Isaiah 26:3a (NKJV)
You will keep him in perfect peace, Whose mind is stayed on You...
2 Corinthians 10:5b
...take captive every thought to make it obedient (under the authority) to Christ.
Philippians 2:5, 1 Corinthians 2:16b
Your mind should be the same as that of Christ Jesus.
Colossians 3:2
Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.
Philippians 4:8, 23
Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things...(as you are being) made new in the attitude of your minds.
1 Peter 1:13 (NLT) Think clearly and exercise self-control.
2 Peter 3:1
Dear friends...I have written both (letters) as reminders to stimulate you to wholesome thinking.
Thomas a Kempis The Imitation of Christ
Many thoughts have risen up against me, and great terrors which afflict my soul. How shall I pass through them without hurt? How shall I break them in pieces before me? I will go before Thee, O Lord, and open the gates of the prison and reveal to Thee the hidden secret. Do, Lord, as thou saidst and let all wicked thoughts flee from before Thy face. This is my hope and only consolation—to put my trust in Thee, to call on Thee from my inmost heart, and to wait patiently for Thy help and for thy strength.
Thomas Traherne Centuries of Meditations, First Century, Sect. 8
As nothing is more easy than to think, so nothing is more difficult than to think well.
Matthew Henry’s Commentary on Psalm 91
There will come a day of reckoning for all the hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against God, his truths, and ways, and people. It would hardly be believed, if we did not witness it, that millions of rational creatures should live, move, speak, hear, understand, and do what they purpose, yet act as if they believed that God would not punish the abuse of his gifts. As all knowledge is from God, no doubt he knows all the thoughts of the children of men, and knows that the imaginations of the thoughts of men's hearts are only evil, and that continually.
Even in good thoughts there is a want of being fixed, which may be called vanity. It concerns us to keep a strict watch over our thoughts, because God takes particular notice of them. Thoughts are words to God.
William Gurnall The Christian in Complete Armour
Do not parley in your thoughts with that which you do not wish to also take into your heart.
If thy God help thee not to keep them together, thou canst as easily hold the four winds in a bag, as keep the thoughts of thy fluid mind from gadding.
Richard Sibbes The Soul's Conflict with Itself and Victory Over Itself by Faith
http://www.chapellibrary.org/pdf-other/otscwi.pdf
A good Christian begins his repentance where his sin begins, in his thoughts. God has sovereignty over the inward as well as the outward man.
Satan often casts a mist before our imagination so that we might have a misshapen concept of things. By the spirit of illusion our affections are misled. Imagination is the womb, and Satan the father of all monstrous conceptions.
We need to labour to bring our imagination unto the obedience of Christ. Fasten it to the cross of Christ, who hath redeemed us from our vain thoughts and conversations. Set before it the consideration of the wrath of God, of death, and judgment, and take it not off till thy heart be taken off from straying from God.
John Owen Temptation and Sin
Meet your temptation in its entrance with the thoughts of faith concerning Christ on the cross; this will make it sink before you. Say, 'It is Christ that died - that died for sins such as these!'
Jonathan Edwards
All truth is given by revelation, either general or special, and it must be received by reason. Reason is the God-given means for discovering the truth that God discloses, whether in his world or his Word. While God wants to reach the heart with truth, he does not bypass the 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.
"Be Transformed By The Renewing of Your Mind"
https://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/articles/onsite/jonesrom12.html
This renewal of our minds not only changes our view of ourselves and other people, it changes our entire view of life in this world.
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?
2 Cor 11:3
But I am afraid that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds will be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.