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Faithful Stewards

All posts tagged with hearts

What Do You Think?

We’ve talked about the importance of taking action in the previous message.  We now want to look at another important subject in our quest to make God first in our lives.  The subject is how to control and focus our thoughts on God such that He becomes the constant subject and focus of our thoughts most of the time.

 

You will agree with me that this perhaps is one of if not the most difficult thing to do in one’s life.  Our thought patterns are influenced by our interests, our fears and anxieties, our environment that includes things that we see or hear around us.  Things we see and hear will also include the things where we have a choice and control to see and listen to like what we see on TV or read in books and so on.  The other side of this is the things we do not necessarily have a choice or control over like accidents or perhaps natural disasters that happen where we may be. 

 

Our thoughts determine our actions.  These actions, when repeated over time, become habits and once habits are formed they become part of or influence our character.  As we all know, character is what we will take to heaven or better still is what will determine whether we are fit to be in heaven or not.  This then means it is very difficult for us to change our habits or our character if our thoughts do not change in the first instance.  Therefore we have to change the way we think in order to have good habits and behaviour and ultimately character.

 

When we think good thoughts, our actions and our words also tend to go in that direction.  However, these good thoughts don’t just come all by themselves.  We have to cultivate them.  That is why it is crucial to have the Word of God in us because then that become the controlling force behind our thoughts.  When we have internalised the Word of God, it becomes a lamp that guides our thoughts as to what is right and not.  We become, so to speak, programed by the Word such that anything that is contrary to that Word is rejected as soon as it comes in.  Only that which conforms to the Word is accepted.  When that happens, we find ourselves having no interest in that which is contrary to the Word and eventually abhorring sin altogether.

 

When we have internalised the Word of God, it also means except for issues of choice, issues over which we do not have control over will also not influence our actions as the Word of God in us will direct our actions.  Let me illustrate this in this way.  When one is running a computer program that should perform a certain action to get a certain result, for instance give you an identification of a certain person, you will need to feed the right information into the computer for that to happen.  As soon as you give the wrong information, either the computer will reject such information or the computer will just not perform the required action.

 

When that happens, then we will have reached a stage that is described in the Bible that no one will teach the other to know the Lord for everyone will know the Lord since His Word is written in their hearts.  Their thoughts are directed by His Word.

We will stop here for now, but have a productive and blessed day further.