Thoughts

                                                                       Thoughts

On a recent missions trip I had the pleasure of hearing a message by Pastor Wayne Cordiero. He said to the group, “Satan is a head-hunter. Your mind is his battlefield. Your future is his trophy.” Wow!

As I noted this quote like a gem collector picks up a sparkling jewel and places it in his pocket the implications became sobering and apparent.  My thought life may be the most powerful and influential asset of my being.  The proverb IS true that as a man thinks in his heart (his brain) so is he.

Rene Descartes in his search for absolute truth landed on an application of thought to stay sane. “I think therefore I am.” (Cogito ergo sum) In his brilliance he invented a methodology that served his pursuit of truth and allowed him a baseline for his own well being and faith in his own existence.

In Genesis the ancients became corrupt (Genesis 6) because their  “thoughts were consistently evil.” God only found pleasure with a guy named Noah who found “favor in the eyes of the Lord.”

Your mind is the battlefield.

Noah’s mind was the key, his thoughts were on God; what else could it be for “he did everything as God has commanded him.” He was in communion with God thinking about Him and the survival of man.

The immorality of humanity AND their wicked thoughts moved God to sadness. He made a plan to destroy his created beings crafted in the Garden with love, passion and goodness; all of this because their mental evil was so dark and hardened that there was no longer hope for man’s future.

In the human narrative it is a low of lows certainly. Can you think of a worse one?

In the close of Wayne’s message he gave hope and motivation to contend for a new thought life. It went roughly like this: 

You can rise above anything in life, but you can never rise higher than your highest and best thought life.

The choice is mine. I realize the high cost of low thinking and the phenomenal power and goodness and getting this right, of turning my thoughts to God and His plans like Noah, who found favor with God. He saved his life and his family and ultimately humanity! Nice job Noah!

The warfare is real and the power of Gods Spirit in us assures success because I am willing to fight!

In the coming year I am wishing you the best of thinking birthed from a renewed and strengthened thought life. Fold up bitterness and negative thoughts and leave them in the grave for you are risen with Christ and free. Let forgiveness flow!

May these words of Paul from Philippians 4:8 be an encouragement to better thinking. Paul of all people could have dwelt in the past but he did not. He was a target for hellish assault and lived on through it all finishing well.

He looked at the future and all that God would do and could do! He won the battle of the mind!

“And now dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.

God bless you!