“But Jesus knew what they were thinking and said to the man with the shriveled hand, “Get up and stand in front of everyone.” So he got up and stood there.” Luke 6:8 NIV
Jesus knew what they were thinking. Do you ever think about what you are thinking about during the day? It is an interesting activity to sit back and examine your thoughts. Are they positive in nature, negative in nature? Are they about work more than fun? Do you think about problems and solutions or just the problems?
What we value tends to be what we think about and what we think about is what our heart is truly focused on. The nice thing about thoughts are that they are yours and yours alone, no one else is able to have your thoughts or even know what you are thinking until you tell them. No one that is except God, He already knows them. He knew them before you thought them.
That can be a scary idea, that God knows my thoughts and that He knows them before I think them. I used to believe that it was scary, but realizing that He knows my thoughts has made me work to capture them. When I capture them, I examine them against God’s word. Is what I am thinking in line with what I believe God thinks about me or how I believe God thinks about the situation that I am facing.
This is done by going to God’s word and looking up what it says about the thought or situation. I was not very good at this for a long time, I would think something negative and then I would get stuck on it, thinking about it for days. Thankfully over time, with a lot of prayer and unfortunately a lot of practice, I moved to maybe thinking about it for a day and now it is even less.
We don’t have to think about everything that comes into our minds. We can acknowledge that it arrived, examine it and if it is not a thought we should be having, we can dismiss it. Our enemy wants us to think that we are helpless when it comes to our thoughts, that we can do nothing about what we think but think it. That is not the truth, the truth is that we have control over everything we think, it is our job to exercise that control more often than we probably do.