What we choose to see and hear and focus on creates what we will think and it’s these thoughts that manifest into our emotions, which result in what actions we take.
There are so many verses in the Bible that teach us about taking control of our mind. Colossians 3:2 instructs us to fix our minds on heavenly things, 2 Corinthians 10:4-5 tells us to tear down and take captive our wrong thoughts, and 2 Timothy 1:7 says we have a sound mind and we must not fear.
Without being disciplined or using self-control to choose what we think about, the devil will use our thoughts to try distract us from what really matters and if he can’t do that, he will discourage us with fears, worries and stress, to kill our faith, our joy and our peace.
The word ‘control’ comes from the Latin word ‘contra’, which means to check, verify or oppose. Think of your mind as a security road-block, that needs to be thoroughly checked before anything can enter it – is your thought kind, is it pure and is it Godly and holy? Any thought that does not pertain to heavenly importance, or for no good reason, should be rejected entry and cancelled out with the promises of God.
We can never hope to be transformed into the image of Jesus until we learn how to renew our minds with right-thinking. Our thoughts are like birds that fly into our head, and we need to make sure that the bad ones do not make a nest, but are shooed off before they can ever land.
Steven Furtick teaches 3 helpful questions in his sermon “Taking control of your mind”, to stop us asking the wrong questions, based on Paul’s response to being thrown in jail. See Philippians 1:12-26.
- What does it matter? See verse 18. This question reflects your priorities and decides what your distractions you will allow.
- What does it mean? See verse 22a. Asking this, helps us to see our circumstances from God’s perspective and discover His purpose for it.
- What will we choose? See verse 22b. God gives us the freedom to choose our thoughts.
Using Steven’s computer analogy ‘R U N CTRL’?, we need to be doing a CTRL+ALT+DEL, so we can remove any bad, negative or evil thoughts and reboot our minds back into alignment with God.
I also learnt from Craig Groeschel from Life Church, in his sermons about the mind, that our thoughts are framed by our past filters, which are determined through our life experiences and in many cases can be warped.
This is why the same event or circumstance can happen to many people, but they all respond differently. We need to make sure that our filters are from a clear, untainted Godly perspective, without any worldly corruption, or warped by the devil’s lies that we have believed from our childhood or past trauma’s, as this makes our vision blurry and makes us react or respond wrongly in our thoughts. These wires that are crossed in our brain are what are known as strongholds.
The way we destroy these strongholds is to find the Spiritual scriptural truth from God’s Word, that will break them. You then you need to write it out, meditate on it and confess it until you believe it; until your renewed mind and filters have been transformed.
God wants us to live a life like a beautiful transformed butterfly, flying high and seeing life from a heavenly perspective, not like a dull, restricted caterpillar, ready to curl up and think its life has ended.
Only when we have learnt how to renew our minds with right-thinking, and have broken down our strongholds, will we ever win the war in the battlefield of our minds.
We can choose whether we will focus and obsess about the problems of the world, or whether we will change our attention and share the solution instead. What we share on Social Media can either add fuel to the flames of fear and panic, or it can restore hope and bring comfort. The choice is YOURS…
