Welcome to the Intention Podcast with Charles Stanley for Tuesday, August 1st.

A biblical perception of God is essential to correctly interpret what he's saying.

Let's evaluate our spiritual mindset as we consider the question,

what determines what I hear.

The greatest influence, the first influence.

Oftentimes, the most life-long influence of a person's concept of God comes from their father.

We don't want to assume that responsibility, but it's already there whether we assume it or not.

All of us have been highly influenced in our image of what God is like,

and our viewpoint of Him by our fathers are some authority in our life very, very early.

Now, we've described this before and I want to reiterate it for just a moment.

When you and I were born, we had a grid system.

Into that grid system was placed either positives or negatives in our minds,

so that we accepted, not volitionally, but unconsciously we accepted,

we accepted the viewpoint of ourselves as others told us what we were like.

We accepted the viewpoint of God by what we saw in that male authority or what we were taught early in life.

So that many of us, all of us, everybody, has received into their mental grid system,

attitudes, ideas, concepts about God, they never chose to necessarily believe,

but they were fed to them as children.

And then they were added by school teachers and Sunday school teachers and preachers and pastors,

depending upon the approach that pastor made, or the approach that Sunday school teacher made,

or the ideas about God that mother gave, or the ideas about God that father gave,

or the way that father acted toward that son of that daughter.

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