Captive Thinking !

Good Morning to each of you. I have returned home after travel through the Delaware Valley region of New York and Pennsylvania and the Greater Toronto Area of Ontario, Canada.  I have had breakfast and now have my second cup of coffee.  I have been catching up on the overnight messages.  One of you wrote to me weeping over her thoughts of judgement of others and jealousy about the things lost that others have not lost.

As you read this, please, do not think about any pink elephants.

We are a peculiar people, a royal priesthood.  We have been given the gifts of sound minds and self-control.  The armor of God includes a helmet to protect our minds.  The weapons of our warfare are powerful.  We are exhorted to take no thought for tomorrow.  We have enough issues to deal with today.  We are to take every thought captive.  As a man thinks in his heart, that is the what he becomes.

Clearly the thoughts running through our minds are extremely important to Jesus.  So important that He said that evil thoughts can be the same as acts of murder or adultery.  Our desires can produce lust which can lead to sin and death.

So what are we to do ?  It is obvious that our minds keep on thinking even when we are sound asleep.  As a practical matter we cannot stop thinking.  Indeed we are not asked to kill every evil thought.  Rather we are told to take every thought captive.  

How can we take our thoughts captive ?  You might have noticed that it is very difficult to stop thinking about pink elephants.  That is especially true when I ask you not to think about pink elephants.  Thoughts, unlike demons cannot simply be cast out and thus be no more.

However, thoughts can be captured and controlled.  Thus, if I start with you a discussion of green polar bears I have seen at the zoo.  If you engage with me in the conversation of how it is that when we remove the polar bear from his normal icy cold habitat and put him in a warm sunlit cage in a zoo the green algae begin to grow and accumulate on his white fur and actually turn him green.  Quickly you have forgotten about the pink elephants and find yourself thinking about the green polar bears.  You have substituted thoughts about the real for the prior thoughts about the imaginary.  

For many years I found it impossible to consistently believe that I was either loved or loveable.  Because that was true, I interpreted many things around me as actions of disrespect, guilt, dishonor, and rejection.  My internal belief controlled my thinking.   Ah, but God . . .   

God revealed His love to me.  Then I went through a process of taking my thoughts of being unloveable and unloved captive by replacing them every time the thoughts arose.  When someone seemed to be saying I was unlovable I would recite to myself, “That cannot be true because I am the loved son of God !”  Over the next few months the thoughts of being unloved and unlovable were gradually forced out of my thinking.  The Truth overcame the lies.

When we are judging other people, we are simply ignoring what God thinks about the person and believing what satan is whispering.  When we are jealous of others we are simply believing satan’s lie that God does not love us as much as He loves others and ignoring the Truth of God’s unfailing love and provision for us of the very best.

Thus, we see that thoughts cannot be killed.  But they can be captured by the simple act of deciding what is Truth and focusing our thinking on the Truth.  Jesus says that when we hear Him, the Living Word of God and continue to believe Him the we shall know the Truth.  And, the Truth shall set us free. 

Often I have found it helpful to repeat a true revelation out loud every time I am confronted with a lie from satan.  You might start with this:

I control what I think by my choices to believe God !

His, thus Yours,

  Stuart