STRENGTH FOR THE WEEK: Flood Church’s Weekly Devotional

Guest Post

Think Sparingly

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“A person’s days are determined; you have decreed the number of his months and have set limits he cannot exceed,” Job 14:5

“You have made my days a mere handbreadth; the span of my years is as nothing before you. Everyone is but a breath, even those who seem secure,” Psalm 39:5

If our days are numbered and will come to an end, and if we can only think so much in a day, our thoughts must be numbered too. What are we going to spend them on? Have you ever considered that we have a finite number of thoughts to think?

Maybe you have been told to guard your thought life against lust, anger, hate, or greed. This is important, but another thing to guard against is having too many unnecessary thoughts. God tell us to “Be STILL and know that I am God,” in Psalm 46:10. Does this verse mean that we should stop walking around, hold perfectly still, and stop fidgeting, or tapping our pencils? No! This verse is telling us to be mentally still, be emotionally still, and to not give into mental restlessness that comes from uncertainty and fear.

I often catch myself thinking, what am I going to wear? Where am I going to go? What will I eat today? Should I buy this thing? She’s/he’s cute, huh? What’s the weather like in Honduras right now? Honduras. Honda-Uraz. Honduras sounds like a planet where everyone drives Hondas. If I was going to buy a Honda, I would definitely get a CBR500, but motorcycles are dangerous. I guess everything is dangerous if you think ab.. blah, blah, BLAH!

There’s nothing wrong with daydreaming or letting our minds wander off, but if our minds never come back home, we’ll miss out on our appointments with the Holy Spirit and run into traps the devil puts in our way.

Let’s call these meaningless thoughts “mind pollution.” While neither explicitly good or bad, we spend so much time mulling over these thoughts that we tune out to the world, people around us, and the Spirit. Our mental hard drives cannot read and write simultaneously (if there are any computer nerds out there).

I cannot count the number of times I was so deep in thought that I ran into a pole, door, or a helpless by-stander. I was ABSENT minded. The phrase itself suggests that my mind was missing, gone, somewhere else skipping in daisies of irrelevancy or worry. In the same way, we should not be spiritually aloof or we will run into every pole the devil puts in our way.

This week, spend 10 minutes every day committed to a complete absence of thought. Because we can only hear the voice of God if we aren’t talking over Him all of the time.

Keep the Faith