Sift for Gold

Posted by Jeffrey Smith June 14th, 2016 2,373 Views 0 Comments

Isaiah 55:8:"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD.

We can get bogged down in our thinking sometimes. We are inundated with impressions daily. Don't know what I mean? Look online and you will see thousands of subliminal messages about products, services, and prescription drugs. Turn on a TV and you get the same thing, more brand reinforcement. Not all commercials are inherently bad nor are all messages or impressions. Think about the idea of going through a day as an empty sponge. When you wake up until you lay down at night you are absorbing so much information, so much language, pictures, and emotion. Then there are the actual interactions with others. The conversation, the politicking with our children and others for our perspective. We have just normal conversations with some, and still we find deep conversations with others. How much of this information is necessary to our lives? We must find a way to wring out the sponge each and every day. We need to be cleansed from the absorption of so much. If we do not wring it out, we are beyond saturation, and we become overwhelmed and useless with all of the information that we have stored. Imagine if we could sift through all the data, all the information and allow the gold to come through and be retained while we allow the other fool’s gold, silt, and non-useful items to go away. How much more clear would we all be? How much more could be accomplished? How much more liberated from damaging thought processes could we be? 

Jesus and His thoughts for us and to us are gold, and throughout the day He is feeding us those through the Holy Spirit. We just have to listen and retain them. The other items we must determine through discernment, if they are worth keeping. They may look like gold, but are they? We can tell through identifying whether they are from the heart of God. This can be subjective to some degree, and so we must also lean on scripture to see if it lines up with Jesus and His grace. We do know that guilt, condemnation, and fear, are not from Him, and so we can reverse engineer so to speak the items we can quickly eliminate. Regardless of how plausible the fear, or guilt or condemnation seem, they are absolutely a lie from hell. So that means that we must examine them, pray in defense of them, and discard them like a pair of twos when someone has aces. It may be difficult to want to let go, but we all know in our hearts that we must. Letting go of negative thoughts can be difficult. It is not natural in the flesh to let go of worldly items like fear, guilt, shame, and condemnation, but in the Spirit it is unnatural to hold on to them. In the Spirit we have a different perspective of life, on situations, and when we master the self-control of being in the Spirit versus the flesh, we complete ourselves through Jesus and His fruits of the Spirit. Self-control is not whether or not we smoke, drink, have bad habits and our ability to quit them. Self-control in the Spirit is the ability to push down the flesh and allow the Spirit to rise up. It is the ability to dictate to your body what functions your Spirit allows it to do. When we are ruled by our minds of this world, we have no self-control in any real aspect. We may have our own control mechanisms that we employ of situations or circumstances, but we do not have control over anything. In the Spirit we are righteous, we are free, and we have control over our whole body and mind (Matt. 16:25:For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.). This is in conjunction with the Holy Spirit who can freely interact with our spirit (Romans 8:26:In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.) to produce an amazing result of wholeness, power, strength, ability, love, compassion, depth, revelation, success, wellness, the list is limitless. Sift for gold brothers and sisters because it is in there. We must pour out our thoughts, impressions, and conversation on God. We must squeeze out the garbage and find the gold which brings us closer to walking fully in the Spirit. When we do that, the gold will be more and larger each and every day and the garbage will be less and less. Believe, think, seek right and it will all line up to God's very best for each of us. Start with me today.