“We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ.” ~2 Corinthians 10:5

Lately, God has been really emphasizing to me the importance of taking our thoughts captive and making them obedient to Christ – I even prayed about it in a prayer Monday post. Literally every thought – even the ones that are emotional reactions to things (especially those!) – need to be brought into submission and obedience. If Jesus didn’t speak it, preach it, or advocate it, it has no business being in our heads.

Think about it. We humans are masters at working ourselves up over small things. Be it overreacting to something, or not addressing an issue as it comes up but instead letting it build, we are great at letting these negative thoughts run rampant in our heads. Great at it. Much better at it than at capturing these thoughts and stopping the process. Letting these thoughts run rampant is exactly what the enemy wants us to be doing. It plays right into his hands. He can use pent-up thoughts like this and expound them in our heads (he can’t read our thoughts but he sure can plant some pesky ones inside us). When he does, issues become bigger than they need to be and resentments build. Even small ones can be toxic. If you have a ‘record sheet’ of slights in your head committed by a person, or some other such thing, it affects how you chat, pray, and worship with that person. Again, that’s exactly what the enemy wants. He wants us to not be praying and worshiping freely together, because that’s the chief way we defeat him. So by getting into this cycle, we are doing him a huge favor.

Also, enemy aside, our thoughts can sometimes get in God’s way! How many times has God told us something that didn’t make logical sense, or commanded something and we didn’t ‘understand’ it so we reasoned ourselves right out of compliance? The problem is, our thoughts are based on either what we know or what we can imagine. God is beyond our comprehension and imagination. If we’re not submitting our every thought to Him, we’re essentially boxing Him in with our brains. Whereas when we do submit them, He can shape them and guide us – it becomes a partnership rather than a competition. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to put Jesus in a box! I don’t want to miss or misunderstand what He tells me simply because I’m too prideful to make Him master of my brain.

Or maybe we do hear and we do understand, and we let fear and worry get in our way of truly walking out along His path. Why do we fear and worry? Simple – because we thought too much. We don’t need to be thinking, we need to be obeying and trusting that if God ordains it, God will take care of it. The worry and fear, that’s not of God. That’s of us and us not trusting God to do what He says He will. He is the God of more than enough – He will provide our every need if we let Him and listen to Him. We, thoughts and all, are not gods of anything, and we’re certainly not more than enough. We need extra things, things beyond ourselves – food, clothing, shelter – to be sustained. We don’t inherently have it in us. But God inherently has it in Him and can provide every single thing. So let’s stop getting in His way, shall we?

I’ve been thinking a lot about how my walk would look if it were based on that level of submission to Christ instead of partially on my own reasoning power. I’m not sure, but it’d probably look different. And it would probably be way more bold. I think on some level, the more we submit the more bold we can be because we can stand on the fact that Christ is always right and has all situations in hand. We sure don’t, but He sure does!

So take the Thought Challenge with me this weekend. Track your thoughts (journal if you want, or just try to be more aware of them). See how many there are in a day that aren’t of God – pray for awareness and discernment on them. Submit them to Him as soon as they pop into your head. And see how God works in you!!!

I’m praying for each and every reader of this blog to have new revelation on submission of their thoughts. But of course, I can pray for additional things too, so write to me at being.rebekah.a@gmail.com and send me those prayer requests!

God bless!

~Rebekah A