to do it daily, daily to begin our day by saying, Lord, take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ. As I'm going through my day, I need to take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ to know what is true and what is not true, to be able to see when you're being deviated. Like, I'm not going there.
Or you're being distracted. There's too much that needs to be done to be distracted. Because one of the things that is good is that people are beginning to look at all that we've surrounded ourselves with and are beginning to see how fake it is. I have had people walk into my office, just walk into my office at work and say, well, you think God thinks of all this?
I have to be careful because I have certain, and it's like, do you want to know what God thinks about whatever the particular topic is? And they're like, yeah, I would like to know. It's like, OK, let's talk. I've had more conversations even in the last two weeks where people are going, why do you think the world is the way it is?
Like, things are really weird. It's like, let's talk about it. But if we're distracted, we might miss it. If we're getting pulled off, we won't know what to say.
We might feel too consumed because one of the things that this world does with our minds is that it loved to get us to navel gaze. And that's not an article term. That's when we are so focused on what's happening to us that we don't see what God's doing. And we don't see where God's directing us.
We don't see how he wants to use us for his glory, or to see how he's working as Emae said this morning, counting our blessings. I have a friendship with a group of men who started a practice where every day, the end of the day, they have to list 10 things that they're thankful to the Lord for. And they're only allowed to carry over a couple. So they have to think of new things.
And at first, it was incredibly hard. It was things like, thank you for air. Thank you that my house didn't fall down. Thank you that.
But they said, as they've done it, and one of my friends, he's done it now for over two years, said, now my lists are new every morning, or every evening, and they're longer. Because some days I'll just start writing, go look, I put 25 things now. Because when our minds are being renewed by the Spirit of God, and according to the Word of God, for the glory of the Son of God, we begin to see the world the way he sees it because he is at work in our minds. We see the needs, we see sin for what it is.
We see the ridiculousness of it. We're able to speak truth in love to people and see what God is doing. Because as we were told in Philippians 4, the peace of God will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. So I would encourage you this week to begin the practice of asking the Lord to guard your mind, to take captive every thought, to do an honest look at what occupies your mind.
Look at your search history. Look at the time on history. That's the one that often creeks me out, is when I look and go, I said, that many minutes today on this. And sometimes, of course, the world will say, well, you need to have it with you.
What if the car breaks down? What if this? What if somebody has to get in touch with me? I had an incident at school where we were talking about banning phones during school hours.
And I had parents come to me and say, you can't ban phones. What if I have to get in a hold of my child? And I said, well, for 70 years, you would call the office. And the office would go and get your child, give them a note, or bring them to the office.
It worked. It was fairly effective. But now, we have this thought that, no, no, I must be able to connect with my child in that moment. But then that's how our minds have been shaped.
See, that's, again, a picture of how our minds have been shaped. We have to do these things. So ask the Lord to take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ. Look at where you're at.
See through the fog. Look at where you bring your truth from. Spend time in the truth in the Word of God. Step away from meaningless debates and discussions and conflicts to no purpose.
That rant that's going on in the internet, nobody cares about your comment. Don't sit there and just listen to it. Talk to real people around you about spiritual things. And see whose life God may use you to impact.
Let's pray. Father, you know the battle that we are fighting. And Lord, I don't think we understand the magnitude of it. So Lord, I pray through the power of your spirit that every believer here, Lord, that your spirit will open our eyes to see the spiritual climate around us.
Lord, I pray on behalf of my brothers and sisters and on behalf of myself that you would take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ. Lord, that we would seek truth, speak truth, and live truth, the truth that comes through your Word, through your spirit, through the saving work of your Son. Lord, if there are those here who do not yet know you through Jesus Christ, Lord, I pray that they would ask the questions today and seek the answers. For you have promised us in your Word that anyone who seeks you will find you if they seek you with all their heart and you speak truth always.
So Lord, do this work. Minister to those whose minds are pulling them down, Lord, that you would reveal your love and your glory. Lord, do this so that then you may use us to shine the light of the glorious gospel in the stark world around us. We say this in Jesus' name, amen.