“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
There was a forest.
The spring weather had been just right and all the tiny seed helicopters from the maple trees in our front yard had found fertile soil and taken root in our front flower bed. And it was a literal forest of tiny trees.
Imagine these little trees but a thick carpet of them all over the place!
Anywhere else it might be admirable, but I don’t need thousands of maple trees in the front of my house. I love a good forest, but not there!
So we set out to pull them up, carefully, one by one. We had some rain that softened the soil and made our work a little easier. And since many hands make light work, my parents came over and we had ourselves a tree-pulling party.
And as I found myself there, down on my knees, this thought came into my head: this is what my mind must look like when I’m not paying attention and bad seeds take root and multiply.
We have thousands of thoughts in a day’s time–research suggests about 70,000 thoughts a day.¹ And if we’re honest with ourselves, often we don’t pay attention to them that much. Many of those thoughts are negative, and many are negative about ourselves.
The message Paul writes to the Corinthian church in his second letter, specifically the verse referenced above, is very clear about what we are to do with our thoughts: take them captive and make them obedient to Christ.
We have that power! Just like we worked on the little maple trees growing in the dirt, we can kneel down into the garden of our minds and begin to uproot and take captive the undesirable, non-Christ-honoring thoughts that are likely lurking around. We don’t have to let them sink deep roots and grow. We can do something about it.
This isn’t an immediate process, but if we don’t start with uprooting even one thought, those negative thoughts will grow into a forest that will overgrow and choke out the good in us–much like the weeds in the Parable of the Sower in Matthew 13. And the world needs the good in us to grow strong and flourish for all to see.
If negativity rules our lives, we cannot be effective everyday ministers to those around us, for we will be consumed by our thoughts and lost in the woods. God has not called us to live this way. Because of His great love for us, He provided a way out of the woods as well as the power to take authority over our minds through the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Jesus’s triumph on the cross over Satan gave us power over evil on earth. Let’s wake up and start by taking captive and uprooting one negative thought, and then another, and then another. It’ll get easier as it goes, and the resulting peace that takes its place is definitely worth it.
~Lynne
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