“Although we live in the world, we don’t fight
our battles with human methods. Our
weapons that we fight with aren’t human, but instead they are powered by God
for the destruction of fortresses. They destroy arguments, and
every defense that is raised up to oppose the knowledge of God. They capture
every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:3-5 CEB).
“See to it that no one carries you off as spoil or makes you yourselves captive by his
so-called philosophy and intellectualism and vain deceit (idle
fancies and plain nonsense), following human tradition (men’s ideas of the
material rather than the spiritual world), just crude notions following the
rudimentary and elemental teachings of the universe and
disregarding [the teachings of] Christ (the Messiah)” (Colossians 2:8 Amp.).
Most
have heard the idiom, “”a vicious cycle,” a rut not circumvented, but rather circumscribed
and circumnavigated ad nauseum; a ditch run narrow and long across the brain inscribed
by the blind leading the blind into an entrenched bad habit.
The
carnal mind is that reprogrammed brain in us which occurred when we started to
believe the vagaries of our own thoughts above God and the established rules of
reality. We got off the foundation of
things and started to believe lies, and as we followed down the broken logic of
their crooked paths, we embroiled ourselves in an argument within ourselves
which we couldn’t mollify to peace. Our
heart strings became a tangled up knot in our guts, and our brain paths became
a crisscrossed huddle of confusion in our heads.
From
time immemorial God designed us after His image, but alas, we have faded away
from that image to the degree that we hardly bear a resemblance to His form anymore. Like a bad copy, a copy of a copy of a copy,
and on and on until the end copy fails to be a fair representation of the
original master, so we are no longer discernible and therefore appreciated in
accordance with the words of the master written across our lives.
This counterfeit
ring of truth still reverberates down the empty but spherical corridors of the
human mind even though God has already broken up this counterfeit ring and is
nigh to removing all fake copies of value from circulation. Perhaps legal tender is a harsh reality to
those who value the present currency of their lives, but even genuine articles
fade, become threadbare, and are eventually taken out of circulation.
In the
end, whether you’re real or phony makes no difference; everyone gets tested by
fire, and all paper excuses go up in flames.
Only the master is metal and lives on in the form of a perfect form
designed to stamp out new paper replicas of itself. God has broken up all the counterfeit rings
and reprinted the image of his Son on every legally tendered bill placed back
into circulation.
We’ve
all heard the phrase that “Imitation is the highest form of flattery,” and when
it is made within the flat circle of insincerity, in the spartan den of
thievery, it inflates the ego beyond the bounds of its track and the height of
its rails. But reimage the heart with
legal tender and you reimage the mind with true currency.
Until
someone is reimaged by Jesus Christ, the vicious cycle is unbroken, and the
paper trail, an endless evidence chain keeping them inside the prison cell of their
own person. Self-esteem without
esteeming Christ is like a person who shouldn’t pay attention to themselves because
they have no money (not even common cents)!
But too often, even without their own two cents to rub together, they
continue to speak their mind for whatever its worth.
But
when we are re-imprinted by the Master, we are reevaluated and become revalued
at the going rate of return on investment.
From a decommissioned threadbare copy too many times removed and worth
yesterday’s worn-out dollar, we become a newly minted copy off the first run of
bills worth today’s crisp dollar. We
either decompose or are decommissioned as we are, but if we allow the intrusion
of Christ into our calculations, and the infusion of Christ into our
sentiments, we will become worthwhile.
Manifesting
Christ in our mortal flesh is re-inking the paper and clarifying the faded
glory of a once perfect copy, near identical to the masterpiece original it was
first cast from. Indeed, manifesting Christ in mortal flesh takes a low-grade
counterfeited by-the-numbers manmade copy to a high-end original by-the-art
made by God-and-man-together masterpiece.
