Good Morning Everyone,
Our theme for this month: “Boundaries:
Our Bible verse for today: “… and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” 2 Corinthians 10:5 (NIV)
Our thought for today: “We need boundaries to govern our thoughts”
For many people the life of the mind is the least structured and the most unruly part of them. While they may manage to impose physical boundaries on themselves which control their outward behavior, inwardly their mind is a chaotic mess. Many people have developed the bad habit of “living inside their head”. In other words, while their physical body exists and functions in the real world, inside their head they’ve got a whole other life going on. It consists of wild imagination and fantasy situations. They see themselves winning arguments, wooing lovers, staring in movies, fabulously beautiful (or handsome), and so on. It’s a whole other life going on inside their head which is pretty much divorced from reality.
Another common mental mistake is to brood over our conflicts with people and allow them to grow in our mind to exaggerated proportions. This will result in the situation being much worse in our mind than it is in reality.
The unrestrained mind can be a wild thing. In 2 Corinthians 10:5 Paul reminds us that we must have well established boundaries to govern our thinking. He writes about the necessity to actually take every thought captive and force it to honor Christ. Imagine a bucking bronco which has to be lassoed, restrained, and then brought under control. Yup, that pretty much describes many of our thoughts.
The way we do this is with the help of the Bible and the Holy Spirit. We intentionally fill our minds with Biblically inspired and Biblically guided thoughts. This comes from spending lots of time reading the Bible, listening to Christian music, memorizing and reciting Bible verses, and keeping ourselves immersed in good Christian fellowship. When we do enough of that, we will find that over time we become intentional about keeping our mind occupied with things that honor Christ. This will be true even when, and most importantly, when we are alone and not reading the Bible or listening to Christian music. It’s when we’re alone and our mind is not intentionally engaged, that our thoughts will take off on us.
The most important boundaries in our life are the ones that restrict, provide structure for, and govern, our thoughts. Romans 12:2 instructs us, “Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.” (HCSB) We need to be intentional about gaining control over our thoughts.
God Bless,
Pastor Jim
Oak Hill Baptist Church 