Watch Your Thoughts

Life has been teaching me lately that our thoughts have the ability to lead us, and what we think about actually matters more than we realize.

It can be so easy to downplay certain thoughts simply because they aren’t inherently visible. It’s kind of like that junk drawer or closet that houses all kinds of miscellaneous items that have no set placement. You can ignore it for a while, but eventually, everything accumulates to the point where you have no choice but to sort through it.

The same is true of our minds.

Somewhere along the way, we became so focused on dealing with our external habits that we neglected what was happening internally. We didn’t realize that in doing so, we were training our minds to become undisciplined, allowing certain thoughts to settle in so often that eventually, they no longer triggered a warning signal. They simply became the norm.

But the truth is, our thoughts are either leading us toward God and the destiny He has for us, or they are leading us away from it.

As much as we want God to do His part, we have to be willing to do ours. And often, that begins in the battlefield of the mind.

When the Israelites made their first attempt to enter the land God had promised them, they sent twelve spies to explore it. For forty days, they saw that the land was exactly as God had told them it would be: abundantly fruitful and flowing with milk and honey. They even acknowledged with their own mouths that the land was good and even brought back evidence of its fruitfulness.

But then they saw the people who lived there.

They began to think about how powerful these people were and how large and fortified their cities were. Suddenly, it no longer mattered to them that God had already promised to be with them and to give them the land. Their thoughts had become what was leading them, and they weren’t aligned with the truth of what God spoke.

They reasoned that the inhabitants were stronger than they were and therefore they would not be able to attack. And because they began thinking this way, their perception of themselves was negatively impacted. They saw themselves as grasshoppers in their own eyes and rationalized that they must look the same way to the people in the land.

And the thing is, their assessment of the inhabitants wasn’t necessarily inaccurate. They were smaller and weaker than the people they saw. But that was never meant to be what they rehearsed in their minds over and over again, because God had already promised that He would deal with what stood in their way.

The problem wasn’t what they saw. It was what they allowed themselves to think about what they saw, which kept them from experiencing God’s best for them in that moment.

And here’s the danger of having an undisciplined mind, it becomes breeding ground for doubt and deception.

This had become a repeated behavior for the Israelites:

• At the Red Sea, they allowed themselves to doubt Gods intentions toward them.

• With the waters of Marah, they allowed themselves to question if God was going to provide for them.

• In the Desert of Sin, they allowed themselves to be deceived in thinking that being in bondage was better because of the food they had there.

• At Mount Sinai, they allowed themselves to foolishly think that they needed to make themselves another god that was more convenient for them.

  
  

I could list more, but hopefully we get the picture.

How we steward our minds matters, and we actually carry a responsibility for what we allow to shape our thoughts.

Which is why I especially love how Paul gives us this instruction:

“Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things.” Philippians 4:8 NIV

He goes on to say that as we put this into practice, the God of peace will be with us. Because this kind of thinking points us back to Him and not our flesh. It gives us a

baseline for what our thoughts should look like, so that anything else will raise a red flag.

The battle is often in our natural inclination to allow what we see to shape our thoughts and what we think as opposed to trusting what God's word says.

It takes faith to believe beyond what we can see and what actually makes sense to us.

And it’s no secret that our flesh desires what the Spirit is against, and the Spirit desires what the flesh is against, creating a war within us.

But the good news is that it’s a battle that can be won. We have a choice to live by the Spirit and not our flesh. And it is God who is working within us, giving us the desire and the power to do what pleases Him.

We need only to do our part by not only being hearers of His word, but also doers.

So it’s my prayer for you today that your mind will be set on things above and not what is temporal. Thinking on whatever is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent and praiseworthy. Being strengthened and empowered by God to do what pleases Him, and not being conformed to this world but being transformed by the renewing of your mind.