It is kind of ironic that the day before this horrendous earthquake in Haiti, the Dayton Daily News ran a lead article: Ohio ranks 42nd in National Happiness Study, which is a real study that was published in the Journal of Science last month. Happiness, that there are only eight states that are in a worse emotional state than we are. It is somewhat understandable in that Ohio is one of the states that is struggling the most in these economic times. What really jumped out at me was this young woman who was experiencing some really incredible challenges this past year, including open heart surgery, but she identified her life as very satisfied. Our lives are made more by our thoughts than they are of circumstances. That's why it says in the Bible, "As a person thinks within themselves, so they are." So you really begin to understand how strategic this battlefield for your mind really is. Your mind is so strategic because it is the door to your heart that influences your character. We really need to ask God's covering and protection. So will you bow your head in prayer and ask God to protect your mind from anything that is not of him. To expose any darkness in your life that you may not even be aware of and invade it with his light. It is in the name of Jesus we pray. Amen.

Will you open your Bibles to Ephesians 4:17-24. "So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do (anyone outside of the faith), in the futility of their thinking. (There it is, it all begins in the mind. Whatever has your mind, has you. Your mind is the door to your heart which is the center of your character.) They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. (There you have it, ignorance from the mind to the hardening of the heart.) Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed. (When you lose spiritual sensitivity, you give yourself over to material sensuality.) That, however, is not the way of life you learned when you heard about Christ and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness."

This past week, I was "Googling" studies on the effect of the mind on the body and healing. There are all kinds of scientific studies out there. It is believed that a positive attitude results in faster recovery from surgery. I asked my son about this and he said, "Yes. In medical school, they tell us that a person's positive mental attitude helps them do better in surgery and recover better from surgery." But what I didn't know, in burn studies out of Shriner's Burn Institute in Cincinnati, is that people with a positive attitude recover quicker from burns. There is a lot of scientific evidence about how our attitude effects our immune system. We all know about stress and so forth and where your mind is in relationship to that. I also found out this week that there is scientific evidence that our attitude gives resistance to certain kind of cancers. This is sound biblically because many times in the Bible we see where people asked Jesus to heal them. He asked about their expectations. He said, "Do you believe I can do this?" You receive what you believe. Then Jesus responded by saying, "Let it be to you according to your faith." So we see the power of the mind and why your mind is such a powerful battlefield because what you believe, you receive. As a person thinks within themselves, so they become. Our thoughts become the behaviors that become our life patterns. So whoever or whatever gets your mind, gets you. So it is understandable why the media and commercial advertising thrives on shaping your ideas, values and attitudes to influence your behavior.

I gave Dan an assignment this week to research some old smoking ads. It was interesting how the tobacco industry has so influenced us. About forty percent of Americans still use tobacco products. We have gone from subtle things, this may be harmful to your health, and the surgeon general has determined this is harmful to your health. Now on tobacco products it says smoking kills. They can put that on there. Buy this product and it will kill you; and forty percent of Americans keep buying the product. You see how the media and advertising has worked to convince your thinking, your attitudes. Dan found an old Chesterfield cigarette ad. It says: "Scientific evidence on the effects of smoking … a medical specialist is making regular bi-monthly examinations of a group of people from various walks of life. (It does not identify who that medical specialist is, probably an orderly.) Forty-five percent of this group has smoked Chesterfield for an average of over 10 years. After 10 months, the medical specialist reports that he observed no adverse effects on the nose, throat and sinuses of the group from smoking Chesterfield." So you can see how important this battle for our mind really is. Whatever or whoever has your mind, has you.

I am convinced, after 58 years of life experience, that attitude is much more important than aptitude. Your attitude effects your expectations that heightens faith and it is faith that energizes your actions to achieve your expectations. So in the battle for your mind, your values, your beliefs and morals - whatever has your mind, your thinking, has you. I am not going to get into what I talked about last week, the reality of the existence of good and evil. If you didn't hear that, I would suggest that you either watch it online for free or buy the CD. God created angels. There is a spiritual realm, and just has he created human beings, he created angelic beings. God didn't create demons. Demons are angels; and angels, like humans, have been created with free will. We can choose to believe in God or not believe in God, to serve God or not serve God. Demons are angels that have chosen to serve self rather than God. Now we have this cosmic battle between good and evil and here is the goal of evil in 2 Corinthians 4:4, "The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers so that they cannot see the light of the gospel." That is the strategy for whatever has your mind, has you.

Go again to Ephesians 4:19. With this spiritual tactic of blinding our minds, we have lost spiritual sensitivity. Our mind is the doorway to our heart. See that word sensitivity. Spiritual sensitivity is the ability to experience the presence and purpose of God in your life. I didn't say believe in God. You can be religious, but religion is nothing more than dead rules and rituals. It's why everyone is bored with religion. Religion is dead, it does not work. We lose the ability, the spiritual sensitivity to be in a vital relationship with God. When you lose spiritual sensitivity, you don't experience burning bushes. All you see are shrubs. Why is a spiritual interpretation of life so hard for Western people? Why do so many of us deal with so much doubt? We have been raised with a Western worldview that rejects any spiritual interpretation of life. There are three people who have primarily influenced your worldview and they are: Charles Darwin and science; Sigmund Freud and psychology; and Karl Marx and politics. I didn't realize that we teach Darwin's theory of evolution as fact until my freshman year in college and realized that it was a theory. Darwin's theory of evolution is based on random selection. I want you to hear this: all Christians are creationists. It doesn't mean that all Christians agree on how God did creation. There are some Christians like Francis Collins who believes that you need Jesus to be saved; but he also believes that God used evolution behind the design of the universe. But here is where the problem lies. We need to quit dividing ourselves when we disagree about this stuff. We are saved by faith in Jesus Christ, not by what we think about evolution or other things. Christians look like fools because we keep making the non-main thing the main thing in the world. We need to quit fighting and be one together in our faith in Jesus Christ. The difference between Christian evolutionists is that they believe in intelligent design. But the Western world has gone with Darwin's perspective, that all of this is by accident. It is illegal to teach intelligent design in most of our public school systems. So Darwin is the first influence that everything is an accident.

Sigmund Freud is the second influence. What Freud has done in psychology is that he has reduced human psyche to this closed mechanical view that we are biological blobs that have been impacted by the environment of our childhood. That we are nothing more than matter and how that matter responds to the environment in which we were raised.

Then we've got Karl Marx. Marx was the first person that came up with a secular politic which means a politic without God. America's politic is a secular politic. It is a politic without God. We have been raised, been immersed in this system that has rejected a spiritual interpretation of life. It is a humanistic system that says human beings are nothing more than matter and we have to depend upon ourselves to determine our own values and meaning. This was exactly the strategy that the serpent used with Eve. The serpent said to Eve, "You can't trust this God stuff. You have to depend upon yourself, Eve, to determine your own moral destiny."

How many people know George Barna, founder of The Barna Group - the survey people? You can check all this on his website. Barna did a survey recently and 1.2 million people were interviewed. Seventy-seven percent of non-Christians say there is no absolute standard for morals and ethics. It's not surprising - non-Christians. What blows me away is how their mind games have effected believers: 64% of born-again Christians agreed that morality is relative. Do you see how this has impacted our minds? The Bible says, in James, that this is double-minded and that double-minded people will never experience anything from God because they are living with two contradictory beliefs. It is not that you can't be religious. The church is filled with religious people who believe in God, but they have lost spiritual sensitivity and the Bible says that is a form of Godliness without power. What is happening, why so many of us get bored with God, is that this distorted thinking has neutralized our faith and it nullifies miracles. Most Christians do not experience the daily supernatural power of God in their life. They are not experiencing burning bushes, they are only seeing shrubs. Not only has this thinking neutralized faith and miracles in our life and blinded God's presence and purpose, it's made us insensitive or blinded us to the needs of others.

The story of the Good Samaritan that Jesus told was about religious people who kept passing by the guy who was beaten, robbed and left lying in the street. I am shocked right now that for so many Christians, it's just "numbers." The number of Haitians who are dead, of Americans and Europeans who were in Haiti who are dead. I was in the Kansas City airport Friday night and I was watching the CNN monitor and it was showing how they have reverted to Civil War surgery. And to get people out from this debris they have had to do amputations - while the person is awake. Three of our UMCOR staff including Sam Dixon were in Hotel Montana when it collapsed Tuesday night. It took them 55 hours to find them. One is named Clint and to get him out, while he was awake, they had to cut off his foot on one side and some of his leg down from the other side. I was looking at the monitor and I thought this is horrendous. This guy beside me was doing some NFL on his computer sitting next to me and I said, "This is horrendous," and he said, "It surely is" like it was about the Kansas City Chiefs or something. Here's what blows me away, there were people who got up Wednesday morning and were more concerned that their cars wouldn't start rather than the human devastation that has taken place in Haiti. What happens is that when we lose spiritual sensitivity, we become blinded to the presence of God in our own life and the need, the absolute need in other human beings.

Go back to verse 19, are you seeing this? It's this play on words, so there is this loss of spiritual sensitivity, so what happens is that we begin to seek life and meaning in material sensuality. "Let's party hardy" or "I'm going to Disney World." It is interesting that when Carolyn and I were going through a really hard time in our life and marriage, a painful time, I bought a BMW without telling her. What was I doing? I was trying to find life in a non-life source. I was trying to medicate. It is no different when we turn to the freezer for ice cream when we don't really need ice cream. And where it really becomes blasphemous is when we use God for the pursuit of an earthly end like prosperity or success rather than be used by God for his eternal purpose.

How many of you remember Sam Dixon, the head of UMCOR? He was here a year ago last month speaking to us. He had gone to Hotel Montana with other United Methodist staff for our mission in Haiti. He had been in Haiti five minutes when the Hotel Montana collapsed. The first news we heard was that they were all okay. Clint, who I told you about that they did the double amputation while he was awake, is now in critical condition in a hospital in Florida. The other one is back home in Colorado, with minor injuries. Sam did not make it. Sam had worked closely with our church in Darfur. In 2005, Ginghamsburg Church was the whole United Methodist denomination mission in Darfur, Sudan, and this is what Sam said to you all a year ago.

(video)

Sam Dixon: "I could go on for hours to tell you the difference you are making in the lives of the people in the Sudan. But also people that you do not even know about in other parts of the world because of your example of sacrifice, your miracle giving. You have encouraged others to do the same. Other church people to do the same, to be like Ginghamsburg. 'We want to do something like Ginghamsburg.' I hear almost every week. So I just want to thank you for that, but to also say this partnership is important for several reasons, but the most important reason is that it connects a person with a person. You know, maybe just a few of you have been able to go to the Sudan but everyone in the Sudan knows the church in Ohio, they know Ginghamsburg. They know you, maybe not by name but by spirit and through your soul. So I am here to say thank you for this partnership. Let's keep it going because it is so important to give life to bring hope and to be a source of help to people in tremendous need."

The news was sketchy coming out of Haiti and we had a false report that Sam was okay. Sam lived in North Carolina, so his wife Cindy, yesterday, spoke to the newspapers and they were all there in North Carolina saying how joyous they were. Then the news came late morning that he didn't make it and that the first reports were false. What amazes me is that last year Sam came here with his wife. I know in ministry sometimes what we get paid for and when you pay for your spouse to go someplace out of your own pocket, that's hard. I noticed that he had Cindy here with him. I said, "Sam, why did you bring Cindy?" I want you to hear what he said. "Well, I brag about Ginghamsburg so much and she has not had the opportunity to be here and I have had the opportunity to be here several times. So I said to her, 'Please just go with me so that you can see that what I am telling you about Ginghamsburg is the absolute truth.' And she has discovered that already. And we are just so pleased to be here with you." I am so proud to call Sam my friend and a fellow servant because Sam understood that we are not here to use God for an earthly end but we are in the world to be used by God for his eternal purpose.

How many remember Sidney, our three time intern at Ginghamsburg Church? He called me from Pakistan yesterday because Sam has him Pakistan. Sidney goes back and forth from Pakistan into Afghanistan. Sam extracted Sidney from a very dangerous situation when Sidney was working in Zimbabwe this past fall. Sidney just had lunch with Sam a couple of weeks ago in New York when Sidney was home for Christmas. We were reflecting, this is painful for us, Sam was a friend, he was older than I am, and he has four children and two grandkids. Go to the web, you can see them interviewing his daughter on MSNBC. Sidney said, "Mike, you know how it is. Sam was in these dangerous places about 40 weeks out of the year, and you know places like Haiti or wherever we go in the world, we stay in substandard kind of places. Others don't have the same codes and stuff and so we stay in hotels and places that don't have the steel structures and the concrete. We travel in airplanes that you and I would never get in while in America." Sidney was with me when that old Russian jet we rented to take us to Darfur in 2005 and the engine on the jet blew up on the ground before we took off; do you remember that? "Mike, think how few days you want to be in a dangerous place, do the math and multiply all of the days that Sam was, even though he has four kids and two grandkids, he knew the risk he was taking." I can't wait to see Sam again and celebrate the victory of what it means not to use God in mind games or for earthly ends, but to be used by God for his eternal purpose. We are going to do an exit offering for Haiti on the way out of here, so be praying about a number. Right now the most urgent need is that well people could die for the lack of water. And it wasn't until yesterday that planes started getting in and helicopters from one of our navy ships were getting in with water and food. There will be a check cut by Wednesday, resources bought by Friday and go out of New York to get into Haiti. We are going to let Cindy know that this has been done to UMCOR in Sam's name from Ginghamsburg Church.

But what we need to see in verse 17, we don't have to live as Gentiles in the futility of these mind games. Do you see that? We are not subject to these mind games, but as it says in verse 23, "We have been made new in the attitudes of our minds." I want to say this: we don't have to be controlled by sin or stinking thinking. We must be born again. I am going to say it out loud, religion is not enough. You must be invaded by the Spirit of Jesus Christ. The Bible says that when we are born again, not religious, but when we are born again, we have the mind of Christ. In that same passage it says that the spiritual person can make judgments about all things. That means we can have Jesus' perspective on every situation. We can possess the wisdom of Jesus but here's what we have to do because evil is still going to tap dance on our head. We have to take captive every thought that crosses our mind and make it captive to the Lord Jesus Christ. Any thought outside of the will of God is not acceptable.

In Philippians 3:13, the Bible gives us some very practical action steps. Here is the first one: let go of the past. Jesus said something on the cross. This is the most important words you will ever hear. He said, "It is finished." That means I am no longer defined or controlled by my past. Do you know that something that is finished can still rule you? Even though it is done?

A couple of years ago, I went to a high school reunion, 40 years out of high school and let me tell you I am not who I was. You know what I mean? Forty years out and I went into it with this great esteem of here I am, what it means to be a man of God. I am part of the solution in the world and not part of the problem. God has made me this leader and I am an author and all that kind of stuff. I was having this adult conversation and Debbie joined the group. Debbie was someone I went to school with from kindergarten to graduation, but she never talked to me, she was the cheerleader type and all of that kind of stuff. And she said, "Mike, do you remember when you peed your pants in the lunchroom in first grade?" Whoosh, right back there. No, Debbie, I had kind of forgotten that until right now. She went on, "Oh yeah, remember Mrs. Cole." Mrs. Cole was the lunchroom monitor and was one of the third grade teachers. And in those days I think it was a rule that to teach you had to be over 70 and on steroids. Do you remember, some of you, and this might really take some of you back. You know how those older teachers used to wear those heavy black laced up shoes with support hose? Can I have a witness? I just did four assemblies in my home school district in Cincinnati and I can't believe it - now principals are like 30something. I wondered when did they change the rules? And so Debbie said, "Yeah. Mrs. Cole made you stand in the green wastebasket right in the middle of the lunchroom until you dried." All of a sudden, it took me back. Something that is finished but you can allow it to rule you. It took me back and I remembered the dark blue heavy corduroy pants my mom dressed me in that took from Tuesday to Friday to dry. But guess what, Debbie? That's not who I am. I am crucified in the Lord Jesus Christ. I have been raised to a new life and my past no longer defines me or controls me. I hear this all the time. People will say, "I have been heavy all my life." No! You have been crucified with Jesus Christ. You have been raised to a new life and your past no longer defines you or controls you. We have to take captive every thought and make it obedient to Jesus Christ. All the time, I hear things like, "I've never been a good test taker." No! It's finished! You have been crucified, dead, buried, raised to a new life; your past no longer defines you or controls you. "I have always been in debt" "I have always had a problem with procrastination." No! We must take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ.

Here is the second action step right in Philippians: picture the goal. "Straining forward to what is ahead." On New Year's Day, Carolyn and I prayed for your prayer requests that you mailed us. We asked that in your Sudan envelope you put prayer requests. I think the thing that shocked me the most, and it may be my age stage, is that the number one request was for a problem that you were having with a child. You can't see past the frustration of the present moment. What you need to do is picture the goal. Claim God's future and hope; proclaim that future and hope; and speak the things that are not as if they were. I thank you for sending us these prayer requests; we have them on our computers. I know how to pray for you specifically as a family. The second greatest prayer request was about debt. There are some of you who feel so drowning in your debt that you see no way out. You've got to look past the frustration of the present moment to the promise of God and claim God's future and hope. Proclaim that future and hope and speak the things that are not as if they were.

The third action step that I see so clearly in scripture is that you've got to depend upon God. Jesus himself realized that he couldn't go against evil in his own power. Did you know that? If Jesus realized that, how can we take it so lightly? He said, "The Son can do nothing by himself. He can only do what he sees the Father doing through him." We've got to get past these little religious sayings we have like - I can't, but God can - and really come to that place to realize that there is a force of evil that wants to have you for lunch; and to convince you it is not there. We need to get serious in our commitment of God who can. I promise you when you do, that God who has called you is faithful and he is going to bring that work to completion in your life.

I am going to do a directive prayer with you. When we have been talking about this, we don't leave without prayer covering. So will you bow your head right now in prayer? You are going to use your own words and I am going to direct you through this prayer. Right now, in your own words, in your own way, I want you to let go of the past - whatever that is. Jesus said, "It is finished" but you can still let something from your past rule you even though it no longer has power over you. Whatever that negative thing is in your life that is less than the perfect will of God, it is a leftover stronghold of your past. Let it go right now. In the name of Jesus, that is not who I am. I have been crucified with Christ. Raised to a new life and my past no longer defines me or controls me.

Now I want you to picture who you want to be. I press forward to the goal for which I am not there yet, but I press forward to the goal for which Christ has called me. I want you to picture yourself as the husband you want to be, the dad you want to be, the wife you want to be, the mother you want to be. A powerful Christian presence in the world. A dad or a mom who is so contagious in their faith that your children are going to follow you as radical disciples of Jesus Christ. A person who refuses to compromise truth. A person who's successful in all of God's endeavors. An over comer. Now, yield fully to God.

"Father God, compromise in any area of my life is totally unacceptable. Possess every part of my being, even dark places that I am unaware of and through Your Holy Spirit give me the power and the courage to take every thought captive, every thought that is not of You, negativity, procrastination, lust - anything that is not of You, to make it captive of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is in Jesus' name that we pray. Amen."