John decided to buy a new car because the gas mileage on his old one wasn’t very good. [The new car John bought depreciated three thousand dollars in value the first year, but he saved five hundred dollars that year in gas!] What John really wanted wasn’t better mileage, but more prestige.
We have remarkable capacity to kid, trick, and fool ourselves. Our self-image is so important to us that we will believe almost any reasonable explanation for our failures, as long as we end up as the hero. The prophet Jeremiah noted this when he said, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9)
Unless we develop a solid understanding of how our thoughts, motives, and ambitions are shaped, we will have impure secret thoughts, wrong motives, and selfish ambitions. If we don’t leave a sentinel posted in the watchtower, then the enemy can slip into our thoughts under the cover of lower awareness.
Solomon understood this when he said, “To man belongs the plans of the heart, but from the Lord comes the reply of the tongue. All a man’s ways seem innocent to him, but motives are weighed by the Lord.” (Proverbs. 16:1-2)
The battle for control of our mind rages in every one of us! It is an active battle in which our passivity leads to victory for the enemy. I desire God to help me and each of us to “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” (2 Corinthians. 10:5) That is the only way to victory in the Christian Life!
ACTION POINT:
What do you think about? What do you fill your mind with all day? You and I both know that it affects what comes out of us in value for the Lord. Let us think, evaluate, and take every thought captive – Satan has had his way long enough, its God’s equipment now! Oh, the application of godly minds!!!
