Until we do something different, we’re destined to have the same outcomes, right?
You can’t start your diet until you start eating healthier food. You can’t become a better student until you start studying more. You can’t be more awake during the day until you get more sleep at night.
Things don’t change on their own. They need a catalyst to enact that change.
This is what spoke to me most following Sunday’s continuation of the Mindset series. We want to fill our minds with holy and God-centered thoughts, yet how can we expect these thoughts to take root until we actually change how we think?
Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!
— Psalm 139:23–24
But it’s not as easy as changing our thoughts — we’ve got to start by sifting through unproductive thoughts and then changing the things we think about.
The request for God to look into our thoughts and examine the flaws in our thinking was incredibly impactful for me. Too often I try to scan my own thoughts and pull out the ones that lead to decay, but how can an imperfect mind perfectly sort its own thoughts?
It can’t. We’ve got to leave that task to God.
While under good intentions, I try to steady myself before God hoping to appear more holy on Tuesday than I was on Monday. But for one, I’ll never be as holy as our Creator, and two, he doesn’t want me taking that task on alone anyways, because I’m destined to fail at it.
As the Psalmist prayed in the passage above, we must give our thoughts to the Lord and allow him to call out the ways in which our thinking has become negative, hurtful, harmful and sinful. Then we can better follow him, now having a God-centered, faith-driven mind.
Are you spending too much time trying to filter your own mind? Or are you allowing God to work for you and through you, enabling yourself to be transformed through that renewal? If we simply ask God to show us those harmful thoughts, we can then start to attack those thoughts as 2 Corinthians 10:5 instructs:
We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ,
— 2 Corinthians 10:5