The Kingdom Starts in the Mind

Authority Begins Where Vision Begins

In Mark 11:23, Jesus told His followers that they could speak to a mountain and watch it move. Read one way, that promise sounds almost like a fantasy. Read another way, it reveals something about the Kingdom of God that the church has often left underexplored: the believer has been given real authority, and that authority works through the mind before it ever works through the mouth or the hands. I have come to believe that imagination, renewed and submitted to God, is where Kingdom authority first takes shape.

I say this because scripture keeps showing us the same sequence. God gives a vision, a person sees it, that person acts on what they saw, and God brings the increase. With this in mind, the seeing comes first, and then our feet, words, and works follow the mind.

What God Said About Our Imagination

One of the most striking verses about the imagination in the entire Bible comes from God Himself. At the tower of Babel, the Lord looks at a group of people united in purpose and says, "Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do" (Genesis 11:6).

Notice that God does not dismiss human imagination as idle daydreaming. Instead, He names it as a force so powerful that nothing would be held back from people who imagined something together and set out to build it. To be clear, the story of Babel is a warning, and it should be read as one because the builders wanted to make a name for themselves apart from God. However, the warning only makes sense because the power is real. I need you to understand that the Imagination is a creative faculty God placed in us, and the only question Scripture raises is whom it serves.

Speaking to the Mountain

In Mark 11, Jesus tells His disciples, "whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith" (Mark 11:23). Did you notice the order? The person must first believe, which means they must first see the mountain moved in their heart before they ever see it moved in the world.

Notice, too, how Jesus opens the teaching. Before a single word about mountains, He says, "Have faith in God" (Mark 11:22) because the authority to speak and see things move is delegated authority. In other words, it flows from relationship with the One who holds all power, the same authority Jesus describes when He says, "I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy" (Luke 10:19), and when He hands His disciples the keys to bind and loose on earth what is bound and loosed in heaven (Matthew 16:19).

This is where the Kingdom comes in. Jesus taught that "the kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:21). If the Kingdom lives within, then the inner life, the place where we picture, believe, and hope, is the first territory where heaven's reality takes shape. Hebrews 11:3 also tells us that "things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." So the visible world was framed by what could not be seen. Therefore, when a believer imagines in agreement with God, we are participating in that same pattern: the unseen moving toward the seen through faith, words, and action.

Jacob's Branches

Genesis 30 tells one of the strangest stories in the Bible but it helps to drive home my point. In the story, Jacob has worked for years under his uncle Laban, who keeps changing his wages and cheating him. They everntually strike a deal where every speckled and spotted animal born in the flock will belong to Jacob. Jacob then takes branches of poplar, hazel, and chestnut, peels white streaks into them, and sets them in the watering troughs where the flocks come to drink and conceive. As a result, the flocks bring forth young that are "streaked, speckled, and spotted" (Genesis 30:39), and Jacob's wealth grows exceedingly.

It would be easy to read this as a clever technique, and many people in Jacob's world believed that what an animal saw at conception shaped its offspring, but Jacob tells the rest of the story himself in the next chapter. He explains to his wives that the angel of God spoke to him in a dream and showed him the spotted flocks, saying, "I have seen all that Laban doeth unto thee" (Genesis 31:12). So the vision came first, and it came from God.

Let me put this another way, the sequence runs like this: God showed Jacob a picture of his future. Jacob then held that picture in his mind and acted on it, setting before the flocks the very pattern he had seen, and then God brought the increase. From my perspective, Jacob's branches were his imagination made visible, which is a physical response to a divine vision. That is the role imagination plays in the life of the believer because it is the meeting place where what God shows us becomes something we can act on.

The Brain and the Mind

Furthermore, I have come to see a real distinction between the brain and the mind. The brain is an organ, full of flesh and chemistry and electricity, and it can be shaped by trauma, scarcity, and fear. The mind is something more and Scripture treats it as a spiritual faculty, which is one that can be transformed, renewed, and joined to God's own thinking. For instance, Paul urges us, "be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind" (Romans 12:2). He then declares that "we have the mind of Christ" (1 Corinthians 2:16), and invites us to "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 2:5).

The biblical languages make this even richer. The Greek word Paul uses, nous, speaks of understanding and perception, and that is the faculty by which we see. The Hebrew lev, usually translated "heart," holds thought, will, desire, and imagination all at once. That is why Proverbs 23:7 can say, "as he thinketh in his heart, so is he." In other words, in the biblical imagination, the place where we think and the place where we believe are the same.

Yet, I want to be careful here, because this conversation can drift into territory that has more to do with positive thinking than with the Gospel. For instance, some teachings claim that our thoughts alone bend the universe to our will. What Scripture describes is different and, I think, far more powerful. The renewed mind sees what God reveals, the believer speaks and acts with the authority God has given, and God Himself brings the increase.

Our imagination does not replace God because it is the faculty He made so that we could see what He is showing us.

Seeing With the Mind of Christ

In closing, if the Kingdom of God is within us, then our imagination is holy ground. I say that because it is where we first receive what God is showing us, where we rehearse faith before we ever see the evidence, and where mountains begin to move long before anyone else notices them shifting.

So guard your mind, and then use it.

Let God renew it, fill it, and show it what He sees.

Then speak to the mountain with the authority you have been given, set out your branches the way Jacob did, and trust God to bring the increase. As Paul reminds us, He "is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think" (Ephesians 3:20).

God starts with what we can think, so give Him something to work with.