blazingthru
Well-Known Member
What Do You Think?
By Pastor Doug Batchelor
An Amazing Fact: While your brain weighs just three pounds, it’s estimated information storage capacity is around 1,000 terabytes—or a hundred times more information than in all the printed books in the Library of Congress. It would take more than 23,400 DVDs to store all the information that your brain is capable of holding!
Modern medicine understands much more about the human heart than about the human brain. In some ways, the mind is the last great frontier on earth.
But if you’re anything like me, you rarely think about your thinking mind. Thinking usually just happens, like an anchorless ship that goes wherever the wind blows.
Still, if we can learn to play the piano or speak a second language, we can also train our minds to think well in just about every circumstance. I for one believe this is absolutely crucial as we head into the last days of earth’s history. We need to have sharp minds ready to overcome all the devil’s challenges.
Our ability to reason in abstract ways is perhaps the most fundamental difference between human beings and the rest of God’s animal creation. It is a significant difference, as someday you and I will answer to God for what we choose to think.
“For the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). Even if we can fool others with our “righteous” actions and somehow entertain sin only in our minds, enjoying the pleasures of those forbidden escapades only within our imaginations, God still sees it. He knows our hearts. According to Proverbs 23:7, it’s what we think in our hearts that counts; it reveals the real person.
Before the Hoover Dam was built, billions of gallons of rainwater would rampage down the Colorado River and rush out to the sea. But once that water was controlled, it was available for drinking, irrigation, and generating electricity. While most people let their thoughts flood aimlessly through their minds and out into a sea of oblivion, under the influence and control of the Holy Spirit, a great deal of good can be accomplished by how we use our thoughts.
The question is—how?
Sinful Thoughts
Wait! Are we really that responsible for what we think? After all, thoughts tend to run through our minds as if they were on a conveyor belt. Psychologists have estimated that about 10,000 thoughts go through our brains every day. So sometimes we can’t help what we start thinking, especially with the blizzard of information coming in through our senses.
But we can choose what to keep in our brains.
A lot of Christians dwell on very unhealthy, sinful rubbish rather than focusing on that which is holy, good, and true. Jesus taught that we can commit perjury, murder, and adultery in the mind. He said, “Those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: These are the things which defile a man” (Matthew 15:18–20). So, according to Jesus, sin always begins in the mind. That’s why we can’t be indifferent about what we think.
However, this doesn’t mean that when a tempting thought hits you—for instance, the temptation to shoplift—it’s automatically a sin. If I told you to not think of a purple monkey, you would be hard-pressed not to think about it. (I imagine you’re thinking about it right now!) At times, in a world drenched in shameful advertising and revealing fashions, we’re unable to control the evil suggestions the devil might plant in our thoughts. If we quickly decide to reject the evil thoughts and evict them from our mind, then we haven’t sinned. But when we deliberately choose to dwell on the evil thought and to embrace it, it becomes a sin.
Thus, if our minds are constantly dwelling on trash, that’s where our lives will go. If our attitudes are focused upward, on the spiritual, we will glide up to heaven. Sadly, God’s people are often blasé about the connection between our thoughts and our success as Christians. George Barna, the famous researcher, put it this way: “The vast majority of Christians do not behave differently because they do not think differently.” So how does a person become spiritually minded, thinking the thoughts God wants us to think?
You Think What You See
Part of training the mind is controlling the inputs. We’re likely to let our minds slip into sinful thoughts if we’re constantly eyeing what passes these days for entertainment. What we take into our minds affects what we think.
How much more likely is it that you will have a nightmare if you watch a graphic horror flick before going to bed? It’s a question of focus and attention. The more poison we let into our minds, the more poisonous our thinking and the more poison we’re likely to leave in the world. Isaiah said of the wicked, “Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood: their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity; wasting and destruction are in their paths” (Isaiah 59:7). If our thinking is influenced by what we take into our minds, shouldn’t we be careful about what we choose to watch and hear?
Some Christians wonder, Lord, why can’t I be more like Christ? Why is the Christian walk so difficult? Yet they’re filling their minds with things that are totally opposed to Christ. We console ourselves that we would never consider murder, adultery, stealing, or lying, yet many deliberately choose to do these forbidden behaviors vicariously by beholding entertainment filled with these acts. That’s a startling contradiction.
It is, in fact, one of the most dangerous problems in the church—the frivolous, nasty things that people watch, and hear, and read, vexing their minds with filth and temptation. Do not be deceived! “To be carnally minded is death. … Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God” (Romans 8:6–8). What we sow into our minds, we will reap in our thoughts and actions.
By Pastor Doug Batchelor
An Amazing Fact: While your brain weighs just three pounds, it’s estimated information storage capacity is around 1,000 terabytes—or a hundred times more information than in all the printed books in the Library of Congress. It would take more than 23,400 DVDs to store all the information that your brain is capable of holding!
Modern medicine understands much more about the human heart than about the human brain. In some ways, the mind is the last great frontier on earth.
But if you’re anything like me, you rarely think about your thinking mind. Thinking usually just happens, like an anchorless ship that goes wherever the wind blows.
Still, if we can learn to play the piano or speak a second language, we can also train our minds to think well in just about every circumstance. I for one believe this is absolutely crucial as we head into the last days of earth’s history. We need to have sharp minds ready to overcome all the devil’s challenges.
Our ability to reason in abstract ways is perhaps the most fundamental difference between human beings and the rest of God’s animal creation. It is a significant difference, as someday you and I will answer to God for what we choose to think.
“For the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). Even if we can fool others with our “righteous” actions and somehow entertain sin only in our minds, enjoying the pleasures of those forbidden escapades only within our imaginations, God still sees it. He knows our hearts. According to Proverbs 23:7, it’s what we think in our hearts that counts; it reveals the real person.
Before the Hoover Dam was built, billions of gallons of rainwater would rampage down the Colorado River and rush out to the sea. But once that water was controlled, it was available for drinking, irrigation, and generating electricity. While most people let their thoughts flood aimlessly through their minds and out into a sea of oblivion, under the influence and control of the Holy Spirit, a great deal of good can be accomplished by how we use our thoughts.
The question is—how?
Sinful Thoughts
Wait! Are we really that responsible for what we think? After all, thoughts tend to run through our minds as if they were on a conveyor belt. Psychologists have estimated that about 10,000 thoughts go through our brains every day. So sometimes we can’t help what we start thinking, especially with the blizzard of information coming in through our senses.
But we can choose what to keep in our brains.
A lot of Christians dwell on very unhealthy, sinful rubbish rather than focusing on that which is holy, good, and true. Jesus taught that we can commit perjury, murder, and adultery in the mind. He said, “Those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: These are the things which defile a man” (Matthew 15:18–20). So, according to Jesus, sin always begins in the mind. That’s why we can’t be indifferent about what we think.
However, this doesn’t mean that when a tempting thought hits you—for instance, the temptation to shoplift—it’s automatically a sin. If I told you to not think of a purple monkey, you would be hard-pressed not to think about it. (I imagine you’re thinking about it right now!) At times, in a world drenched in shameful advertising and revealing fashions, we’re unable to control the evil suggestions the devil might plant in our thoughts. If we quickly decide to reject the evil thoughts and evict them from our mind, then we haven’t sinned. But when we deliberately choose to dwell on the evil thought and to embrace it, it becomes a sin.
Thus, if our minds are constantly dwelling on trash, that’s where our lives will go. If our attitudes are focused upward, on the spiritual, we will glide up to heaven. Sadly, God’s people are often blasé about the connection between our thoughts and our success as Christians. George Barna, the famous researcher, put it this way: “The vast majority of Christians do not behave differently because they do not think differently.” So how does a person become spiritually minded, thinking the thoughts God wants us to think?
You Think What You See
Part of training the mind is controlling the inputs. We’re likely to let our minds slip into sinful thoughts if we’re constantly eyeing what passes these days for entertainment. What we take into our minds affects what we think.
How much more likely is it that you will have a nightmare if you watch a graphic horror flick before going to bed? It’s a question of focus and attention. The more poison we let into our minds, the more poisonous our thinking and the more poison we’re likely to leave in the world. Isaiah said of the wicked, “Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood: their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity; wasting and destruction are in their paths” (Isaiah 59:7). If our thinking is influenced by what we take into our minds, shouldn’t we be careful about what we choose to watch and hear?
Some Christians wonder, Lord, why can’t I be more like Christ? Why is the Christian walk so difficult? Yet they’re filling their minds with things that are totally opposed to Christ. We console ourselves that we would never consider murder, adultery, stealing, or lying, yet many deliberately choose to do these forbidden behaviors vicariously by beholding entertainment filled with these acts. That’s a startling contradiction.
It is, in fact, one of the most dangerous problems in the church—the frivolous, nasty things that people watch, and hear, and read, vexing their minds with filth and temptation. Do not be deceived! “To be carnally minded is death. … Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God” (Romans 8:6–8). What we sow into our minds, we will reap in our thoughts and actions.
