When a speaker gives a final point, it’s usually the most important one, the one they want you to take home with you.
Why did Apostle Paul give this final thought: choose what your mind and heart focus on? Could it be that he knew how important mindset was? Likely so. Paul was one of the smartest guys of his time, highly educated, not only in Jewish learning, but also the secular.
Where we focus our minds becomes the filter through which all things pass. If we believe that everyone is out to get us, take us, or steal from us, then everything we experience takes on that incorrect, colored thinking.
If we believe that everything is about sex or money, then anything that comes our way is all about sex or money.
These two filters, and many others, lead us on a path of getting what we want, of taking care of “them” before they do something to us, and worse. They lead us away from God and His ways.
When we focus on what is true, honorable, right, pure, and lovely — things that are admirable and excellent — we will see things through those filters. Our minds won’t go straight to the what-ifs, sex, money, power, or fear thoughts. The paths we’ll be led down will be the ones that God approves of.
Oh, Faye, that’s just setting us up to be gullible!
No. I don’t think so. I think it sets us up to be faith-filled, trusting God for the outcome of every situation He allows us to be in. I think it settles our hearts and minds to choose to see the beauty and peace available in every situation.
For myself, I rarely watch the news. I’m no ostrich. I receive information, but it’s on my terms, brought through my true, honorable, right, pure, lovely, admirable, and excellent filter. See, I find that when I watch the news, my filter is demolished by the delivery of AHA! moments from every direction—all the “See, I told you!” items that back up the wrong thinking that is natural to us humans.
When I choose instead to think of these things Paul talks about, my blood pressure stays in a good zone, my heart doesn’t race, my emotions are not riled up and overflow.
This is part of that taking thoughts captive thing Paul told the believers at Corinth about. When those thoughts that are untrue, dishonorable, wrong, impure, unlovely, unadmirable, and poor enter our minds, we must capture them and either throw them back out as garbage (not passing them on!) or we must bend them to Truth and replace them with the good.
We can’t do that if our filter isn’t in place.
Let’s put on our God-goggles and install our God-filter today. Don’t wait! Your life and the lives of others depend on this!
Coffee, Bible, Journal.
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