January 26, 2012
Fear of the Lord
I was intrigued when I recently heard a speaker mention scary
Scriptures in the Bible. I’m wondering if, similar to losing our fear of God,
some of us have also lost our fear of Scripture. Personally speaking I don’t usually
focus on the consequences of a passage when I’m already obedient to its
instruction. One of my picks for a scary Scripture is, “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 Cor 10:5 NIV) I think do pretty well at taking my thoughts
captive. However keeping them captive and then making them obedient to Christ
is another thing.
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Gail;
-----How do I make a thought obedient to Christ? How do I take it captive? You don’t know how many years I’ve pondered that. It’s been so long that thinking maybe I might know feels like what I had ought not do. I remember the friends of my Pentecostal days. They were always taking thoughts captive, kind of like they were always on the battlefield with swords and chains just rounding up, chaining up, and casting out surfeits of them there bad thoughts. Watching their subtle behaviorisms towards each other often made me wonder why they hadn’t turned so vehemently upon feelings as well. Thoughts are funny things. They have voices. And I could perceive the voices of their chained up thoughts barking through the oft inappropriate feelings of their manners.
-----I didn’t spend a lot of months in the Pentecostal church. I love them very much, and they have a special place in God’s mix of people as the particular body parts they are. But thoughts are not monolithic. They open up like books. They have units and chapters and paragraphs and sentences and words. So, when you throw a chain around a thought to take it captive, it’s middle unit breaks to the left while its end unit squirts to the right after its first chapter demonstrated a great escape. So you end up nailing nothing to the tree.
-----Being compound, thoughts come apart and reassemble (sometimes with other thought parts, not amazingly.) Like a yard full of five year olds needs someone to watch them rather than tie them all up, thoughts are not captured in the sense of capture we know. For we surely are what they are.
-----A thought is captured by a simple mental process. A process taking advantage of thoughts’ penchant for disassembling, reassembling, and accreting. It is an analyzing process which seeks truth and love like a hungry bear seeks honey. It is a process we learn to keep working at the front and back doors of our consciousness by which the inner workings of our minds learn to do the same. It is powered and perpetuated by humility.
-----What parts of a thought it discovers to be true and to be attitudinally of love are interlaced with words known to be joy attracters. (Thoughts attract emotion like water attracts tree roots.) What parts are not true or are attitudinally hateful get a straightening effort by the process before being tagged for joy attraction. What parts are found to be irreparably false or hateful become coated with Teflon, so to speak. They will then just slip away from whatever other thoughts they contact and dissipate into the abysmal mud of the unconscious.
-----Knowing that Jesus Christ is Truth and that He is Love, we are well on our way not to imprisoning thoughts, but to capturing them to the serving of the truth and love. A renewal of the mind, if you will.
-----If I may bore you a bit further, every true thing done in love is right. Righteousness, the Bible calls it. So, truth and love are elements of every righteous thing. Then every righteous thing has a peaceful correlation with any other righteous thing through the nature of their common elements: truth and love. Paul says the kingdom of heaven is not food and drink, it is righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit (the nature of God.) Capturing thoughts’ service to Christ renews the mind as it ever more assimilates into its part of the kingdom of heaven. So by capturing thoughts, “...Thy kingdom come...” becomes as much deeply personal as joy is tremendously essential.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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