The Christian Mind: Capture Every Thought

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone, and happy Sunday to you. Thank you for joining us for our worship today. I have a pretty good list of announcements to go over this morning.

The men’s group will meet this evening. All men are invited.

I’ll remind you that this is the last Sunday to give a love offering for a longtime church family who needs some help with medical bills. Please consider helping our church family.

Don’t forget our fellowship meal after today’s service. I’ll be blessing the food as part of our closing prayer so that you can head back to the fellowship hall and get started without waiting on me. Thank you to Christi and Vonda for helping to pick up the food and drinks for that.

You’ll see a form in your bulletins to order an Easter lily. That form is due back by March 12.

You’ll also find in your bulletin from our newly-formed church safety team, which has been hard at work building a program from the ground up. We’re starting out with simple things that don’t cost any money at all, such as keeping me safer by moving me a little over to the side, which is why I’m over this way today.

We’ve also decided that calling this group the security team is a little narrow, because these are the folks who will also be responsible for planning for not only a security emergency, but any sort of emergency. So we’ve settled on the name Safety Team instead.

Right now, we’re looking for volunteers within our church who have either the willingness, the training, or experience to help out in times of need. Much of this is very basic stuff such as watching doors and making sure they’re locked or greeting guests as they come in. If you’d like to volunteer for a role like that, please add your name to that form and place it in the offering plate. And if you have any experience with anything in that list, please add that as well.

We’ll be having a church-wide meeting with the safety team on March 8 at 6:00 to go over some of the things the team has been talking about. I encourage you all to be there, because this is an important part of our church life. I especially invite anyone who will be volunteering for a role to be there as well.

Also, I need to update you on the work our local pastors are doing. We met on Wednesday and settled on a tentative date for our town-wide week of revival. That will be May 21-27, with a location to be announced. As part of the lead up to that revival, we’re planning to gather all the participating churches together for a worship service some time in April, as well as a pulpit swap in March so that our pastors can meet other congregations, and you can meet other pastors.

We also discussed ways that our local churches can reach into our community to provide assistance to those in need. David Rash is pastor at Sherando United Methodist Church, and he found that children in Stuarts Draft owe a total of about $6,500 in school lunch fees. We decided as a group that our churches will take a special love offering on Easter Sunday with a goal of paying off that bill. We think it’s an amazing opportunity to show the love of Christ to families in this town and that our churches are there for them.

So, lots going on both in our church and our community.

Sue, do you have anything?

Opening Prayer

Father, we come before You in Jesus’ name to praise Your Holy name. We will not forget Your benefits and your forgiveness of our sins. We praise You because You have redeemed our life from the pit and crowned us with compassion. We praise You because You satisfy our desires with good things and You renew our Youth like the eagles. Father, we praise You and honor You for You alone work righteousness for the oppressed, You are compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in love. For it’s in Jesus’s name we ask it, Amen.

Sermon

There’s a great little story in Acts chapter 19 about the sons of a Jewish high priest named Sceva. Paul was in Ephesus, and God was doing such powerful miracles through Paul that people would actually touch his skin with their aprons and handkerchiefs and then take those articles of clothing back home to their sick family members and friends. All the sick people had to do was touch that piece of cloth that had touched Paul, and their diseases were cured.

Some of the people in Ephesus heard Paul preach and became convinced that Jesus was the Messiah. And there were people who weren’t convinced too. But whether they believed Jesus was the Christ or not, everyone came to realize that the name of Jesus had power. So much so that the seven sons of Sceva decided they were going to borrow that name.

All of Sceva’s sons were exorcists. People would come to them for help with demon possession, and these sons would go and try to drive those spirits out. When the sons started seeing all the things God was doing through Paul in Jesus’s name, they thought, “Hey, it’s always good to have another tool in your toolbox.” So when they were trying to cast out a demon, they started saying, “I command you to come out by the Jesus whom Paul proclaims.”

But guess what? It didn’t work. In fact, when they said that, the demon said, “Jesus I know, and Paul I recognize, but who are you?” Can you imagine that? The demons knew Jesus, of course. In fact, the demons knew Jesus was the son of God, which is more than we can say for a lot of those very religious and godly Jews in Ephesus. And Paul had driven out enough evil spirits that word had spread about him in the demon world. They knew who he was.

But these seven sons of Sceva, these men whose job it was to cast out evil spirits, were so inconsequential and weak that the demons didn’t even know them. And those sons were also so spiritually weak that after the demon said, “Who are you?” he jumped on all the sons and overpowered them to the point where they ran out of the house naked and wounded.

It’s a powerful story, and it’s powerful because it’s a warning to every one of us. Those seven sons of Sceva thought that all they had to do was mention Jesus’s name and that demon would be gone. They thought the name of Jesus had power, but the power doesn’t come in just saying his name. How often do you hear people saying Jesus’s name like a curse word? No, the power of Jesus’s name comes from the relationship you have with Jesus.

They said, “I command you to come out by the Jesus whom Paul proclaims,” and that demon wiped the floor with them. If they would have had a faith like Paul’s, and a relationship with Christ like Paul’s, they would have said, “I command you to come out by the Jesus whom we proclaim,” and that demon would have run straight back to hell.

Last week we started talking about what a miracle your mind is, but also how broken it is. We talked about your record player, and how your mind is always trying to make sense of what’s going on around you by bringing up all those bad memories you have.

Fixing that, keeping that needle in your mind away from those deep grooves of bad thinking that you always fall into, means fixing your thoughts on Jesus instead.

And that is so important in your life as a Christian. I can’t begin to tell you how important that is, because if you let your needle just keep making those deep grooves deeper and deeper, you still might be a Christian, you still might go to heaven, but you’ll be useless in this life because your heart and your mind will already be dead. The devil’s already locked you up tight in that prison of lies. You’re basically another child of Sceva, and the demons will just wipe the floor with you.

There’s actually a phrase that describes the spiritual life of someone like this. It’s something that unfortunately a lot of Christians suffer from. It’s called functional atheism. It’s when people believe that God exists, they believe the Bible is true, they believe that heaven is theirs, but at a functional level in their day-to-day lives, they live like none of that’s true. It’s knowing that God is all-powerful and all-loving, but living like He’s small and distant and unwise. It’s believing in Jesus but acting like he doesn’t exist.

There are symptoms of functional atheism. They include worrying too much. Trying to control too much. Demanding too much from God. If that’s you, then sit up and pay attention for the next twenty minutes or so, because functional atheism starts right here in your mind, but that’s also the first place we can start fixing it. And the first step in that is found in 2 Corinthians 10. Turn there with me now. Second Corinthians chapter 10, we’ll be looking at verses 3-5:

For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ …

And this is God’s word.

The devil can’t make anything. Did you know that? The devil doesn’t have the power to make anything new — only God can do that. The only thing the devil can do is to make bad what God has made good. And he is exceptionally good at turning what God has made to be of good use to you into something that destroys you. That is especially true for your mind, because if you’re not careful and if you’re not disciplined in how you think, that door gets propped wide open for him to walk right in and wreck things.

And we let him do this all the time. The devil loves to play your record player. He loves to nudge that needle into one of those deep grooves, because feeding you your worst memories and regrets over and over again keeps you safe inside that prison he wants you in.

Here’s how that works. Remember a while back when I told you about my fever? I woke up one morning with a fever, then I just completely lost my voice. I had never lost my voice before, and it was Tuesday, and I knew Sunday was coming. So like the big dummy I am, I decided that instead of calling my doctor, I’d just get on Google and diagnose myself.

Well, that turned out about as well as any other time anyone ever gets on the internet, because before long I had diagnosed myself with about seven diseases, all of which were fatal. Every time I coughed, every time my fever spiked, every time Advil didn’t work, I just knew I was getting worse and worse and I’d never get better again.

That is exactly how the devil gets at your mind. You start off with a single little thought. Then that thought grows into a worry. Then that worry becomes a fear. Then that fear becomes paranoia. At that point, your mind has just created an entire world that isn’t real except for the realness you give it. And then you’re finished. The devil has you right in that prison.

Those thoughts and worries and fears and paranoia are the shafts on the arrows the devil fires right at you, and the tip of that arrow, the part that pierces you, is his voice saying, “See, you’re always like this. Everything’s bad, and nothing will ever get better. You’re a terrible person. Even if God was there, even if He’s real, how could he possibly love you?”

And many times, most times, you believe it. You do. And in some ways you don’t have a choice, because your thoughts are so powerful that they actually alter the shape of your brain. Dr. Caroline Leaf is a neuroscientist who studies how thoughts affect our brains. Listen to what she writes: “Thoughts are real, physical things that occupy mental real estate. Moment by moment, every day, you are changing the structure of your brain through your thinking.”

Remember what Solomon wrote in Proverbs 23? “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.” Paul understood that better than anyone. He also understood that with God’s help, what you think about is entirely up to you. That’s what he’s talking about in these three verses right here. And he starts out by saying that everyone has a problem with what they think about because “we walk in the flesh.”

We’re all stuck in these bodies that break down with minds that have a habit of betraying us. You might be a Christian saved from sin, but you’re still in the world, so you can’t get away from sin. As long as there’s life left in your body, you’re going to struggle. So understand that first, Paul says. That’s just living. But if you trust God, He’s going to take all those hard things you have to go through and turn them into something special that you can enjoy in this life and especially in the next.

Notice what Paul says here though — he says that we walk in the flesh. He doesn’t say that we walk after the flesh. Those are two very different things. Walking in the flesh is just being a human being with human faults and troubles. Walking after the flesh means that you’re setting aside what God calls you to do and instead you’re chasing after what you want to do.

No matter who we are, Christian or non-Christian, religious or atheist, we all struggle with the ways we think and believe. As Christians, we’re given both a strength and weapons that nothing of this world can match. But while the world goes on just as it always has with people fighting and warring against each other, our fight is with the devil, and the war is with ourselves.

Paul uses that metaphor of warfare a lot in his letters, and almost every time it’s a word he uses to describe how we’re supposed to think about that internal conflict we talked about last week — the war between that higher kind of life God wants us to live, and the lower sort of life that we settle for instead. And that is a battle you fight in your mind.

It’s war — that’s how seriously Paul says you have to take this. That’s exactly what it is. And just like any war, the stakes are as high as you can get. It’s a matter of life and death. It’s you against the devil. One of you is going to win, and the other is going to lose. There can’t be any peace, there can’t be any truce. There can only be the one who defeats, and the one who’s defeated.

This is something you absolutely have to understand, because it’s easy to live your life with the idea that you’re not in a war at all. It’s easy to believe that every thought you think is just a random bit of nothing that you can’t control instead of a shot that’s fired in a war over your very soul — a shot fired by either you or the devil. And more often than not, it’s the devil who’s firing all those shots. He’s shooting you with lies. And you can be absolutely ignorant of the fact that he’s doing it because to you, it’s just your needle finding a groove in your record the way it always does.

And so the result is that your life isn’t the way you want it to be. You keep wanting more out of life but you keep settling for less. You try to keep yourself busy so that you won’t ever have a quiet minute when you have to think about how unhappy you are. You’re not fighting, because you don’t think you have to fight. And for every day you think you don’t have to fight that war over your own thoughts, the devil takes a little more of your mind.

For years after the start of World War II, the United States declared its neutrality. We wanted to stay out of it. We’d already seen the cost of war in Europe during the First World War, and most of the country didn’t want to send any more of our soldiers off to die. What a lot of people didn’t understand was that even though we weren’t at war with Japan and Germany, they were at war with us. Pearl Harbor was just the final straw. Even if we don’t think of our daily live as being at war with the devil, he’s at war with us. The only way to defeat evil was to engage it. To fight it. You can’t be neutral. If you’re not fighting the devil, he’s defeating you.

God says you have to fight, and God gives you weapons to fight. And in verse 4, Paul says that the weapons you have aren’t like the weapons found in the world. They don’t rust. They don’t run empty. Your weapons have divine power. Paul isn’t talking about the armor of God here, even though that’s absolutely what you need to be wearing. But here he’s referring to something he’s written earlier.

Turn back a few chapters to 2 Corinthians 6. Paul’s talking about all the things he’s had to suffer — afflictions and hardships and beatings and imprisonments — and then starting in verse 6, he tells us how he was able to overcome them. He writes in verses 6 and 7, “by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, the Holy Spirit, genuine love; by truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left.”

Right there in the middle of those two verses is the heart of the way Paul lived, of how he constantly fought the devil over his own mind and his own thoughts. It’s right there at the start of verse 7 — “truthful speech, and the power of God.” More than anything else, that’s what gives your weapons divine power. And back in verse 4 of chapter 10, Paul says those weapons are charged by the Holy Spirit “to destroy strongholds.”

That word “stronghold” is translated from a Greek word that means “to fortify.” In Paul’s day, every city had walls to keep the people save from invaders. A stronghold was a fortress inside that city built on the highest ground. It was surrounded by its own walls up to twenty feet thick. When the city was attacked, the city’s leaders would hide there so they wouldn’t be killed.

Paul says the lies you believe are like a fortress, and the walls of your fortress grow thicker and stronger every time you believe those lies. You’ve believed them for so long that they’ve become a part of you. You think those lies protect you. They keep the bad out. But really it’s just the opposite. The devil wants you to think the lies you believe keep you safe, but really all they’re doing is keeping the truth away.

In Proverbs 21, Solomon writes that “A wise man scales the city of the mighty and brings down the stronghold in which they trust.” If you’re in a war, you have to attack. And if you attack a city but don’t bring down that city’s stronghold, then that city isn’t conquered. All those leaders are still safe inside. That means in order to win that war between you and the devil over your mind, you have to do what seems impossible — you have to bring down that stronghold of lies that’s sitting in your mind. And you know as well as I do that isn’t easy.

Paul knows that too. The word he uses in verse 4 for “destroy” is a Greek word that means “destruction requiring massive power.” It’s going to take a lot to bring down a lifetime of lies that you’ve told yourself, more powerful than what you have. But thankfully, God has that power.

Paul tells us in Ephesians 1 that he prayed we’ll understand the incredible greatness of God’s power for everyone who believes in him, because it’s the same mighty power that raised Christ from the dead. Stop and think about that for a moment. God’s power, the resurrection power, the roll-away-the-stone-power, the power that overcame the grave, is the same power that’s available to you.

That’s what you use to tear down the walls of that stronghold of lies that control your thinking. That’s what you use to get rid of those deep grooves in the record player in your mind that’s always trying to explain what your circumstances are and what they mean.

So here’s my question to you: what’s your stronghold? What are the lies that are holding you hostage (because I bet it’s more than one)? Because I’ll tell you this, you can’t beat what you can’t define. You absolutely have to name the lie that’s become the stronghold in your mind, and you have to realize how much joy you’ve missed out because of that lie.

If you’re going to change your life, you have to change your thinking. That’s what Paul’s getting at in verse 5: “We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.”

All of those divine weapons that God gives you, that same power that raised Christ from the dead, and all of those strongholds God wants you to destroy, are all aimed at this right here. It’s to “destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God.”

My translation, the ESV, is really good at being accurate to the original text. But sometimes it tries so hard to be loyal to what the original language says that it misses the mark a little on what the verse means. I think this is one of those times, so I’m going to share what the King James Version is of the first part of verse 5: “Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God.”

What does Paul mean by “imaginations”? It’s what we talked about last week. Every time the needle on your record player finds one of those deep grooves that’s a lie, you believe that lie a little more. And every time you believe that lie a little more, you become a little more blind to the truth. Remember what I said earlier about how your mind works if you just let it go on its own. Thoughts lead to worries, worries lead to fears, fears lead to paranoia, and paranoia means you’re not seeing anything clearly — not yourself, not others, not life, not God. What you’re seeing and believing might be powerful, but they’re not real. They’re your imaginations.

Your imaginations are the walls around your stronghold, and those walls are the first things you have to knock down, because then you can get to the heart of what all those lies do to you, and Paul tells us that in the second half of verse 5. Again, here’s the King James: “Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God.”

Paul uses a brilliant image with that phrase “every high thing,” because he’s calling back to the Old Testament. The pagan religions often worshipped their gods by building altars on high hills and mountains. In fact, that was still done in Paul’s day, and it’s done in our day too. When the nation of Israel first entered the Promised Land, God was clear that His people needed to destroy all of these altars in the high places.

Listen to Numbers 33:50-52:

And the Lord spoke to Moses in the plain of Moab by the Jordan at Jericho, saying, “Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, When you pass over the Jordan into the land of Canaan, then you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you and destroy all their figured stones and destroy all their metal images and demolish all their high places.”

God didn’t want any of these high places left. He didn’t want His people to be corrupted by thinking they could get any closer to Him by being on a mountain. That was a human idea. That was a way of approaching God based on people’s own ideas instead of what God said.

Unfortunately, those high places were never completely destroyed. The Israelites didn’t obey God, and that is one of the reasons why after generations of God’s patience, He finally let His people fall into judgment by being carried off into captivity by King Nebuchadnezzar.

Paul’s saying something very important. He’s saying that the lies you believe don’t just build thick walls around your stronghold. That’s bad enough. But those thick walls are actually protecting a high place in your mind, and Paul says in verse 5 that you treat those high places with more reverence and more obedience than you do with your knowledge of God.

You’ve believed the lies your mind tells you for so long that now it’s an altar. You might still be a Christian, but you’ve also become a functional atheist. You might be saved and bound for heaven, but you’re letting your life here on earth rot. You’re worshipping your high place instead of God, because you’re listening to the lies you’ve convinced yourself are true instead of God’s voice.

Until you take down those strongholds and rip down those high places in your mind, you’re not going to enjoy the life that God wants you to have. So how do you do that? Paul tells us at the end of verse 5: We take every thought captive to Christ.

Paul says the key to overcoming all those lies the devil tries to tell you and all those lies you’ve believed for so long is to capture them before they go rotten in your minds. If your thoughts can lead to worries, and then to fears, and then to paranoia, then the key is to grab hold of those thoughts and look at them before they get out of control. But you don’t look at them through your own eyes and with your own opinions, because often your eyes don’t see what’s true and your own opinions are just absolutely wrong. What you have to do instead is look at them through God’s Word.

You have to take your thoughts captive. But how do you do that? I’m going to give you 4 ways.

First, and most important, you have to study scripture.

Proverbs 4:20-22: “… be attentive to my words; incline your ear to my sayings. Let them not escape from your sight; keep them within your heart. Fro they are life to those who find them, and healing to all their flesh.”

I’ve said this over and over, and I’m going to keep saying it: You cannot be a healthy, powerful, make-the-devil-run-away Christian if you do not read your Bible. You have to know that book inside and out. You have to let those words talk to you, because that’s your sword. Remember? That’s the only offensive weapon in your armor. God only gives you one because one is all you need, and it’s His word.

You break through that stronghold and you pull down your high places by taking every thought captive before it can turn into a worry or a fear or a paranoia, and you do that this way: you don’t just think your thoughts, you study them. You look at them.

The next time your needle finds that deep groove that says, “I can’t do this,” you pause and put that word up against God’s. You think, “I can’t do this.” But what does God’s word say? God’s word says, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” And at that point, you make the choice to believe God’s word over your thought.

The next time your needle finds that deep groove of worry, you think of God’s word that says, “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” And at that point, you make the choice to believe God’s word over your thought.

For whatever lie you’ve let yourself believe, and for whatever stronghold and high place you have that exalts itself above God, there is a verse in the Bible that gives you the truth. Believing your own words have put you in a prison. Believing God’s word is going to set you free. But to set yourself free, you have to take those bad thoughts captive.

Second, you have to take responsibility for your thoughts. That’s exactly what God tells Cain in Genesis 4. He says to Cain, “If you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. It’s desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it. But Cain’t didn’t. He let his thoughts run wild and didn’t capture any of them, and he murdered Abel as a result. Until you believe that you can control the things you think about, you’re going to believe the lies you tell yourself more and more, and those walls around your high places will just keep getting thicker and thicker.

Third, don’t think it’s just your behavior that needs to change. Even if you manage to change what you do, it’s only going to last for a little while. It’s not what you do that gets you in trouble, it’s the thinking that informs what you do. That’s why Christianity has never been about changing your behavior, it’s about transforming your life.

Lastly, and I saved this for last because I don’t want you to forget this — just because a thought’s in your head doesn’t mean it’s your thought. Remember, the devil loves to root around in your mind because that’s the straightest path to your heart. Sometimes it’s the bad stuff you think, and sometimes it’s the bad stuff he gets you to think. That’s why it’s so important that you know what scripture says. That’s your weapon. That’s your sword. Unsheathe it. Hold that sword up against your thoughts. Hold fast to what God tells you instead of what your thoughts tell you.

My favorite definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result. You’ve tried fixing things on your own. How’s that worked out for you? So let’s try something else.

Instead of giving up, look up, because greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world. As a child of God, you have access to every blessing. So ask God to show you the lies that you’ve believed for too long. Ask Him to fill your mind with His truths instead of the devil’s lies. Ask Him to help you start living like a believer in deed instead of just a believer in name. And then thank Him for hearing and helping you.

Let’s pray:

Father we’re so thankful of the blessing and the wonder of the human mind, and we’re especially thankful of Your help in us capturing every thought to make sure it aligns with Your words. We pray Your Spirit informs our thoughts every day, and that the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. As we gather in fellowship, we pray You bless our meal and our togetherness, and that You see us safely home. For it’s in Christ’s name we pray, Amen.