Thoughts - Part 1

Welcome to the podcast.

I just feel a different push this year to be more intentional with some of the things that I do and some of the adventures I go on.

I got different ideas I want to go on and go through this year and just dabble in some things and see what the Holy Spirit will have me do and kind of go from there.

I am recording my audio too. Part of one of my dreams this year is to do some sort of podcast.

So that's what this mic is for.

So I have my little setup here. I'll probably take these headphones off eventually.

It's just more so I can hear myself and make sure I have clean audio coming through.

So far I do. This is good. I talked to my wife about it and got her feedback on it and see what she thought I should do and go from there.

That did hit me as doing my youth pastor stuff. I just started teaching this past Wednesday and I want to take those same notes that when I teach on Wednesday nights to our youth bringing my notes back and doing a live or video recording of some sort.

I'm not quite confident in my abilities to do a live video just yet. I was going to play with it tonight on Tiktok and see as far as any other platform.

I don't know. Y'all have to give me some feedback on that and I don't know. That's new for me. This is new for me.

I'm just kind of playing and seeing what happens. I want to talk about a subject and this is what we started with with our teenagers this past Wednesday.

I originally thought when we first started talking about us taking over the teens at our church that I would start going through Ephesians.

Something hit me just a couple of weeks before and some of our previous teenagers hit this. They'll remember some of the stuff we talked about.

The Holy Spirit took me back to when we were there previously and what we were walking through.

Personally I did not want to go back into it but after kind of wrestling with the Holy Spirit I felt like it was the right thing to do.

Here we go. It's probably been 3, 4, 3, 4, maybe 5 years ago now. I don't really know.

When I saw a post, I believe it was on Facebook, it was just 6 words and it was basically this.

It said, watch your thoughts because they become your words. Watch your words because they become your actions.

Your actions become your habits and your habits create your character and your character leads you into your destiny.

As someone who was in youth ministry at the time when I first read that I thought well that's a really good 6 week message.

So that's what I thought it would be.

About 6 to 8 weeks of talking on just thoughts alone, I was ready to move on. I was ready to go on to how important our words are.

I heard the Holy Spirit strongly tell me, no, you're going to stick on thoughts.

I tried to argue. It did not work.

What the Holy Spirit basically told me is that Son, you're trying to break in 6 to 8 weeks what some of these young people have spent 12, 15 plus years building a mindset around.

Once he established that in me, I was like, okay, so we will camp out on thoughts a little while longer.

This is what I told our teenagers last week. Let me do some math here.

In a week, you have 168 hours.

For a week, I might get you for an hour.

If you come to church on Sundays, you have 3 hours. That's 4 hours total.

If you have any other extra things during that week for church or whatever, factor that in.

Let's just say you have the 4 hours. You have Sunday morning service, you have Wednesday night. That's 4 hours. That gives you another 164 hours during your week.

We have 4 hours to essentially combat what you face the other 164 hours of your week.

My role and my part is to push young people to establish a relationship with the Holy Spirit for themselves.

You can't rely on us to be your sole source of communication from heaven.

You are sole source of teaching because the Holy Spirit can teach you a lot more than I can.

Tonight, I am going to share some things that I have learned.

I will just throw some thoughts out there that I have had. I think a live would be beneficial because I can see some comments that interact with people.

I will see what kind of feedback I get off this and go from there.

Basically, you have thoughts, words, actions, habits, character, destiny.

Ultimately, your thoughts dictate where your destiny is going to go.

Behavior follows identity.

Backster Kruger, an author and theologian that I thoroughly enjoy listening to and reading, said that behavior follows perceived identity.

How you see yourself dictates what your behavior plays out.

My fear is a lot of times in the church that I grew up in, the church culture I grew up in, should I say,

is we focus on the fruit of the problem and never deal with the root issues.

We will deal with what we see and never go deeper beyond the surface to find out what is causing the fruit that I am seeing.

It all begins with thoughts. This is why you have probably heard this and this is why I say the mind is the devil's playground.

He likes to get right between these two things right here to make you think different things and make you believe things that go contrary to what God has spoken over you.

Your thoughts are incredibly important because they directly influence things such as your emotions, your behaviors and decisions.

They essentially shape your reality and how you experience life.

Essentially the truth is what you think you become. In fact, Henry Ford said it this way, he said, whether you think you can or think you can't, you're right.

In other words, what you think is what you get. See how important your thoughts are. See how important what you feed your mind is.

If you put junk in, you're going to get junk out. I tell my teenagers this, I've told teenagers this before, you are not a garbage disposal.

Quit allowing junk to flow through your life or to come in your life. Silence those voices and move on.

I want to read the scripture. I want to read it through probably all four different translations that I have.

What I did last Wednesday were 13s.

It's because I like the way all four of these put it and I don't think you can ever have too much scripture.

But I want to read Romans 12 to any of my other previous teenagers see this, they will, they should be able to quote this scripture to you.

But Romans 12 to from the Amplified says this do not be conformed to this world any longer with its superficial values and customs, but be transformed and progressively changed.

I catch that it says being pro-crip progressively changed means this sometimes is a journey. No, not sometimes. This is probably going to be all the time.

This is going to be a journey with the Holy Spirit to be progressively changed as you mature spiritually by the renewing of your mind, focusing on Godly values and ethical attitudes.

So that you may prove for yourselves what the will of God is that which is good and acceptable and perfect in his plan and purpose for you.

Now catch that focusing on Godly values. What you focus on is essential in this life.

I'll never forget the Holy Spirit dropped this down to me. I think I was actually playing with a magnifying glass and I felt the Holy Spirit just speak to me.

He said, Sonny said, whatever you magnify will be magnified in your own life. So you, now catch that. Whatever you choose to magnify, I wonder if I can give you a quick example.

Let me do some quick. I need a paper clip. Here we go. So I've got a camera going here and you can see I have a paper clip and a pen.

I can take this paper clip. There we go. I can take this paper clip and I can completely pretty much block out that pen.

Now to the size of the paper clip change. No, the size of the paper clip never changed.

Clearly we all know, I hope you know, that the paper clip is much smaller than this pen is.

But if I adjust your perception, I can make it seem like this paper clip is huge and that pen is just so tiny.

In fact, I can back it on up and make that pen look really even smaller and that paper clip is huge.

So there you go. Whatever you magnify will be magnified in your life.

All I have to do for this camera and for you watching is to adjust your perception to make you believe that this paper clip is actually bigger than this pen that I have.

Now, of course, we again, we know that the pen is much bigger than the paper clip, but you get my idea.

You get to choose on what you focus on. You can't choose and decide what every thought that comes through your mind, but you do get to choose and decide what thought, what thought you dwell on.

Think about that. The message says that this way.

It says, so here's what I want you to do. God helping you take your everyday ordinary life or sleeping, eating, going to work and walking around life and place it before God as an offering.

Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for Him.

Don't become so well adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking.

Don't try to fit into the culture around you.

Don't become so well adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking.

That's powerful.

Instead, fix your attention on God. Again, you get to choose what you focus on. You get to choose what you dwell on.

You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what He wants from you and quickly respond to it.

Unlike the culture around you always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

Now, that right there dragging you down to its level of immaturity, that goes back to something I know I heard as a kid growing up.

I've heard leaders talk about it before. You show me your five closest friends and I'll show you your future.

You want to look and see where your future is going. Look at your five closest friends around you and find out where are we going.

And if I want to go higher and if you want to go higher, can the people around you handle that and go with you?

Are they challenging you? Are they okay with you just living this regular normal life?

And then we have Romans 12-2 and the Passion. These last two translations are probably two of my favorites.

The Passion says,

Stop imitating the ideals and opinions of the culture around you, but be inwardly transformed by the Holy Spirit through a total reformation of how you think.

This will empower you to discern God's will as you live a beautiful life, satisfying and perfect in His eyes.

Now, I want to look at that total reformation of how you think.

If you've ever been around some renovations, my family and I just went through renovations at our house last year and it was a nightmare.

Not that just the guys that did it was magnificent. They did a great job. It's just the process is a nightmare.

Your life is kind of turned upside down while that time period is going on. We had a lot of work done around the house.

But essentially to do renovations, you have to tear out what there was there currently or previously in order to build back new or build back better.

No, this is not Joe Biden's presidential campaign. But here what I'm saying, this is not a bill. You have to tear out the old completely demolish it.

It's a mess having been through it. It can be very stressful. But you have to do that in order to get the new in.

And it's the same way with our thoughts. Some of you watching this, if you're a teenager, you may have been taught things for 12 to 15, 18 plus years.

Maybe there's 30 year olds and 40 year olds and 50 year olds and you've been taught certain things over the years that go contrary to what God says about you.

It takes time and it takes the Holy Spirit to remove those out of your mind to completely renovate and reform how you believe and how you think.

This is why it's critical to have a relationship with the Holy Spirit to get in the Word of God, to sit down and not just read it to read it, but sit down with Holy Spirit.

Sit down with the Word as you read the Word and allow the Word to teach you what it's trying to say.

And then the mirror translation, and this is probably one of my favorites. I say that, between that and the passion, I can do it all day long.

But the mirror translation says this, do not allow current religious tradition to mold you into its pattern of reasoning.

Like an inspired artist, give attention to the detail of God's desire to find expression in you.

Become acquainted with perfection. To accommodate yourself to the delight and good pleasure of Him will transform your thoughts afresh from within.

Notice how everything is from within. It all takes place from within. This is why you can't deal with the fruit unless you first are willing to deal with the root issues.

You have to begin to think God thoughts about yourself.

To discover what Yahweh says about you in order to dismantle the lies of the enemy, you have to hear His voice over you in order to shut down the mouth of the enemy.

And if you can learn to begin to focus and meditate what He declares over you, it will take you further than you can ever imagine in life.

Think about this. Go all the way back to the Garden of Eden.

We have Eve, okay?

Eve was made, if you read the Genesis, the first couple chapters, Eve was made in the image and likeness of God.

And yet the enemy comes to Eve and says, if you eat this fruit, God just knows you will be like Him afterwards.

Now think about that because Eve is already created in the image and likeness of God.

But the enemy is trying to plant doubt in Eve that Eve begins to think, hmm, maybe God has withheld something from me.

Maybe He's not as good as I perceived Him to be. Maybe He's left something out.

And it caused Him to begin to think, or caused her to begin to think that maybe I'm not already like God.

But she's already created in the image and likeness of God.

Eve could not be any more like God than she already was.

Eve should have recognized this, but the enemy convinced her that God was withholding something from her.

He does the same thing to Jesus in the wilderness.

He comes to attempt to make Jesus question who He was, but what we have to remember is before Jesus goes into the wilderness,

and this is fascinating to me, I didn't realize this until probably just a couple of years ago,

but before Jesus goes into the wilderness and before Jesus does any kind of miracles that we read or any great thing that we read about,

He's baptized by John.

And during that baptism, the heaven splits open and you hear the fathers say, this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.

Excuse me.

This is my beloved Son in whom I'm well pleased.

Jesus gets, this is my beloved Son in whom I'm well pleased before He does anything.

Before He does any great miracle, before He goes into the wilderness, He hears His Father say, before you do any of that for me,

this is my Son, this is my beloved Son.

This is where I finally, one translation reads it as, this is my greatest delight.

And He gets all that before He does the miracle.

So it's not your great things that you do for God that makes Him love you and delight in you.

He delights in you before all that.

And if we could ever flip that script to understand that I am loved if I don't do anything else,

that I am His greatest delight now before any miracles flow through me.

That will shift your entire life if you let it.

But He gets all this before He goes into the wilderness.

So when the enemy comes at Him and begins to question His identity, Jesus already knows and has in His mind where He came from and what the Father has said about Him.

So the enemy can say, if you are all day long, but repeatedly, Jesus says, it is written.

Like, you're not going to move me from this.

I will have to prove to you who I am.

My Father already knows who I am.

I'm already His.

He already delights in me.

I'm already His beloved.

So thoughts and identity.

That's what we have.

Those two go together.

I believe personally one of my missions on this earth, one of my purposes is to help teach identity back to a generation.

And quite frankly, where I'm at in life right now, I believe a lot of that has to do with dealing with the thought process, dealing with what goes into your mind sets, dealing with the mental part of your life.

Think about Philippians 2.16 that says we have the mind of Christ.

Think about that.

You have currently, right now, the mind of Christ already in you.

Are you accessing it?

That's the big question.

Are you accessing what is already put in you?

See, you don't need anything else from God.

You don't need Him to do anything more than what He's already done.

The thing that He's called you to, you don't need anything else, but what He's already deposited into you.

Part of the reason I wanted to start in Ephesians, and let me read, I want to get this right if I can.

Let me pull up my iPad.

I want to read this.

I want to read this verse.

If it will let me.

Give me just a minute.

Okay.

So this is the Passion Translation.

This is one reason I wanted to start in Ephesians with the youth group.

Because to me, Ephesians speaks of identity.

If you want to find something to start reading, go read Ephesians in Galatians and Colossians and read some of those and find out what Yahweh declares over you.

But in Ephesians 1 3, it says this, Every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realm has already been lavished upon us as a love gift from our wonderful heavenly Father.

Think about what I just read.

Every spiritual blessing has already been lavished upon you.

Everything that you need is already inside of you.

You don't need anything else.

But to come into agreement with what Yahweh says about you, and come into agreement and walk with the Holy Spirit and listen to His voice to find out how He would have you move and operate each and every day.

Because I'm telling you right now, I'm in the, as far as the Old Testament goes, I've been reading through Exodus and the amount of detail in Exodus when the Lord is giving instruction on how to build certain things is incredible.

And if He has that much concern over the details of a building and whatever else in there, how much more detail does He have about your life?

How much more involved does He want to be in your life?

He wants to be from the very, very small decisions you have to the large decisions.

He wants to walk with you and help speak to you and give you insight on how to walk out this life.

And I'm telling you, it all begins with your thoughts.

You have to begin to partner with heaven about what heaven declares over you, what Yahweh says about you, and leave all the other junk behind.

I hope this helps.

So I'm going to stop there.

I'm not going to go any further tonight. We've been about 25 minutes.

If I do these videos like this, I'm going to keep it below 30. That'd be my goal.

I'm very long-winded. I can be.

You can thank my family for that.

My grandmother is long-winded too. Thanks, Granny.

And like I said, I do get it honestly. I'm passionate about this kind of stuff.

But I'm hoping what I said tonight helps you begin to understand and maybe think a little bit more.

Just get along with Yahweh and say, How do you see me?

Holy Spirit, teach me what you say about me.

Because that's the important part.

You have to know what He says about you.

Remember, before Jesus does anything, He's baptized,

and He gets the, This is my beloved Son, in whom I'm well pleased, and this is who I have my greatest delight in.

And He says the same thing about you and I.

So I'm going to pray, and then I'm going to jump off this video, and I'll get it posted for everybody to do whatever.

Please, if you watch it, give me some feedback. Give me some comments.

Know this, I may not respond. If you're going to post negative stuff, you might as well find somewhere else to do that,

because I'm not going to engage with it. Don't care to.

I believe my focus is more important of the places. I've got three kids, and that's definitely more important than your negative feedback.

If it's anyhow.

But let this kind of stuff sink then. I guess the good thing about doing it this way, you can go back and we watch it if you like.

Maybe there's something that stuck out to you.

You know, whatever. I'm just testing this stuff out. I'm not professional with this.

I'm just seeing kind of where it goes.

Father, we thank you tonight. I thank you for any individual who may have stopped and listened to this and watched this.

I pray that my words and the words that you spoke through me would penetrate their hearts and their minds tonight.

Help them, Father. Holy Ghost, teach them who they are.

Reveal yourself to them and reveal yourself in them, Holy Ghost.

Teach them who you are. Teach them who they are in you. How do you see them?

Give them dreams, give them visions, speak to their minds, send people in their paths to remind them who they are.

And it's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen. God bless you guys.