Have You Ever Thought About What You Think About? … Hello Hump Day readers! We’ve turned the page to September and I hope you all had a wonderful holiday weekend. Now it’s back to work! I was the worship leader this past Sunday. The pastor had an incredible sermon that grabbed my heart and even more, my thoughts. So today, I want us to think about our thoughts!

Thoughts: we can’t see them, buy them, predict what they will do, but we cannot deny this about them: They define our lives. If we think well, we live well. If we think poorly, we live poorly.

Believe it or not, we need to understand that we actually can manage our lives by managing our thoughts! There are all kinds of neuroscience, therapies, etc., that are out there but the idea is also embedded throughout Scripture! Really, God has not abandon us with the struggle of our thoughts. In Romans 12:1-2: [MSG] the Apostle Paul said: “So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.”

What does the word ‘conformed’ mean to you? Max Lucado tells his idea on this: “The word reminds me of Play-Doh I had as a kid. It came with a dozen containers of modeling clay. I could press, smooshed, squished, rolled or squeeze and shape. Gosh that was fun.”

Obviously, there is nothing in the Bible that would incline us to think that the Apostle Paul played with Play-Doh! But abundant messages from his pen allude to the very real pressure that all of us encounter in conforming to the world. Our enemy—the mastermind behind these attacks is the devil who plants unruly thoughts to get us off-track in our lives.

Paul wrote in Greek. He chose the verb ‘metamorphous’ which translates as “transformed.” In school did you ever see the process of the caterpillar who morphs into a butterfly? I loved that, it was amazing. My 2nd grade teacher Ms. Price would share this with us often. At that time, I didn’t know why, but as I grew up I got it. Transformation is a process we all go through; the problem is, who is in our minds transforming us! Is it God or is it someone else?

Remember that God promises us an even greater transformation that no one could do. Are you wrestling with that ‘stuck in my head’ or ‘hounded by my pass’ or ‘your bag of worries’ that you just can’t get rid of? That’s when God says “My child, you need a transformation!” In other words, change IS POSSIBLE. But will we put that into God’s hands or will we keep hearing the others that want us to go another way?

The thoughts that have characterized our past do not need to characterize the rest of our lives. Turn off those who want to ‘make you over’. Instead, turn on the gift of our Lord who will move you from a worm to a butterfly, from clay-like to Christ-like!

This is how God wants us to live: God gives us a new mind, retrains our brains and renews our minds. He has the routes for our thought patterns and how we think. So choose God’s transformation—it will tame your thoughts and transform your life! AMEN.