Taking Thoughts Captive

Possibly the hardest aspect of living an upright life is keeping my thoughts pure and focused on God. Believe it or not, prayer time for me can be the most difficult time to stay focused. I guess that really shouldn’t surprise me, because I know that Satan doesn’t want me to have clarity of thought when I pray, and experience intimacy with God the Father. He’ll throw just about anything in my path to divert me. Recently, in a time of prayer, I found myself battling countless images and thoughts attempting to drag my mind away to wander aimlessly. The sense I had was of a soldier in Vietnam, fighting his way through the brush, looking for an opening. But the sticks, limbs, and tall grass kept hindering his vision as he attempted to walk through.

In my prayer time, as I attempted to press through to effective prayer, these thoughts and images kept coming at me, making it tough to want to continue praying.

Then God brought 2 Corinthians 10:3-5 to mind. This says that He has given us authority to tell our thoughts to straighten up and fly right. Our whole being needs to be in submission to God. That includes our words, our actions, and our thoughts. Other people witness our Christian (or non-Christian) example by our words and actions. They can’t see our thoughts. They don’t know the battles we fight in our mind.

For a Christian, probably more so than a non-Christian, the battle to keep our thoughts in check is the greatest battle of all. I would even say that the mind is the battlefield in which our battles are won and lost.

Intense prayer is not easy. James 5:16 says “The fervent prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.” We can’t believe even for a second that Satan wants our prayers to God to be powerful and effective. Our prayers, when offered in faith, have tremendous influence in the spiritual realm. And we can be certain that our enemy will do all he can to distract us from effective prayer.

So how do we combat those diversions? Before Jesus ascended into Heaven, he gave his authority to his disciples, which is also passed onto us (read John 17). All things were subject to the authority of Jesus. In 2 Corinthians 10:3-5, Paul teaches us that we don’t wage war like the world does, because we fight with divine power and authority. Let this passage in 2 Corinthians sink in deep…

Corinthians 10:3-5 (New International Version)

3 For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. 4 The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. 5 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.

The authority of Jesus in us was imparted to us so that we would have authority in the spiritual realm, just as Jesus did (does). When the enemy comes in like a flood with distracting thoughts, we have the weapon of Jesus’ authority to command them to be obedient to Christ Jesus.

God bless……..Brian

~ by Brian on December 17, 2008.