YOU are called to conquer! (I know, right? You’re probably thinking “Who? Little ‘ol me?”) Yes! I am talking about YOU!
YOU are called to conquer! And you can CONQUER your thoughts.
How, you may ask?
Well, it all starts with monitoring your thoughts. See, you have control over what you pray. (You don’t just pray any ‘ol thing, right? Right!) And you have control over your thoughts, too. You can CONQUER them.
You don’t have to allow just any crazy thought to run around your head. In order to conquer your thought life, you have to start being conscious about your thoughts. Most people just dismiss their thoughts. (They don’t really focus on what they’re thinking about.) But you? You can learn to CONTROL your thoughts.
How do we do this? The first step is to learn NOT to just dismiss them. You have to learn to ANSWER your thoughts. What do I mean? Well, if a crazy thought comes to your mind, you have to learn how to cast it down. Believers are supposed to cast down imaginations. We are not supposed to just let crazy thoughts run free in our minds. And when we learn to start doing this regularly, this is how we start conquering our thoughts.
Let’s use fear as an example. As Believers, we are supposed to CONQUER our thoughts. This means that we are also supposed to conquer fear and doubt (because both fear and doubt often start as just a thought.) And we are called to bring EVERY thought (that means every fear and every doubt) into captivity! 👀
Picture that you are in the middle of a tennis match and a ball is heading toward you at 100 mph. Are you going to let the ball just hit you? No! You are going to grab your tennis racket and try to block it, right? Well that’s a picture of what you are supposed to do with your thoughts. You are not supposed to just let the ball (I.e. the fear or doubt) run into you. You are supposed to swing at it!
And if you dismiss your thoughts (i.e. just let them run around unchallenged) it will be like letting a ball hit you going 100 mph. Before you know it, you’ll have fear and doubt running rampant in your life, causing all kinds of chaos. But you are not going to allow fear and doubt to creep into your life, right? Nah. Instead, of doing that, you are going to learn how to swing and stop the ball!
The way that you do this is that you learn to align your thoughts with what God says. How do you do this? You start checking the thoughts that are coming to your mind to see if they actually line up with the Word of God.
So if a thought comes to your mind that is actually rooted in fear, and you know that God hasn’t given you a spirit of fear, you know that you need to cast that thought down. Aligning your thinking with the Word of God means that if a doubt or fear tries to creep in, you learn to recognize it and stop it in its tracks.
The next step in learning to cast down imaginations is speaking. You don’t use a thought to cast down another thought. No! You actually have to open up your mouth and SAY SOMETHING. And of course, what you want to say or speak is the Word of God. So if doubt or fear comes to your mind, and you recognize that the thought doesn’t line up with the word of God, you don’t have to “take it.” Instead, you can cast down that imagination (the doubt or fear) by speaking out loud what God has said, instead of the doubt or fear.
If you’d like to get more information about how to start conquering your thoughts, check out the video “How to conquer your thoughts” on YouTube @theBlessedNewbie.