Taking Your Thoughts Captive
Taking Your Thoughts Captive
From secular to Christian authors, many people are speaking of the importance of controlling your thoughts. It seems that we simply cannot be truly successful until we do.
The first step of looking at your own thoughts can be the start of a good new habit—what can be termed “thought awareness”.
Thought Awareness
You must start by becoming aware of the thoughts that you think. You need to know what your thoughts are before you can judge them and take them captive like we are told to do in 2 Corinthians 10:5. We cannot take them captive if we don’t know what they are first.
After we catch a thought, we take it captive or put it into prison. Then we challenge it to see if it is true and positive. For a complete Biblical thought challenge you can use Philippians 4:8 as your guide. For any thought that does not pass this test you throw it out.
Thought Replacement
The most helpful thing to do when you notice a bad thought that keeps repeating itself is to come up with a replacement positive thought. Experts tell us that our brains do not process negative commands so we need to word our thoughts and speech in a positive way in order to change the way our brain thinks.
For example, if you notice yourself thinking, “I’m so stupid”, you could think or say to yourself, “I’m intelligent”, instead of saying, “I’m not stupid”. Or instead of telling yourself to “stop smoking”, tell yourself that, “I am a nonsmoker”.
Most habit changes involve challenging your thoughts that are negative or untrue to some degree so your success in this area will affect your success in later habit changing endeavors.
Let me know how your new thought awareness or thought captivity habit is coming along. Your comments welcome below.
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