Minding (and Using) Our Mind

D.Martyn Lloyd-Jones, ‘The Unfruitful Works of Darkness’ in Darkness and Light: An Exposition of Ephesians 4:17–5:17

‘As a man thinks, so he is.’ (Proverbs 23:7) It is absolutely true, although we often tend to forget it. Everybody today who is alive and doing this or that is proclaiming exactly what he or she thinks! Everybody is a philosopher, everybody has got a philosophy of life, and we show what our philosophy of life is by the way in which we live. Our actions always correspond to what we think and what we believe.

If people are living a superficial, bubble kind of existence, they do so because that is the sort of mind they have. It is their failure to think that causes them to live a superficial kind of life.

A.W. Tozer

The best way to control our thoughts is to offer the mind to God in complete surrender. The Holy Spirit will accept it and take control of it.

Man-The Dwelling Place of God

Thinking is the mightiest act a man can perform, and perhaps for that very reason, it is the one act he likes the least and avoids most.

Born After Midnight

What we think about when we are free to think about what we will – that is what we are or will soon become.

Rut, Rot, or Revival

To think God's thoughts requires much prayer. If you do not pray much, you are not thinking God's thoughts. If you do not read your Bible much and often and reverently, you are not thinking God's thoughts. Those thoughts you are having-and your head buzzes with them all day long and into the night-are earthly thoughts-thoughts of a fallen race. They are the thoughts of a lost society. They should not be our thoughts. Paul said, "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 2:5 KJV). There also has to be a lot of meditation. We ought to learn to live in our Bible. Get one with print big enough to read so it does not punish your eyes. Look around until you find a good one, and then learn to love it. Do not just read the little passages you like, but in the course a year or two see that you read it through.

Your thoughts will one day come up before God's judgment. We are responsible for our premeditative thoughts. They make our mind a temple where God can dwell with pleasure, or they make our mind a stable where Christ is angry, ties a rope and drives out the cattle. It is up to us. Have you found yourself in that awful circular grave, not making any spiritual progress? What should you then do? Examine yourself.

The Set of the Sail "We Need Sanctified Thinkers"

It is doubtful whether any sin is ever committed until it first incubates in the thoughts long enough to stir the feelings and predispose the will toward it favorably. (James1:14-15)

A religious mentality characterized by timidity and lack of moral courage has given us to a flabby Christianity, intellectually impoverished, dull, repetitious and to a great many persons just plain boring. This is peddled as the very faith of our fathers in direct lineal descent from Christ and the apostles. We spoon-feed this insipid pabulum to our inquiring youth and, to make it palatable, spice it up with carnal amusements filched from the unbelieving world. It is easier to entertain than to instruct, it is easier to follow degenerate public taste than to think for oneself, so too many of our evangelical leaders let their minds atrophy while they keep their fingers nimble operating religious gimmicks to bring in the curious crowds. Christianity must embrace the total personality and command every atom of the redeemed being. We cannot withhold our intellects from the blazing altar and still hope to preserve the true faith of Christ.

Jesus, Our Man In Glory

God has purposefully given us a mental capacity with wide human boundaries. Beyond that, if we are justified, regenerated believers, He has given us an entirely new spiritual capacity. God wants us to believe, to think, to meditate, to consider His Word. He has promised that the Holy Spirit is waiting to teach us.

As Christian believers, we have learned to trust the divine wisdom and the leading of the Holy Spirit of God. The Spirit knows that we do not quickly apprehend divine truth. We must read or hear it more than once. God's method of instruction is "Do and do, do and do, rule on rule, rule on rule; a little here, a little there" (Isaiah 28:10) until we have received and learned and benefited.

God is faithful and persistent. He is not disposed to let us go. He keeps telling us to go on learning, to go on believing, to go on rejoicing in His Word. He is God and we can trust Him as He leads us and reveals His will to us.

That Incredible Christian

God intended that the truth should move us to moral action. The mind receives ideas, mental pictures of things as they are. These excite the feelings and these in turn move the will to act in accordance with the truth. That is the way it should be, and would be had not sin entered and wrought injury to our inner life. Because of sin the simple sequence of truth-feeling-action may break down in any of its three parts.

Jessie Penn Lewis War On The Saints

http://articles.ochristian.com/book1665.shtml

All believers acknowledge known sin to be ground given to the enemy; but they do not realize that every thought suggested to the mind by wicked spirits, and accepted, is ground given to them; and every faculty unused invites their attempted use of it.

The Lord's words in Matthew 13:23, that the good ground hearer is "he that heareth the word and understandeth it" show that the mind is the vehicle through which the truth of God reaches men to win their affections, and bring back the will into intelligent and loyal co-operation with God. In like manner the mind is the hindrance to Satan's carrying out his schemes.

God has given man a will, and a deciding voice; and all the purpose of His working in man, is to restore that once enslaved will to its (place) of intelligent volition, in the choosing of right instead of wrong, and God instead of Satan. But Satan's entire purpose is to drag back the will into captivity - and thus the man himself - so that he becomes a slave to the rulers of the darkness around him.

C.S. Lewis

God is no founder of intellectual slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you that you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all.

WARNING

Your social media shapes your mind - you become your social network.

Is your social media God focus...or world focused?