By Chris WittsThursday 4 May 2023Morning Devotions with Chris WittsFaithReading Time: 1 minute
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Transcript:
The minister was spending time with a middle-aged couple and their marriage had been a disaster, and they were planning this divorce. Now it was difficult to help them, but he spent a lot of time talking, praying with them. One day, when the wife was on her own, she told her minister that her husband was lazy, inconsiderate, self centred. She’d had enough. She wanted out, and he wasn’t the man she’d married.
So the pastor advised her to do something, to spend the next month concentrating on her husband to really love him, as if he was the man she dreamed of all those years before. So he the husband wasn’t aware of this plan, so she started focusing only on his good points, she said later. It was a struggle to start with, but she persevered and and the minister had the appointment to see her one month later. Well, how did you get on?
Do you still want to go ahead with the divorce? Oh, no, she said no. He’s changed so much that I do truly love him.
Well, the wife had re-pattern her thoughts, hadn’t she?
The mind is an incredibly powerful thing
The average person, so I’m told, has over 30,000 thoughts a day and our thoughts they affect every part of our life. Someone has wisely said, we’re either controlled by our thoughts or we control our thoughts. Thousands of thoughts flow through my mind, your mind each day.
Now many of us and my I know this for myself, have negative thoughts.
But your mind is really the thinking engine that you use every second, minute, hour of every day. Sometimes we wrongly consider our thoughts, that our thoughts control us. I know you. No, you can control your own thought pattern. It doesn’t have to take charge. And if you don’t guard your thoughts, you can tell yourself a lot of garbage that simply isn’t true. And who wants to live like that each day?
And the apostle Paul emphasised this. Do not be conformed to this world, he said, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. That’s Romans 12:2.
The Psalmist in Psalm 19, Verse 14 had a prayer.
May my words and my thoughts be pleasing to you, Lord, because you are my mighty rock and my protector. And you might say, Yeah, that’s fine, But I can’t help myself. How am I supposed to grab control of my negative thinking when it’s been controlling me all my life?
Well, I just want to share a few tips. Understand that just because you tell yourself something that doesn’t make it true, and this is essential when we’re talking about self-image. No matter how long you’ve been telling yourself that you’re ugly or you’re unattractive or you’re dumb, that really doesn’t make it so. Most of our misbeliefs are about ourselves and how we think others see us so wrong thinking it’s like a snowball that’s rolling down a hill. It continues to gather momentum as it goes along, and that’s why you need to stop straight away before it becomes something that overwhelms you because you do have the power to change what you tell yourself.
I mean, your mind is not like a stuck record, you know, the old days of a record. With the needle getting stuck in the groove, your mind is like a tape recorder that can erase abusive messages that perhaps are there in your mind from the past or whatever.
So it’s not enough to just stop. Stop telling yourself bad things. You need to fill the void that’s there. And this is where God, in his own wonderful way, can come in and replace your bad thoughts with really good thoughts. It’s called self-destructive thinking.
And so the Bible says to guard your minds, believing that you can’t guard your thoughts is another lie because God through you, of course, can do that. So you deserve God’s best for your life. You don’t have to believe that truth that, well, I’m just stuck the way I am.
Guard your thoughts. Stop those lies before they can actually take root in your heart. Rip it out of you like those old lies and replace them with the truth. And Paul said in 2 Corinthians 10:5 fitting every loose thought and emotion and impulse into the structure of a life shaped by Christ. A great idea. May God help you and me to restructure our thoughts in the way that he wants.
Let’s Pray
Thank you, Lord. It is possible for me to guard our thoughts today I pray. Amen.