Friday, April 18, 2008

Words of Encouragement

Are your eyes seeing what God is showing?
Drawing: property of Joselyn Williams



Avoid every kind of evil. May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful and he will do it. - 1 Thessalonians 5:22-24

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. – Philippians 4:8

What are your thoughts? Sanctifying Thinking. To sanctify our thoughts means to make our thoughts line up with what is right before God. It means we must have holy thoughts. The scripture says avoid every kind of evil. This means that we must yield ourselves to God so that he can sanctify us in our entirety. That means my actions as well as my thoughts.

To have sanctified thoughts means that I must daily consecrate my thoughts to God. That means that I don’t dwell on stinking thinking and instead I allow my thoughts to be set aside for God’s purpose. I set aside my agenda or what I want to dwell on in my thoughts so that God can have the control.

When the thoughts that would make me dwell in the wrong places tries to rise up, I am reminded to avoid all kinds of evil. The evil to avoid is allowing the enemy to feed us lies and us believing it. We need to ask God to help sanctify our thinking so that we can think the right thoughts and not dwell our thoughts on things that are not praiseworthy and excellent.

As we go to worship this week, let us go seeking a change in our thoughts. What are your thoughts? Are they thoughts on the negative, defeated ways or are they thoughts about the victory that is waiting for us? Lord help us to move from stinking thinking to righteous thinking. Help us to move from being shortsighted in our thinking to seeing the whole picture in our thoughts. Help by setting our thoughts aside for your purpose and your ways.