Winning the War in Your Mind

Many sins begin in our thought life. It is the continuous process of thinking that can be so beneficial or so evil to our daily actions. Whatever we consume, we think about. And what we think about, we so often do or act in a manner of those thoughts. Consider what the apostle Paul has to say about our thought life:

“For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ.” (2 Corinthians 10:3-5)

As Christians, we do not fight a battle of flesh and blood, but a spiritual one. The most challenging temptations and struggles we face are internal ones, even though it is easy to think that they are physical. Our thought lives are difficult to control not because we lack the self-control, but because we fight invisible strongholds that we are so often ignorant of. But if we don’t know what we are fighting, we don’t know what armor to use.

The battle of our thoughts is won through a simple, yet challenging solution: yielding to the Spirit. We fight this battle by submitting everything to God and receiving his spirit. We don’t get to pick and choose what we submit, rather, we must submit every part of ourselves, even something as intimate as our thought lives. For by yielding our thoughts to him, we live in the way of the Spirit because our mind is tuned to his:

“Those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace.” (Romans 8:5-6)

You either live in death or you choose life and peace. And again, the way we accomplish this is by constantly submitting ourselves to the Spirit. Every thought deserves to be taken captive, every action deserves to be examined, and every life deserves to be yielded to its creator. It might seem like a lot, but the return on your investment is eternal.