The Pneumatic Mind - Part 3

By Pastor Gary C. Price

The spirit of the world is a spirit of bondadge! When people are bound, they will also try to bind others. You must recognize that. A slave can only offer you bondage, but a liberated man can offer you freedom. That is why people did not like Jesus. They were bound to the world and its systems, striving to make something of themselves based on worldly standards. Yet Jesus cared nothing about those things; their position, status, renown, wealth, etc. Jesus walked in freedom and authority because His identity came from the Father and not the ruler of this world.

This dichotomy between the world and God is the same today. Those who loved the world rejected the person of Jesus then, and the same type of person will also reject His Gospel today. They do not like the real Gospel because it offers liberty from this world. The spirit of bondadge makes people afraid, even afraid to be free! Why? Because they are walking under the yolk of this present world. Such will make a person unable to operate in God’s presence because all the world can offer is death. Being free from the dictates of the world is offensive to many because they are a part of the world’s systems. They can only think in line with the world and as a result they will conform to it every time. They will even resent those who won’t conform to it.

People are living in death and afraid to let go of death in exchange for life. How crazy is that? To leave here as a saint and go to heaven is life! Yes, we will go through afflictions for a minute, but that is why our minds must be liberated from this world to focus on the hereafter. The world is built upon lies, and by nature the mind of sinful man is programmed to receive these lies as truth. Our minds must be reformatted in order to recognize and embrace reality as defined by God, escaping the lies of this present evil world. This can only happen once you have been born again, allowing you to have eyes to see and ears to hear.

God can work in such a way where it can seem that He is not even around, but He’ll be right there talking to you through someone else. If you only see the person, it is because you are seeing things after the flesh. Your mind must be in tune to God to know the difference. Just as God can speak to you through people, so can the devil. This is what spiritual discernment is about. Having no peace inside is an indicator that you are not spiritually-minded. Such persons live in turmoil because of the mess the devil has set-up in their lives. The only way to get above those distractions is to walk in resurrected life!

In Scripture, the 6th day represents the day of man. The 7th day represents God’s rest. The 8th day represents resurrected life. In the Old Testament, the male child had to be circumcised on the 8th day. However, in the New Testament the circumcision is an internal circumcision of the heart. When our hearts are circumcised by God, it is then that we are living in resurrected life! What is God’s instruction to us once we are walking in this resurrected life?

The word for affection is ‘mind.’ Don’t claim to be walking in resurrected life with the Christ if your mind is focused on the things of this world. That focus on this world is your own internal barometer showing that you are not what you claim. Simply put: you are what you eat. What we focus our minds on (or meditate on) has the ability to trasnform us. "The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!" - Matthew 6:22-23). The spirit of our minds must medidtate on the things of God in order to interact with Him.

Did you know that people can spend their entire lives trying to figure out why they cannot receive from God? The explanation is simple: they are dead. The only one God is going to deal with is the one who has a life in Christ. All others are dead to God. When you find your life in Christ, the revelation of what God created you for will begin to manifest. If God’s Spirit is not inspiring what you are thinking, then it is just dead thought. It must be pneuma inspiration from God as the breath of God inspires your mind. Then you will have what the Bible calls ‘good success.’ (Joshua 1:8) When God inspires your innovations, they produce results.

Here we have the old man with his deeds contrasted with the new man who is renewed in knowledge to reflect the image of Christ. This is how our minds get renewed. You get and attain spiritual knowledge to renew the mind, casting out the old breath and replacing the spiritual program in your mind with new breath. Inspirations from God to make you over into a new creation. “If any man be in Christ he is a new creation, old things pass behold all things have become new.” (2nd Corinthians 5:17) Your ‘zoe’ eternal life is hidden in Christ.

You hear people saying things like, “When I was born I felt like a man in a woman’s body.” That is a spirit talking! The spirit in them carried that particular nature and gender, and they could ‘feel’ it. The unfortunate thing is that the church, for the most part, has no power to address this. People are walking around bound by these spirits. Instead of being vessels sent to deliver them, most religious folks are too busy setting-up churches which accomodate and adapt to these spiritual problems. No longer is the goal to conform people to Christ, but the church is now conforming to the perversions of the fallen man. In other words, the church is conforming to the dictates of demon spirits.

We spend so much time bathing our mind in the old man - his surroundings and his established covenants - that our minds are not being refreshed to walk with God. See, you have to do a new thing to get new results. You have to operate in a new spirit and interact with God’s Spirit at the expense of the old spirit that you used to walk in. “Putting on” the new man is only going back to the image that God created initially. We are returning to the image that Adam was before he fell. The new man is actually the first man. The old man He is talking about is a filthy, unregenerate invader that came into our minds and took it over. We were born in sin and shapen in iniquity; formed in the nature of the old man. That is what we are battling! The old man does not want our minds to be inspired by the Spirit by God brought back to life from the dead. There are a number of things that you will lose once you really get inspired and brought back to life in God. One is the fear of death. Death is nothing to be feared for those who have been born again because death is understood to be a transition. Death is a doorway.

When you are afraid of the spirit world, you are closed down to God. Your mind is closed to God and you are on the other side of the door guessing about God; giving your opinion about God and telling people what you think God is like. How long will people choose to espouse a God that is the result of their imagination (what they think, feel, believe, etc.) instead of turning to serve the True and Living God? The exodus is the perfect example of this. Just as Israel came out from Egypt and through the wilderness to enter the promised land, Christians come out of the world and through a soulish existence before entering into spiritual life. When you are in the world, you are conscience of your environment and Satan is your god. Once you get to the widerness, you become self-conscious and you become your god. This is in fact where most religious people stall out. They do not serve God because they still love this world. Yet, they don’t go back to Egypt or continue on to the promised land. Instead, they set up a golden calf fashioned after their own perverted desires and imagine that they serve God. That is how people live in church; it is the core of religion and denominationalism. They never do what it takes to have their own minds renewed, but they just hang around and go through the motions. This is a terrifying scenario because when you get before Jesus Christ He is going to say, “Depart from me you worker of iniquity. I never knew you.” (Matthew 7:23) In other words, your mind was never opened to me. There was no spiritual transference from me to you. There was no conduit created by the Holy Spirit for me to commune with you. I do not recognize you. Who are you? What are you?

In order to truly know God, one must come over into the spirit world where God is. You must come out of the soulish realm and become spiritual, where your existance is God-conscience and is centered around what His will is. Yet, to live where God is you must die. “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it.” (Mark 8:35) Death is a doorway to the spirit world. This is why death has already been processed for those with a spiritual mind. There is no longer any fear of death. When you accept that you are dead, death no longer has any hold on you.

The Bible says, “Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.” (Hebrews 2:14-15) Did you know that the one thing which kept you a slave to the world was a fear of death? You have been subject to bondage all you life because you are afraid to die. This is why people hold on to this life so fervently: they are afraid to die. They hold on desperately to this life and struggle continuously to live up to worldly standards because they have no hope beyond this life.

Why do we look at death as the end? In the fallen, sinful state, man tries to escape the reality of one simple fact: you are going to die. No one wants to process that. People strive for recognition from this world. Even worse, they think getting attention from this world makes them into “somebody.” This is the primary marker of those who have no identity; those who are fatherless. Your natural father is supposed to be the first example for you of what it means to have God as a Father. However, even if your worldly father failed in this responsibility, that is no reason to continue wandering through life as a vagabound. You can still turn to God and receive your identity in Him. Only those who have never had the love and security that comes from knowing a father would turn to the world for acceptance. The criteria for worldly acceptance? You must allow the world to make a fool of you.

Today we have millions of young girls who are being trained to be dogs. They are trying to appeal to the lowest state of humanity, a beast-like nature whose carnal instinct can be summed up in one word: LUST. Being taught by the world to appeal to the most animalistic of man’s desires, these girls are drawing attention the way that fresh cow manure draws flies. They present themselves as nobodies and as a result, these are the ones they draw: nobodies. What is their main problem? They never had a daddy to train them. Take a look around. Most women are out there like this, with all personal standards of decency and behavior having been lowered. They downgrade their lives to the lowest common denominator to live “up to” the world’s dictates, resulting in a pitiful reflection of life. In their own minds they try to make believe they are “something.” They try to look like, act like, be like...trying to prove that they possess something they just don’t have: an identity.

While the world is telling these girls that they are “it,” they are taking a beating. There is no such thing as a good friend in the world. The world just uses folks and it wants to make of you what it is: fatherless, lost, rebellious, rejected. This is what we saw happen in Sodom when the men said to Lot, “...bring them out unto us, that we may know them.” (Genesis 19:5) In the Hebrew, they were literally saying “bring them out so that we can make of them what we are.” If I am a fatherless nomad with no identity, then all I want to do is make you into the same.

That is what is so pitiful about letting the world define who you are. Who would want to fit in with this? You can monitor any culture by the state in which the women are in. Women are to a culture what the Holy Spirit is to God. The Holy Spirit reflects the very essence of God. Yet the Bible says if whoredoms overrun the land, the whole land is cursed and destroyed. So the standard now in this country and around the world has become whoredoms. Whores are in the limelight. You see very few women who maintain a standard of style and grace. There is relatively no allure that comes from being feminine and lady-like, only that which elicits lust. All of this will continue (and only worsen) unless somebody stands up to confront it. Someone must wake these people out of their comas so that they can come to themselves. The Bible says finding a virtuous woman is as rare as a ruby.

Walking with God is a rare occurance. Do not downgrade your existence to fit in with the world, for the world and its fashions are perishing even as you read this. How do you get 100% resurrection power? Go 100% over into that realm with God under the control of the Holy Spirit. Remember, Satan’s primary tool to stop that total tranformation is fear. If he can make you afraid, he can stop your growth. David was able to deal with the spirit world through psalms. Look at 1st Samuel 16:14-23:

Notice that the Scriptures do not say that the evil spirit came from the devil; it came from God. In the Hebrew style of writing, God does everything. In other words, if anything happened then God allowed it so by default God did it. What really happened in terms of the sequence of events is that David played the harp Saul was refreshed; a breath of fresh “pneuma” or air was released unto Saul to displace the unclean, oppressive spirit which troubled him. The harp lifted that unclean spirit so that Saul could then breath freely. Music anointed by God has the power to set the soul free. Music appointed by the devil is oppressive and will burden you down. The worst mistake that we made in the world was to fill our minds up with the Devil’s music.

Also notice how there is always a void left when one spirit leaves. First, the Spirit of the Lord departs, leaving room for an evil spirit to trouble him. Disembodied spirits are looking for vessels through which they can express themselves. The number one goal of someone full of these unclean spirits is to have people pay attention to them. Remember, the spirit world when it is not seen by definition is disembodied. It is a breath outside of a physical body. Yet, if your mind id being renewed, you will begin to perceive spirits in any environment. If you are unable to discern the spirits around you, it is because you are still worldly yourself. To live is to get to Christ and let His Spirit fill me so that I may walk in His Spirit.

Not everyone wants to deal with the hard things of the gospel. The pneumatic mind is a spirit-driven mind; one that is revived by the refreshing breath of God. Any kind of compressed air is powerful when released. Likewise, you and I should be chambers of compressed air with God’s Spirit housed in us and ready to be released at His command. However, if we are worldly, the chambers of our minds will be filled with other pneumas. There will be no conduit for God’s Spirit, but a short circuit of that power. Our focus must be on creating an environment in our lives that is conducive to God.