“where for forty days
he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end
of them he was hungry.
The devil said to
him, “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.”
Jesus answered, “It
is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone.’”
Luke 4:2-4
How many thoughts run
through your mind in the course of a day?
Hundreds?
Thousands?
I am guessing that
some prestigious university somewhere in the world has studied this and can
provide the number within a certain range.
Suffice it to say,
for our purposes, that it is a lot.
Not all of them are good
and not all of them are bad.
The believer who
desires to be transformed by the renewing of their mind must learn how to deal
with those thoughts that are not good or godly.
The devil will work
to inundate you with evil or bad thoughts.
Like a farmer, he is
out to produce a crop.
Except in his case it
is a crop that will disable, divide and destroy.
Maybe you picture him
as a week-end gardener tossing the occasional seed in the soil of your mind.
If that is how you
picture him it is to your peril.
Instead, he is like an
artillery soldier taking aim at your mind with a Gatling gun.
The thoughts he tries
to get you to entertain can come at you continuously and relentlessly.
So what’s the key
word?
Entertain!
The transformed mind
has learned how to entertain godly thoughts and how to handle ungodly thoughts.
Like Jesus in the
wilderness temptation, we are not to give any ground to the enemy.
While the new birth
is instantaneous, a renewed mind is a lifelong process.
There are no
shortcuts.
The process is
biblical and it is modeled for us by Jesus.
This week we will
take a look at how we do it.
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