TABERNACLE: MIND
INTENTION:
Our mind can guide
alot of what we do by its thinking and imaginations; impacting our lives and
the lives of those around us. Yet, we can renew it away from the influences of
this world and shape it into acknowledging and accepting a greater Truth from
the Holy Spirit inside of us. And in doing so, create a healthier life and
lifestyle.
I.
TOPIC (PART 3 – MIND):
In the continuation of our series “Tabernacle: Body, Mind,
Soul, Heart, Spirit” we want to focus on the Mind.
When looking at the diagram above, we see that the first
doorway into the Tabernacle from the Courtyard is our mind. Everything that
gets processed by our 5 senses (our body) goes through our brain (our mind)—our
mind is the gateway from the body into the soul. And is the battleground for
much of our life.
But what can create beautiful imaginations, can also create
doctrine and obstacles (filters) against the Lord. Because it is here in the mind that we begin
to train our thinking into accepting the world around us as reality; creating
those filters on our mind that affect our own will (which comes from the Spirit
in us). These filters are developed through negative “nature and nurture”; and
can be: racism, xenophobia, religious doctrines, victim mentality, a poverty
mindset, negative thinking, and more.
Our minds from birth are an open and free sponge, accepting
all that comes its way—whether positive or negative nature or nurturing. We
don’t consciously know if it is positive or negative at that childhood time,
but as we grow and mature, we can often recognise where we picked up a “bad
habit” or “bad mindset” and change it in our adulthood—even though it can be
quite a painful process in reprograming and rewiring the brain.
However, when we align our mind (thinking, imaginations,
wisdom, etc) with the Lord, we help set our beliefs on Him and allow Him to
more clearly flow out into our bodies from His Spirit within. The battle for
our mind is strong as the world will always want to train it to align with
itself—yet the brain is always mailable and can untrain and retrain itself.
So, when you find something misaligned with the Lord, know
that you CAN change it, and the Lord will help you through that change to set
you free from the filters that hinder or destroy your life. Even undoing
traumas.
II.
READING: Philippians
4:1-20 (NTE)
Well then, my dear family – I miss you so much, you’re my
joy and crown! – this is how you must stand firm in the Lord, my beloved
people.
2 I have a special appeal which goes jointly to Euodia and
Syntyche: please, please, come to a common mind in the Lord. 3 (And here’s a
request for you too, my loyal comrade: please help these women. They have
struggled hard in the gospel alongside me, as have Clement and my other
fellow-workers, whose names are in the book of life.)
4 Celebrate joyfully in the Lord, all the time. I’ll say it
again: celebrate! 5 Let everybody know how gentle and gracious you are. The
Lord is near.
6 Don’t worry about anything. Rather, in every area of life
let God know what you want, as you pray and make requests, and give thanks as
well. 7 And God’s peace, which is greater than we can ever understand, will
keep guard over your hearts and minds in King Jesus.
8 For the rest, my dear family, these are the things you
should think through: whatever is true, whatever is holy, whatever is upright,
whatever is pure, whatever is attractive, whatever has a good reputation;
anything virtuous, anything praiseworthy. 9 And these are the things you should
do: what you learned, received, heard and saw in and through me. And the God of
peace will be with you.
10 I’ve been having a great celebration in the Lord because
your concern for me has once again burst into flower. (You were of course
concerned for me before, but you didn’t have an opportunity to show it.)
11 I’m not talking about
lacking anything. I’ve learnt to be content with what I have. 12 I know how to
do without, and I know how to cope with plenty. In every possible situation
I’ve learned the hidden secret of being full and hungry, of having plenty and
going without, and it’s this: 13 I have strength for everything in the one who
gives me power.
14 But you did the right thing by entering into partnership
with me in my suffering. 15 Indeed, as you people in Philippi know well, when
the gospel was getting under way and I was moving on from Macedonia, there
wasn’t a single other church, except yourselves, that entered into a two-way
partnership with me, giving and receiving. 16 Yes: when I was in Thessalonica
you sent help to me, not just once but twice.
17 I stress that it isn’t the gift I’m interested in. My
concern is that you should have a healthy profit balance showing up on your
account. 18 For myself, I’ve received full payment, and I’m well stocked up. In
fact, I’m full to overflowing, now that I have received from Epaphroditus what
you sent. It’s like a sacrifice with a beautiful smell, a worthy offering,
giving pleasure to God. 19 What’s more, my God will meet all your needs, too,
out of his store of glorious riches in King Jesus. 20 Glory be to our God and
father for ever and ever, Amen!
III.
RELATED VERSES AND QUESTIONS:
A. Mark
12:30 (NTE) {PoG}
“and you shall love the
Lord your God with {your whole} heart, and with {your whole} soul, and with {your
whole} understanding, and with {your whole} strength.”
Question: When we Love Him in “whole”, it means
without filters and hindrances—what are some filters you feel you can eliminate
in your mind that affect how you view the Lord?
B. Renewing the Mind.
Ephesians
4:17-24 (NTE)
So this is what I want to
say; I am bearing witness to it in the Lord. You must no longer behave like the
Gentiles, foolish-minded as they are. 18 Their understanding is darkened; they
are cut off from God’s life because of their deep-seated ignorance, which
springs from the fact that their hearts are hard. 19 They have lost all moral
sensitivity, and have given themselves over to whatever takes their fancy. They
go off greedily after every kind of uncleanness.
20 But that’s not how you
learned the king! – 21 if indeed you did hear about him, and were taught in
him, in accordance with the truth about Jesus himself. 22 That teaching
stressed that you should take off your former lifestyle, the old humanity. That
way of life is decaying, as a result of deceitful lusts. 23 Instead, you must
be renewed in the spirit of your mind, 24 and you must put on the new humanity,
which is being created the way God intended it, displaying justice and genuine
holiness.
Romans
12:1-2 (NTE)
So, my dear family, this
is my appeal to you by the mercies of God: offer your bodies as a living
sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. Worship like this brings your mind into
line with God’s. 2 What’s more, don’t let yourselves be squeezed into the shape
dictated by the present age. Instead, be transformed by the renewing of your
minds, so that you can work out what God’s will is, what is good, acceptable
and complete.
Philippians
3:13b-16 (NTE) {PoG}
this is my one aim: to forget {no longer care for (G1950)}
everything that’s behind, and to strain every nerve to go after what’s ahead.
14 I mean to chase on towards the finishing post, where the prize waiting for
me is the upward call of God in King Jesus. 15 Those of us who are mature
should think like this! If you think differently about it, God will reveal this
to you as well. 16 Only let’s be sure to keep in line with the position we have
reached.
Question: Do you feel you need to change (or
“forget”) in your own mind anything contrary to the Lord?
·
Refer Also: https://cbadenhorst.blogspot.com/2016/06/forgetting-past-renewing-mind-06-13-16.html
C. Worldly
vs Spiritual wisdom and discernment:
1
Corinthians 2:13b-16 (NTE)
We don’t use words we’ve
been taught by human wisdom, but words we’ve been taught by the spirit,
interpreting spiritual things to spiritual people. 14 Someone living at the
merely human level doesn’t accept the things of God’s spirit. They are
foolishness to such people, you see, and they can’t understand them because
they need to be discerned spiritually. 15 But spiritual people discern
everything, while nobody else can discern the truth about them! 16 For ‘Who has
known the mind of the Lord, so as to instruct him?’ But we have the mind of the
Messiah.
2 Corinthians 4:2b-6 (NTE)
We don’t use tricks; we
don’t falsify God’s word. Rather, we speak the truth openly, and recommend
ourselves to everybody’s conscience in the presence of God. 3 However, if our
gospel still remains ‘veiled’, it is veiled for people who are perishing. 4 What’s
happening there is that the god of this world has blinded the minds of
unbelievers, so that they won’t see the light of the gospel of the glory of the
Messiah, who is God’s image. 5 We don’t proclaim ourselves, you see, but Jesus
the Messiah as Lord, and ourselves as your servants because of Jesus; 6 because
the God who said ‘let light shine out of darkness’ has shone in our hearts, to
produce the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus the
Messiah.
2
Corinthians 10:3-5 (NTE) {PoG}
Yes, we are mere humans,
but we don’t fight the war in a merely human way. 4 The weapons we use for the
fight, you see, are not merely human; they carry a power from God that can tear
down fortresses! We tear down clever arguments, 5 and every proud notion that
sets itself up against the knowledge of {God; leading away into captivity every
thought and making it obedient to} the Messiah.
Question: Do you believe you have the “mind of
Christ”? Do you know anyone who hears testimonies and truths about the Lord,
yet their minds still reject His existence? What are ways you can discern that
your thoughts are going against the “knowledge of God”; or that someone is
speaking with worldly wisdom vs Spiritual?
D. Ephesians
2:1-7 (NTE)
So where do you come into it all? Well, you were dead because of your
offences and sins! 2 That was the road you used to travel, keeping in step with
this world’s ‘present age’; in step, too, with the ruler of the power of the
air, the spirit that is, even now, at work among people whose whole lives
consist of disobeying God. 3 Actually, that’s how all of us used to behave,
conditioned by physical desires. We used to do what our flesh and our minds
were urging us to do. What was the result? We too were subject to wrath in our
natural state, just like everyone else.
4 But when it comes to
mercy, God is rich! He had such great love for us that 5 he took us at the very
point where we were dead through our offences, and made us alive together with
the king (yes, you are saved by sheer grace!). 6 He raised us up with him, and
made us sit with him – in the heavenly places, in King Jesus! 7 This was so
that in the ages to come he could show just how unbelievably rich his grace is,
the kindness he has shown us in King Jesus.
Question: What do you find you have trouble with
letting go of your “former self” (old flesh and mind)?
E. We
have to remember that we, in truth, are not enemies of God… we only think we
are in our imaginations.
Colossians
1:9-11,21b-22 (NTE)
For this reason, from the
day we heard it, we haven’t stopped praying for you. We’re asking God to fill
you with the knowledge of what he wants in all wisdom and spiritual
understanding. 10 This will mean that you’ll be able to conduct yourselves in a
manner worthy of the Lord, and so give him real delight, as you bear fruit in
every good work and grow up in the knowledge of God. 11 I pray that you’ll be
given all possible strength, according to the power of his glory, so that
you’ll have complete patience and become truly steadfast and joyful.
…there was a time when you
were excluded! You were enemies in your thinking, and in wicked behaviour. 22
But now he has reconciled you in the body of his flesh, through death, in order
to bring you into his presence holy, blameless and without any accusation.
Question: What are ways we can remind ourselves,
even when we make a mistake (sin), that we haven’t changed our Loving
relationship with the Lord (that He is not upset or disappointed with you)?
F. How
we need to think of ourselves:
John
10:34-36 (NTE)
‘It’s written in your law, isn’t it,’ replied Jesus to them, ‘ “I said,
you are gods?” 35 Well, if the law calls people “gods”, people to whom God’s
word came (and you can’t set the Bible aside), 36 how can you accuse someone of
blasphemy when the father has placed him apart and sent him into the world, and
he says, “I am the son of God”?
Philippians
2:5-11 {PoG}
Let this mind be in you,
which was also in Christ Jesus: 6 who, being in the form of God, did not think
He had something that didn't belong to Him—He didn't think that equality with
God was wrong, or that He had acquired something that wasn't supposed to be His.
7 Yet He emptied Himself, made Himself devoted to another (a slave), and existed
in the identity of a human. 8 Indeed, He discovered Himself as being comprised
of everything that a human is. He humbled Himself, becoming obedient until
death; moreover, death on the cross. 9 On account of this, God indeed exalted Him
to the Highest Rank, even giving Him a Name which is over and beyond each and every
name! 10 So that, by the Name of Jesus, every knee should bow down in honour:
whether in heaven, on earth, or in the world below. 11 Indeed, each and every
tongue (of each and every language) will profess and confess that Jesus Christ
is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Question: We are as Christ (1
John 4:17b)—does your mind agree with this truth?
G. James
1:5-8 (NTE)
If any one of you falls
short in wisdom, they should ask God for it, and it will be given them. God,
after all, gives generously and ungrudgingly to all people. 6 But they should
ask in faith, with no doubts. A person who doubts is like a wave of the sea
which the wind blows and tosses about. 7 Someone like that should not suppose
they will receive anything from the Lord, 8 since they are double-minded and
unstable in everything they do.
Question: Do you feel you can ask the Lord for
anything—even clarity as to the things in our mind that might be deceiving us
regarding us knowing His Truth?
H. The
manifesting of the Lord (faith) comes about by hearing (instruction)—i.e., the
hearing / instructions of: how, why, what, when, where, who... a hearing (instruction)
that programs (re-programs) the mind to align with the way the Lord does
things. With the ability to hearing / be instructed in (all the above), coming
from the Word of the Lord—Jesus being the demonstration (instructions) of all
the "how, why, what, when, where, and who".
Romans
10:17 (NTE) {PoG}
So faith comes from
hearing {instruction}, and hearing {instruction} comes from the word of the
Messiah.
Question: How do the instructions (hearing) from
the Lord change your mind (thinking) for you to manifest the Lord in your life?
IV.
FURTHER THOUGHT:
We must not limit how the
Lord can work through different techniques available to us from the Medical or
Psychological fields. The following are ways I have found which help me
overcome the ways my mind (brain) has been detrimentally programmed—and theses
methods, to me, align with ways we can Biblically “renew our minds”. Often, I
find that the Bible references a task, and that both science and psychology
fill in the details.
One of the goals we have
is to help people in their Mental Health state—having personally suffered from
Depression, Anxiety, PTSD, and Suicidal Ideation. We know the affects it can
have on one’s life and that of the lives around someone suffering from these.
But we know and feel that these do not have to be a permanent reality to
anyone. Through my relationship with the Lord, medication, deliverance, psychedelics,
Psychiatrists, and Psychologists, I have been able to overcome these
debilitating conditions.
Following are some of
those techniques / therapies that assisted me; helping renew my mind (rewiring
my brain) and healing my soul.
A.
Mental Health – Dr Caroline Leaf (www.drleaf.com):
[Dr. Caroline Leaf has
developed a] theory (called the Geodesic Information Processing theory) of how
we think, build memory, and learn, into tools and processes that have
transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals with Traumatic
Brain Injury (TBI), Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), learning
disabilities (ADD, ADHD), autism, dementias and mental ill-health issues like
anxiety and depression. She has helped hundreds of thousands of students and
adults learn how to use their mind to detox and grow their brain to succeed in
every area of their lives, including school, university, and the workplace.
– www.drleaf.com/pages/about-dr-leaf
Thoughts: I (as well as other’s I know) have
gone through some of her books and listened to many of her talks. In brief, she
(and I) believe that our mind can Rewire / Unwire (reprogramme) the brain to
overcome habits, addictions, and negativity.
B. Mental
Health – BrainWorking Recursive Therapy (www.BWRT.org):
BWRT is defined by Terence Watts – the leading therapist who developed
it – as an approach grounded in science. It uses natural psychological
processes to recondition neural pathways in the brain that lead to unwanted
behaviour. By stopping and rerouting the brain’s natural response to anything
traumatic or not understood in its tracks, BWRT can prevent the negative
outward symptoms of conditions like depression and anxiety. It uses no devices,
advanced technologies or medication, but simply involves a patient and a
therapist talking – like many other forms of therapy. Watts believes that
because many physical health problems are rooted in – or at least impacted by –
psychological problems, BWRT can also be effective in coping with the symptoms
of diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and a number of autoimmune diseases. He says:
“The purpose of BWRT is to give people the life they deserve, and that’s what
it does. “It’s about giving people contentment in their lives, and making them
feel equal to others. BWRT does that better than any other therapy I’ve ever
used.” – www.ns-healthcare.com/analysis/brain-working-recursive-therapy
Thoughts: Having done several BWRT sessions
with my Psychologist, I’ve been able to undo harsh traumas in my past—even from
childhood. This has helped free me from much of the negativity and
reaction-based responses from those traumas. Plus, it helped free me from the
guilt and shame that I’ve lived with for so long in my life.
C. Holistic
Health – Addiction, Trauma, Mind and Body, ADHD, Compassionate Inquiry,
Childhood Development and Parenting – Dr Gabor Maté (www.drgabormate.com):
“The more we learn, the
more we realise that our health is a complex consequence of all our
relationships, personal and social.”
“Trauma is an invisible
force that shapes our lives. It shapes the way we live, the way we love and the
way we make sense of the world. It is the root of our deepest wounds.”
“We may not be
responsible for the way the world creates our mind, but we can learn to take
responsibility for the mind with which we create our world.”
“The question is not
why the addiction, but why the pain.”
Thoughts: One of the most powerful understandings
I got from listening to Dr Gabor Maté is the fundamental relationship that is
the natural human need to feel connected. This, with the disheartening results
and destructive behaviours that stem from abandonment trauma (abandonment
wounds). Seeing this affect in myself from my childhood, and the importance of
connection with my own child, really shifted my self-healing.
D.
Mental and Emotional Health – Psychedelic
Therapy:
Psychedelic
psychotherapy may be represented as a paradigm shift, one that promotes whole
health and self-integration. This modality cultivates respectful conditions for
self-healing and fosters a blossoming of innate creative potential. As internal
disconnects and trauma are processed, internal resilience and enrichment
results. These shifts in internal health are correspondingly reflected in
enhanced empathy, improved relatedness and increased capacity for social
connection. – www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8874171/
Thoughts: My first guided “Mushroom Journey”
occurred in 2023 following a long and painful adult complex trauma, compounded
on top of my already-in-place Childhood (Complex) PTSD. Through the use of psilocybin,
I felt I broke down many of the barriers-to-healing I had in place—softening
those parts of my mind that needed to be rewired. It was a seeking to also help
“bridge the gap” between “head and heart”; but what transpired, was not a
melding of head and heart, but a better understanding to their interdependency.
And, mostly, expanding my ability to see, feel, and comprehend this
life-journey.
* If you are wondering,
this (along with all my healing processes) have been directed and encouraged by
the Lord. I thus had to overcome the former religious programming in me that
saw psychedelics as wrong or “sinful” (in essence, renewing my mind to this).
Yet, it truly was the Holy Spirit that led me into this type of healing. The
Holy Spirit was with and in me, through my mushroom journey—guiding thought,
imagery, and providing interpretation and understanding. Even with the Praying
in Tongues during the process.
V. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT & SUPPORT:
A thank you to Kelly and Joshua who are inspirational in this life-journey. And to all the family, friends, sponsors, and donors who have fed into this ministry and outreach.
If you would like to support this ministry and outreach, you may do so via our website or at:
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