For a lot of my life I don't even think I'd even heard the word. Now it's one of the most talked-about words in our health and fitness
vocabularies - cholesterol. We have awakened to cholesterol and to the damage it can do. Getting a reading on our cholesterol levels
is like basic to any physical these days. My doctor has given me a brief, personal seminar on things like LDL and HDL. LDL is your
bad cholesterol that clogs your arteries. You want to be low in that. But then there's your good cholesterol (this is starting to sound l
ike an old Western with the good guys and the bad guys!). Your good cholesterol is called your HDL, and you want lots of that HDL.
That's the good stuff. Now, my doctor says, "I'm not just concerned when a patient's bad cholesterol is high. I get concerned when
you don't have enough good cholesterol." See, it isn't enough just to get rid of the bad stuff. You have to load up on the good stuff.

I'm Ron Hutchcraft, and I want to have A Word With You today about "Heavy On the Healthy Stuff."

Our word for today from the Word of God is ultimately a battle plan for stepping on Satan. Sound like something you'd like to do?
Well, you'll be interested in the two-step battle plan outlined in Romans 16:19-20. It's all about getting rid of what's damaging to your
 spiritual health and loading up on what builds up your spiritual health. Here's what God says: "Be wise about what is good, and
innocent about what is evil. The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet." Stay away from, reduce the bad elements
in your system. Be innocent about what's evil and get a lot of what's good. Just like your physical wellbeing, your health depends
directly on your diet - your mental and spiritual diet in this case.

So what are you filling up on? You do have to keep junk out of your heart or it will clog your heart. It will bring about spiritual heart trouble.
The input you allow in creates the ideas you think about; and your ideas become your attitudes and your actions. So that means
consciously and aggressively turning off the bombardment of impure ideas that come your way: the videos, the movies, the Internet
sites, the soap opera immorality, the music that makes you all too wise about what is evil. You have to protect, or restore, your innocence.
You can't afford even casual contact with dark stuff.

But just like cholesterol, you can't just be against the bad input. You need to be making a conscious, daily effort to load up on God's ideas
and attitudes. Jesus said if you clean out one evil spirit and you just leave an empty space there, seven spirits worse will come back and
 fill that space. So, you have to fill the space in your thinking and your emotions that the dark stuff has been occupying.

For me, that means not just reading news magazines but Christian magazines; making every effort to listen to Christian radio; to make
 the last thing I read at night be something about my Lord; to put the priority on reading books that have some eternal value. Be wise
about what is good means weaning yourself from a diet of mostly secular music to more music with Christ at the center; using your
mind-wandering times to memorize or review some Scripture. As you start to load up on what is good, you start to become a more
positive person, become cleaner and lighter on the inside.

Now, does this mean you never read or listen to anything that isn't Christian? No, but you give the priority, the majority of space in your
mind to God's ideas. Crushing Satan under your feet; that's a war on two fronts. You have to be against what's bad getting into your system,
but that isn't enough. You have to take daily opportunities to become smarter about what is innocent. Cut the damaging stuff out of your
heart-diet and go heavy on the healthy stuff!