Engage Your Mind in the Battle with Cancer

For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but mighty before God to the casting down of strongholds, casting down imaginations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ; 2 Cor. 10:4-5

Just the other day, a young patient sat sadly, telling one of our chaplains that she just didn’t have the strength to fight her cancer. She wanted to live, but she just had no energy to fight, so she was resigning herself to the fact that she was going to die.

The chaplain told her, “Well, you basically become what you focus on. So if you focus on dying, on being weak, on having no strength, you probably will die. But wouldn’t it be better to focus on what makes you happy, what gives you hope, what gives you strength? Then you might find out that you do have the energy to fight this disease and to live.”

Good advice. Because when cancer strikes, the battle for survival must be engaged at the mental, emotional and spiritual levels as much as at the physical level. Thoughts of death, dying, resignation, victimization, despair, depression and hopelessness are as lethal as cancer itself.

And because God knows that and knows how weak we are to Satan’s suggestions, doubts, lies and whispers of death and destruction awaiting us, He gives us supernatural weapons to win the battle for our minds and thoughts, including His power, His Word and His authority, when we've given our lives to Him.

Left unchallenged in his work in our minds and hearts, Satan erects footholds and then strongholds where he becomes entrenched in our thinking, and soon, he controls our minds. Statistics tell us 18 million Americans now suffer from chronic depression. They’re slaves to it. It rules their lives, their thinking. Without medication and even more drastic forms of intervention, many people have lost their jobs, families and lives to its effects. Researchers have found that in many of these cases, an area of the brain has become “hot” due to the sustained depression. A new medical procedure, being tried in Canada, uses probes to electrically stimulate that specific area in an effort to move the person from depression back to normal responses to life. Sometimes it works beautifully, and sometimes it doesn’t.

But in a good many people, becoming a slave to depression could have been avoided by using God’s weapons from the outset to defeat Satan and his lies. These include: Turning your life over to Christ for Him to control. He made you; He made you with purpose; and He wants to help you have what He calls “abundant life,” not just life, but one that is full and lived to the utmost. You must surrender to Him if you want to be filled with His power and life and speak in His Name. Filling your mind with God’s truth from His Word. Following in obedience what God tells you to do in His Word. Spending time with God, getting to know Him and letting Him influence your life. Recognizing fear, hopelessness, despair or the underlying causes of depression as things God doesn’t give you but which Satan does. Repenting of them if you’ve let them, as Martin Luther said, “build a nest” in your head and become at home there. You can’t keep those kind of thoughts from flying around your head, but you can keep them from roosting there. Renouncing Satan’s hold in your thinking and life through those thoughts and mindsets. Declaring that the territory in your life which he has occupied with that thinking is no longer his but God’s. Telling the enemy to leave in Christ's Name.

And then, asking God to help you take every thought you have captive in Christ and filling your mind with things like the chaplain suggested, or like Paul tells us to do in Phillipians 4:8: Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honorable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.

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