Driving Out the Inhabitants of the Land: Part 1
By Pastor Mitch Horton | January 2001 | Posted in • Archives | (0) Comments
Many people start each new year with a list of “resolutions” that they intend to put into practice. Their intentions are wonderful, but often the years ends with most of them unfulfilled. This frustrating process continues year after year and for some a sense of hopelessness replaces the incentive to change. As Christians, we should be constantly changing from “glory to glory!” Too often we find ourselves bogged down in the reality that we are stuck in cycles that we can’t free ourselves from. In this article, I want to challenge you to take the steps that will help you out of the downward spiral that you may feel trapped in, and bring your life into a new liberty and a life of obedience to God.
The new birth removes the desire to sin from our human spirit (See Romans 6:1-12), but leaves the rest of our nature unchanged. Our souls (mind, emotions, and will) and our bodies are relatively unaffected in the new birth. The Apostle Paul speaks of the wrestle that even he had with his body after he was born again (see 1 Corinthians 9:27). In Romans chapter 12:1-2, he encourages the believer to submit his body to God and to transform his lifestyle by changing his patterns of thought.
Though we may be born again, real change doesn’t appear in our daily lives until our thinking processes change. Our thoughts govern our behavior! “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he,” so reads Proverbs 23:7. Someone has said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results! For the results to be different, we must THINK differently!
In Ephesians 4:22-24, Paul mentions putting off the old man and putting on the new man. To do this we are encouraged to “be renewed in the spirit or our mind.” What he’s really saying here is that real change comes only when we change underlying thought patterns in our lives.
Putting off the old man and putting on the new man is likened here to changing your clothes. To “put off” or “put on” in this verse in the original Greek means to put off or put on as you would your clothes. Since your clothes are the first thing that others see when you come into their presence, putting off or putting on means that behavior changes so much that others notice the change when they see you!
The spirit of your mind mentioned in Ephesians 4 is speaking of the thoughts that we have about ourselves that we’re unaware of. I call them underlying patterns of thought. These are the thoughts that form your belief system, that is, what you really think about yourself, about God, and how you think of yourself in relating to others.
The spirit of your mind is developed over many years of living and responding to your world. The most influential force in helping you develop these underlying thought patterns are your parents. How you see yourself, how you relate to others, and how you relate to God are directly related to your family of origin. There we develop character traits that last a lifetime.
Though we receive much good from our parents, we also receive their negative patterns, too! Exodus 34:6-7 mentions the sins of fathers and mothers being passed down to the third and fourth generations. These transgenerational sins must be exposed and challenged if they are to be removed from our lives.
The children of Israel being led into the land of Canaan by Joshua is an excellent example of what we face as believers as we enter the born again, Spirit filled life! Some say that Canaan is just a type of heaven, but it just can’t be. In heaven the battle is over! And there are no giants there! In the land of Canaan there is a fight to kick out the giants! The Israelites faced giants much larger and more powerful than they were as they entered the land of promise. And they faced having to conquer the land city by city, a little at a time. The Lord told them that if they didn’t drive out the inhabitants of the land, then the inhabitants would be irritants in their eyes and thorns in their sides (See Numbers 33:50-55; Exodus 23:20-30).
This is an excellent analogy of our life as born again, Spirit filled believers. The blessings of God are available to us, but we have to drive out the inhabitants of our land if we are going to receive the best that God has for us in this life. These inhabitants are the thought processes, the grave clothes of the old man, that keep us thinking and acting toward God, ourselves, and others, in ways that keep us from living a life of peace, joy, and harmony with others.
Many believers who have walked with the Lord for years are still being irritated and hindered from God’s best by underlying thought processes that remain untouched by the Word of God. The Lord wants to enable us to drive out these patterns of self-condemnation, fear of intimacy with God, and fear of intimacy with others. Next month we will discuss the process in more detail.
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