Master them.
What are you thinking right now? Maybe you’re scrolling through your Facebook feed or looking outside your window. “How beautiful the snow is…. Oh, I should have put salt on the sidewalk…. And I really didn’t get the driveway as clean as I could have…. Why do I always go part-way and never fully complete projects?... Why does it seem like other people have it together and I’m always struggling?...Oh well. Live with it.”
There is, in each of us, an internal monologue (also called self-talk, inner speech, inner discourse, or internal discourse). A person's inner voice provides a running monologue of thoughts while they’re awake and also while they’re asleep. This internal monologue is usually tied to a person's sense of self and it affects your behavior.
My encouragement to you this week is this:
pay attention to those thoughts and,
with Christ’s help, master them.
We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. // 2 Corinthians 10:5
Every day brings a mixture of good feelings and bad, behavior we are proud of and behavior we’d rather not admit to: dark moods, angry outbursts, and stressed-out living. Even as Christians, negative feelings can dominate our lives, crippling our ability to function effectively, destroying our relationships, or spinning us into a downward spiral of bitterness and self-loathing. This is not Christ’s design for us and this is also the practical side of 2 Corinthians 10:5. Jesus knows that we are going to be hit with thoughts and feelings that don’t line up with the reality of what he is accomplishing in us and through us. Our thoughts are not always obedient to Christ and our identity that comes from Christ.
What we fail to recognize is the connection between our feelings, our thoughts, and the ongoing internal monologue we carry on with ourselves at all times! This internal monologue—our self-talk—begins at an early age and is the way we interpret events, emotions, and circumstances. Our self-talk can be largely misinformed and distorted and is able to cause emotional turmoil and problematic behavior, even relational difficulties.
If we leave these misbeliefs in our internal monologue unchecked and unchanged, then we can become victims of the circumstances and painful events in our life. Those circumstances influence our thoughts, which feed into our feelings, and from there, our feelings set the course for our behavior.
A mentor of mine put it in this visual: EVENTS → THOUGHTS → FEELINGS → BEHAVIOR
Events lead to thoughts, thoughts influence our feelings, and our feelings have a huge sway on how we act or behave.
The bottom line is that you feel the way you think and you think the way you believe! Christ calls us to think differently because we have been given the most optimistic outlook that has ever been dreamed up in the history of mankind.
We are dearly loved by God.
He has great plans for us that rely on his great love for us and not on our performance.
Jesus makes every situation work for our good.
So do an internal audit of the thoughts in your mind. Once or twice a day for the next two days, just make a note of what you are thinking and how you are feeling. What are the thoughts—good, bad, or indifferent? And then, with God’s help, realign your thoughts to the truths that God provides for us in his Word.
Blessings to each of you this week.
Pastor Al
P.s. A great book and a big resource for this note: Learning to Tell Myself the Truth by William Backus