Protecting Your Mind against the Flesh

Reading through The Enemy Within by Kris Lundgaard, I recently ran across the following three ways to help your protect your mind as you fight against the flesh (selections are below). Before I give you the three ways of protecting your mind against the flesh, let me highly recommend this book to you. Lundgaard’s work is absolutely one of the best I have ever read on helping understand the flesh as it works in the life of the Christian. He describes the book as straight talk about the power and defeat of sin. He takes John Owen’s ideas and brings them into modern culture. Although hard-hitting, you will enjoy this great work.

Meditation and Private Prayer

These great tools of the mind are meditation and private prayer.

The meditation and prayer I mean are designated specifically to ruin the flesh. In this mediation and prayer we compare our hearts to the Scriptures, comparing our lives to what we find there. We ponder the truth as it is in Jesus, to see his life formed in us. But we never approach meditation and prayer like this until we keep three things in mind:

1. Meditate on God with God.

Fill your mind with thoughts of God’s character, glory, majesty, love, beauty, and goodness—but not abstractly and impersonally, as you might contemplate a textbook description of photosynthesis. Speak to God as you contemplate him, humbling your soul before him, adoring and admiring him, delighting in him and giving him glory. Make your meditation into the worship of the psalmist:

O Lord, my Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! (Psalm 8:1)

2. Meditate on the Word in the Word

Study the written Word to know the living Word. Never let it be your goal to search the Scriptures to find a new insight to tickle your hunger for learning or to have something neat to share with your small group. Ask him to open his mind and will to you, so that you may know him and love him more. He delights to do it.

3. Meditate on your self in the Word and with God.

The power of this meditation and prayer lies in its ability to expose the secret workings of sin—what advantages the flesh has gotten over you, what temptations it has used with success, what harm it has already caused, and what harm it still plans. This prayer and meditation calls on the Spirit to use his Word to shine light into the cracks and crevices of your soul, to show you every real need and danger there.

Without these, prayer is not prayer. Without these purposes and longings, your prayers and meditations won’t bring any glory to God, and they won’t make you holy or fill you with joy.

But with these, prayer and meditation sound the depths of your soul, dredge up the schemes and plots of the law of sin, and drag them into the light of God’s presence. In his light every imagination of the flesh is judged, condemned, abhorred, and mourned.

Protecting Your Mind against the Flesh

We would be wise this week to strive to meditate on God with God, meditate on the Word in the Word, and meditate on ourselves in the Word and with God. In the process, may God receive the glory!