Philippians 4:6 Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done.7 Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.
We have so much information going in our minds and affecting our emotions on a daily basis and we may not realize just how much it is persuading us in our daily walk. I know we surely can't stick our heads in the sand and ignore all that is being thrown our way, but we can use a filter to keep it from sticking in our mind and in our heart. God's Word is that filter. You may ask "Why should we even worry about it?" In Proverbs 4:23 the writer says "Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life." You can see that guarding our heart is a real thing and something that is not just a Bible verse, but a life reality. We need a mind guard because what goes in your eyes and your ears makes it's way to your heart, or soul. When I used to be in youth ministry I would tell those teenagers that "garbage in garbage out" was a reality and they picked up on that, so should you.
Use God's Word as a filter for keeping out the bad and soaking up the good. Paul wrote to the church at Philippi and in Philippians 4:8-9 8 And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.9 Keep putting into practice all you learned and received from me—everything you heard from me and saw me doing. Then the God of peace will be with you. Years ago Fram air filters had a commercial that stressed the need to buy their product to keep your engine from blowing up by keeping out the pollutants in the air. Their famous byline was "Pay me now or pay me later." God's Word teaches us the same lesson in the above scripture, but it is not defense we are called to but an offense, where we put so much of the truth of God''s Word in our life that it acts as a filter to keep all of the wrong things out. So the lesson should be "Read God's Word and let it filter out the wrong things in the information and you will know how to go with the right things."
Our mind can get confused at times and as we age our mind can even go stagnant if we don't keep it fresh. God's Word keeps it fresh and studying God's Word will not only give us wisdom, but it will give us a fresh direction for our day. I read scriptures every day that I have read for years and they just jump out at me in a fresh new way. How does that happen? The Bible itself says in Hebrews 4:12 . For the Word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow, it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.
Well, there it is. The mInd guard. As we grow older we must keep our mind active in reading and studying God's Word and if you are young, you must make this a priority for living life today. Why? Because the purity of God's Word has the true wisdom that affects your mind and your heart and it guards your very essence. Mark Batterson writes this: Neuroimaging has shown that as we age, our cognitive center of gravity shifts from the imaginative right brain to the logical left brain. At some point, most of us stop living out of imagination and start living out of memory. That’s the day we stop creating the future and start repeating the past. That’s the day we stop living by faith and start living by logic. Living for Jesus might seem illogical at some point in your life, but in reality living for Jesus is the most Biblically logical thing to do. Plus the Word of God's freshness keeps our spirits fresh and growing. I like that and I hope you do to!!
The Pilgrimage Continues.....
David Warren
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