Taught by John Lenhart  |  flowcess.com

My name is John Lenhart, and I’m one of your two coaches through this course. Ed is going to give you the tools of spiritual warfare. My job is to help you understand how to let God flow through you to actually use them.

Think about it this way. Jesus only did what the Father told Him to do — and He always did what the Father told Him to do.

“Most assuredly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do; for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner.” — John 5:19 (NKJV)

“When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He, and that I do nothing of Myself; but as My Father taught Me, I speak these things. And He who sent Me is with Me. The Father has not left Me alone, for I always do those things that please Him.” — John 8:28-29 (NKJV)

That means when Jesus did spiritual warfare, He was doing what God told Him to do, with God flowing through Him. Every other spiritual warfare course I am aware of teaches you how to handle things from your own strength and your own ability. That is not how Jesus did it. What Ed and I are building together is something different: Ed gives you the tools, and I help you learn how to have God flow through you to access those tools — especially when you are under pressure.

Everything I am going to teach this month is foundational. An overview. You are probably not going to fully grasp it right away, and that is completely okay. My goal for right now is simply to introduce the framework. I expect you to really start getting it by the end of three months. Don’t worry about mastering it immediately — let it wash over you, and trust that it will settle into your unconscious over time.

Everyone does everything through a thought process. That means the most important thing in the world is understanding how your thought processes work.

Here is what I am going to do: teach you how your mind and brain work — specifically, how your unique mind and your unique brain work. Once you understand how to operate them, especially under pressure, you are going to be fine. And as a side benefit, people are going to think you are a lot smarter than you are.

The Model for Models

Before we get into the mind and brain specifically, I want to give you something that will make everything else I teach you — and everything Ed teaches you — click into place. I call it the Model for Models.

Whenever anyone explains anything to you, they are doing it through a model. There are only four types of models, and only one of them is actually true. Once you can see which type of model someone is using, you instantly know whether to trust their explanation or how to challenge it. This is one reason you will end up with better doctrine than most pastors and theologians by the end of this course — not because you studied harder, but because you have the right framework.

The four models are best illustrated through the story of how scurvy was eventually eradicated:

LEVEL	SCURVY EXAMPLE	WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE	VERDICT
1 — Unknown	Maybe it’s this. Maybe that.	“Who can say? Everyone has their own truth.”	❌  Fails always
2 — Effects	“Eat well, be healthy.”	“Just be good and be smart.” (Sounds helpful. Changes nothing.)	❌  Fails always
3 — Contextual	Fresh meat and citrus fruit	Works in some situations but not others. Most popular models today are here.	⚠️  Fails eventually
4 — Truth	Vitamin C	Works in every context, every time, with everyone. This is where we work.	✅  Always works

Everything I teach you will be a Level 4 — Truth model. When the context and principles and applications follow, you will already know they are going to work, because the foundation is sound.

The Driver and the Car

My model for the human mind and brain is this: you are a driver in a car. You — your mind, your soul — are an intangible driver. Your brain is the car. This model is non-contradictory, which matters enormously, because a model for the mind and brain that contradicts itself will cause you to hurt people when you try to apply it.

YOU (The Driver)	YOUR BRAIN (The Car)
Mind / Soul — intangible, spiritual	Physical organ — can be trained and reshaped
Controls ~10% directly (steering wheel)	Conscious brain — 10% of processing power
Influences the other 90% indirectly	Unconscious brain — 90% of energy & behavior
Step 1: Open the nucleus basalis (choose to focus)	Doorway between conscious and unconscious
Step 2: Choose your thought or stimulus	Directs which tool to access

Notice the proportions. In your car, roughly 10% of the vehicle is what you directly control — the steering wheel, the gas pedal, the brake. The other 90% is where all the energy is, all the mechanics that actually move the car. Your brain works the same way.

The 10% you directly control is your conscious brain — the part you are aware of, the part you think of as “thinking.” The 90% you influence but do not directly control is your unconscious brain. That is where all your energy lives. That is where all your behavior comes from. And here is the crucial point: God gave you an unconscious brain that is more powerful than any supercomputer ever built. Most people are barely using it.

KEY INSIGHT The goal is not to consciously control more. The goal is to learn how to operate your conscious mind in a way that cooperates with — and is guided by — your unconscious. That is how God designed you to function.

HOW IT WORKS: TWO STEPS

STEP 1

Open the Nucleus Basalis This is the doorway between your unconscious and conscious brain — essentially your attention switch. Your mind/soul is always making a choice: open this doorway and focus, or stay on unconscious autopilot. Most people spend most of their lives on autopilot.

STEP 2

Choose Your Thought or Stimulus Once the doorway is open, you choose what to direct your attention to — a thought, a scripture, a principle, a tool. This is where the tools Ed is giving you come in. The doorway gets you into the right storage unit. The choice of thought takes you to the right tool.

Right now, you probably have a pile of tools — things you’ve learned, things that sometimes work and sometimes don’t. What I am going to do is organize those tools into a system, so that when something happens, you go Step 1, Step 2, and you arrive at exactly the right tool every time. Not sometimes. Every time.

The Card Deck Experiment

The best way I know to explain how your thought process actually works is through a real experiment involving four decks of cards.

Participants sat at a table with four decks — two with red backs, two with blue backs. They could flip a card from any deck they chose. Each card either won them money or cost them money. What they were not told is that the decks were rigged:

🔴  RED DECKS — DANGEROUS Big wins and big losses — but more losses than wins. Exciting. Addictive. Ultimately ruinous.

🔵  BLUE DECKS — SAFE Small wins and small losses — but more wins than losses. Less exciting. Consistently profitable.

WHAT THE RESULTS REVEALED

FLIPS	THOUGHT LEVEL	WHAT HAPPENS	SPIRITUAL STATE
0	Holy Spirit / Flow	God tells you — instant recognition	Godly
10	Unconscious Brain	Your unconscious recognizes the danger	Be Still
40	Behavior Change	Others can see it — you can’t yet	Fellowship / Conscience
80	Conscious Brain	You finally recognize the problem	Human / Understanding
160	Habitual / Addiction	Behavior is entrenched — willpower fails	Fleshly / Rationalization
320	Destruction	Justification — evil feels right	Seared Conscience

Here is what makes this experiment so important. At 40 flips, a person’s behavior has already changed — they are picking the red deck less often. But they do not know it yet. And if you point it out to them, they will deny it, because their intention hasn’t changed. They still feel like they’re trying to win. Their intention is the same, so in their mind, their behavior must be the same.

We judge everyone else by their behavior. We want to be judged by our intentions. Right there is the source of most of the problems in human relationships.

Everyone has a 40-flip gap — a zone where your behavior has already changed in ways others can see, but you cannot yet see yourself. The enemy exploits this gap constantly. He knows your patterns at 10 flips. You don’t find out until 80.

THE GAMBLER PROBLEM Addictive gamblers are the exception in this experiment — they love the big win more than they fear the big loss, so their unconscious drives them toward the red deck, not away from it. This is addiction: a rewired unconscious that steers you toward what destroys you. The behavioral pattern is the same as everyone else’s — the unconscious is running the show — but the values driving it have been inverted.

THE SPIRITUAL DIMENSION

Now apply this to spiritual warfare. Ed is going to give you tools — truths from Scripture, practices, disciplines. Think of those as the blue deck. The enemy is always going to dangle the red deck: the big win, the quick fix, the comfortable compromise. Your unconscious brain will recognize the danger at 10 flips if you let it. But if you are living at 80 — waiting until you consciously understand what is happening before you respond — the enemy has already moved you 70 flips in the wrong direction.

This is why Jesus operated at 0 flips. The Holy Spirit told Him. He didn’t have to wait for experience to confirm what was true. He was already in perfect flow with the Father.

Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths. — Proverbs 3:5-6 (NKJV)

“Lean not on your own understanding” — that is not a call to be irrational. It is a call to stop relying exclusively on your conscious, 80-flip brain and learn to work with the deeper intelligence God built into you. That deeper intelligence, when submitted to the Holy Spirit, moves you toward 0.

THREE GOD-GIVEN OPPORTUNITIES God gave us three chances to deal with a behavior before it becomes a habit: (1) At 0 flips — hearing directly from the Holy Spirit through prayer and fellowship with someone who hears from God. (2) At 10 flips — learning to be still and listen to your internal signals: conviction, unease, quiet guilt. (3) At 40 flips — being humble enough to listen when someone in your life confronts your behavior before you are even conscious of it. When we ignore all three, we get what we choose.

The Thought Process Levels

There is a spectrum of thought processes, ranging from the mind of God flowing through you all the way down to a conscience so seared it calls evil good. Here is how it maps:

LEVEL	THOUGHT STATE	WHAT IT FEELS LIKE
10 — Flow	Holy Spirit / Unconscious toggling	Creative, innovative, effortless. God flows through you. This is where Jesus operated.
80 — Focus	Conscious / Human thought	“I’ve got this under control.” Useful — but too much of it depletes your focus capacity.
160 — Habit	Addictive / Fleshly	Willpower is your only tool. It will eventually run out. This is the sheer cliff face.
320 — Destruction	Seared Conscience / Evil	You justify the behavior. Evil feels right. Good feels wrong. The conscience is gone.

Flow — the toggling between the 80 and the 10, between conscious focus and unconscious intelligence — is the only healthy thought process. A Harvard Business Review study confirms this: too much focus depletes your focus capacity, which eventually leads to loss of self-control. God did not design you to live at 80. He designed you to flow.

All of conventional psychology is trying to move people from 160 to 80 — from habitual, fleshly behavior to conscious self-control. That is better than nothing. But it is not the destination. People who spend their lives cycling between 160 and 80 are burning through a finite number of cycles. Eventually the system blows out and they end up at 160 permanently. Anyone helping you get from 160 to 80 without taking you to 10 is, unintentionally, hurting you long term.

My job is to help you get to 10. And then to help God flow through you at 10.

Why Your Car Goes Off the Road

We will be using the driving analogy throughout this course. So let’s establish the four ways a car goes off the road — because each one corresponds to a different type of spiritual attack or failure:

CAUSE	THOUGHT LEVEL	WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE IN SPIRITUAL WARFARE
Mack Truck	320 — Destruction	Someone is in a full dysregulated breakdown. Do not engage them directly — they will take you down with them. Your job is to not be on the road when the truck is coming.
Black Ice	160 — Habit/Addiction	An external event hits your weakest point. Even a skilled driver goes off the road on black ice. This is where your trained unconscious — not willpower — keeps you on track.
Wrong Steering	80 — Conscious	You have a belief that is wrong, and it is steering you off course. This is a stronghold — a bad model operating at the conscious level. Ed will help you identify and dismantle these.
Driver-Car Mismatch	10 — Flow / Uniqueness	You are a Porsche driver in a Ferrari — your unique wiring is not matched to how you are operating. We will spend significant time on this. God wants to flow through your specific uniqueness, not a generic version of you.

What We Are Building Together

Over this year, here is the picture I want you to hold in your mind. Ed is filling your storage unit — wall to wall, floor to ceiling — with the right tools. The Word of God. The armor. The weapons. The knowledge of your enemy and your own identity in Christ.

I am teaching you how to find the right tool at the right time, under pressure, automatically — not through conscious effort and discipline, but through understanding your unique wiring and learning to cooperate with the unconscious brain God gave you.

The goal is not to be a harder-working Christian. The goal is to be a flowing one. A warrior who doesn’t have to think about it — who responds at 10 flips, or even at 0, because God is flowing through them.

For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. — Romans 8:14 (NKJV)

Led. Not driven by willpower. Not grinding through discipline. Led. That is the operating system we are building.

⚔  THIS WEEK’S EXERCISE: KNOW YOUR FLIP COUNT Think of one area in your life where you know your behavior has changed — or where others have told you it has changed — but you have not yet fully acknowledged it. Sit quietly with that for a few minutes. No judgment. Just observation. Where are you in the flip count on that issue? Write your honest assessment below. _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________

⚔  OBSERVATION: YOUR THOUGHT LEVEL RIGHT NOW Without overthinking it — what is your dominant thought state today? Are you in flow (creative, at ease, ideas coming naturally)? Focused at 80 (working hard, conscious effort)? Drifting toward 160 (that old pattern pulling at you again)? Just name it. Naming it is Step 1. _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________

Don’t worry about mastering this yet. Let it settle. It will.

Next month we go deeper into your unique wiring — what kind of driver you are, and how to match your brain to that driver.