Person (6) Imagination

Our imagination is an amazing facility. It has tended to get a bad rap from Christians, who say, “Daydreaming is dangerous”. But that bad rap is unfair and limiting.

God created our imaginations good. They have been corrupted by sin, but he can renew our imaginations, so that we can benefit.

The imagination is like the memory, but whereas the memory relates to the past, imagination focuses on the future.

Our imagination is a bit like a television or monitor on a computer. We can use our imaginations to see pictures and hear sounds. We can smell the aromas, taste the flavours, and feel the textures in our imaginations. Just like the memory, our imagination can play the emotions that go with the events that we imagine.

The imagination itself is morally neutral. We can imagine good things and we can imagine evil things. Christians should be careful about how we use our imaginations because what we imagine affects the way we behave.

• We can imagine the future that God has promised for us. Filling our imagination with the things that he has promised and prophesied for us, increases our Hope and Faith.

• Imagination comes before creation. Architects imagine the house or building they are designing before they produce their drawings and plans. God imagined the world, before he spoke it into being.

• Books and literature are received through our imaginations. They inspire us to imagine worlds and people that do not exist. This can be great entertainment, but too much can be dangerous if we escape from the real world to much.

• Television and film bypass our imagination by communicating directly though our external senses. This may have had the effect of weakening our imaginations, which may have had a negative effect on our hope and faith.

• Dreams appear in our imagination. So do our daydreams. If they are from God, they can be powerful motivators. If they are from the devil, they can scare and cripple us.

• The imaginations of evil men are full of evil.
  

  The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every imaginations of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time (Gen 6:5).

  From their callous hearts comes iniquity; their evil imaginations have no limits (Ps 37:7).

  People who fill their imaginations with the benefits of evil will end up enjoying evil.

• The spiritual powers of evil can put things into our imagination. When the devil appeared to Jesus, he may actually have appeared through Jesus imagination, because he does not have a physical body. We need to deny those false imaginations as soon as they come, by declaring the word of God.

• When we are living in the Spirit, our imagination can perceive what is happening in the spiritual world. Understanding what is happening in the spiritual realms is really important for the Christian life. A few Christians perceive what is happening in the spiritual realms through their external senses. Most of us perceive it in through our imagination when the Holy Spirit displays what is happening there in our imaginations for us. More about this in Spiritual Realms.

• Imagination create empathy. If we can understand what life is like for another person, we can understand why they are behaving the way that we do. “Walk a mile in their shoes”. We should use our imaginations to increase our empathy for other people.

The imagination is a wonderful tool. We should use it for God, to increase our faith and hope, and grow our awareness of events in the spiritual realms.

Scarcity (7) - Imagination Unleashed

Supply and demand are not fixed. The supply of goods depends on our ability to combine energy, intelligence and stuff from the earth to produce things that people want. Supply can increase gradually over time, but cannot increase dramatically unless new technology emerges.

Demand depends on our attitudes and desires and is only limited by our imagination.

A strange thing has happened in the modern world. The supply of goods has increased steadily. This would normally cause prices to fall, except that demand has grown even faster. Our needs and desires have expanded radically. If a poor man from Jesus time were offered the lifestyle of a person living on welfare today, he would feel incredibly rich. The lifestyle of a rich person from Jesus time would be seen as inadequate today.

This has a strange consequence. Although we are the richest generation that has ever lived, we are also the most dissatisfied generation that has ever lived. We have gone into debt, so we can have more stuff now, but we still want more. This is a different scarcity. An unbound imagination can never be satisfied.

Scarcity now derives from demand rather than supply. In traditional society, scarcity was the consequence of severe limits on the ability to produce. A subsistence farmer or hunter often needs to work all day, just to produce enough food to live. He had no time to dream about luxuries. Scarcity arises out of technical constraints on the ability to produce.

In the modern world, pressure on scarcity comes from the demand side. Free market capitalism has largely resolved the problem on the supply side. A modern economy can easily produce food and shelter for all members of society. In the Western world, scarcity arises more out of the insatiable demand for more and more goods and services. The problem is that there are no physical or technical limits on what people can desire or want.

Scarcity arising from the demand side cannot be resolved by producing more, as desires and wants can grow faster than productivity capacity. The only solution to pressure from this side is for people to be happy with what they have got.