So imagination's a faculty of your inner man. It's a screen where pictures form and we can receive dreams from the Lord there. We can receive visions from the Lord there. It's a place where God has designed us, we receive input from Him into our imagination and we create from our own heart things in our imagination. And demons can put thoughts in that also lead to our imagination being filled, so there are three ways our imagination can be accessed: by the Holy Spirit putting things in there, by our own heart putting things in there, and by demons flooding and invading us. It's very important to understand that, and so the imagination can be cultivated. You can actually develop this whole faculty that God has given you and develop the prophetic realm because all can prophesy. So you can develop the ability to see, imagine, perceive, receive things from God. Everyone has been given that. Everyone has that faculty.
You understand that God has given it to you because He's made you a spirit being, like He gave you two eyes to see. They may not work so well, you may need glasses, and your imagination may be the same thing. The prophetic area may not be developed, but you can develop it through meditation in the word and renewing the mind, and identifying vain imaginations and confronting them and pulling them down. Next week we'll look at what's involved in the pulling down of them. Okay then, so imaginations can be cultivated and our imagination can also be defiled. Your imagination can become polluted and defiled, and it's a lasting defilement that requires a major cleansing action of the blood of Jesus and the word of God. How is it defiled? By for example, a person has a traumatic experience. The memory is imbedded into them and it keeps coming back in and the imagination will go over and over and over that event that happened.
We can set our mind and our heart on unclean things, sexual things and the imagination becomes defiled. People who've been sexually abused, they have images in their mind they cannot seem to get out of. It's just part of life. Things happen to us, so we need a strategy to deal with defilement of the imagination so that we can open our imagination progressively and begin to co-operate with the Holy Spirit in dreaming and beginning to see possibilities of the future. Getting the idea? So let me just look at this area today of fantasy. I'm going to talk about a fantasy, how imagination and fantasies are connected. So first of all I'll just give you a definition of it and we're going to look at fantasy and daydreaming. So first of all fantasy, and of course the thing is everyone has them. Tell someone next to you, he's talking to you. [He's talking to you.] Everyone has fantasies, not necessarily all bad. Everyone daydreams. Have you ever found yourself looking out the window and oh, wait, come back again? Everyone daydreams and everyone fantasises. It's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just where you go. Well what's taken it up, so we all have it so don't get all so serious on this matter.
Actually this part of our - it's normal for kids to dream and to - you know sometimes you find them staring into space? These things are all quite normal. There's a need to develop the imagination. Overexposure to television when children are young hinders the development of the imagination. That's why you don't want to have too much TV, put your kids in front of TV when they're very young, because what happens is their imagination then gets overloaded and it doesn't develop properly. You notice you can buy a fancy toy for a child and they throw it away and they're playing with some other little thing? Because their imagination is involved with that. They're not interested in the fancy - that fancy toy that cost so much is the parent's idea. The kid's happy with a bit of mud. Have you ever noticed children; they're not interested so much in the fancy toys, they're interested in other things and that's part of a normal developmental process, so some aspects are really quite normal.