God Is After My Thoughts
Several years ago I was reading Romans chapter 1, and when I reached verse 21 I was arrested by a single thought. It did not leave me when I closed my Bible that morning. It stayed with me for months. The thought was this. God is after my thoughts.
I went to bed saying it. I woke up saying it. I would be driving to work and in the pause between one part of a conversation and the next, there it was again. God is after my thoughts.
Here is what I mean. The God of the universe does not want to be someone I interact with for a few special minutes in the morning with a cup of coffee and an open Bible. He does not want to be present in my mind only on a Sunday, or only in a crisis when someone I love is sick and needs healing. He wants to be part of my waking, my planning, my dreaming, my reflecting, my resting. In every moment of every day, God is after my thoughts.
And that matters, because your thoughts are the thing that makes you you. When you meet someone brilliant, what sets them apart is not their background or their education. It is the way they think. "As a man thinks in his heart, so is he" (Proverbs 23:7). What I love is the context. The Bible is describing a meal with a miser. He puts the food in front of you and says eat, eat. But while his mouth is saying eat, his mind is saying, I wish I had invited the over forties rather than the youth group, because then there would be chicken sandwiches left for tomorrow. The words are generous. The thoughts are not. The thought trumps the gesture. You are what you think.
Jesus said the same thing. "You have heard that it was said, do not commit adultery. But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Matthew 5:27-28). Why say that? Because if the thoughts are adulterous, the actions eventually will be too. Your thoughts today become your life tomorrow. That is a warning, but it is also a promise. If I do not like my life today, I can change it tomorrow by changing my thoughts today. Even when God calls people back he goes for the mind first: "Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts" (Isaiah 55:7). There is no mention of deeds in that verse at all.
Our thoughts are also the primary battlefield. "The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. 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 Corinthians 10:4-5). Read that backwards and you find four stages, and they run in a terrible order.
It begins with a thought. The enemy is always trying to sow a thought that does not align with the truth of Scripture. A thought that is not arrested becomes a pretension, and a pretension is an assumption, something you believe to be true without ever having tested it. Most of us are carrying assumptions that are quietly governing the way we live and are nowhere in God's word. A pretension that is not dealt with becomes an argument, and an argument is something untrue that you will fight to defend. You know one is there when somebody says something that agrees with Scripture but confronts the way you live, and your first instinct is not to receive it but to get aggressive with the person who said it. It is far more comfortable to justify a flaw than to accept the change. And an argument that is never torn down becomes a stronghold, an impenetrable fortress of the mind.
Which is why I say the strongest prisons in the world are not the ones with the thickest walls. They are the ones with the most convincing thoughts. Thoughts become walls, and walls hold us in place for years.
So I am uneasy with the idea our generation has been handed, that whatever you feel is how you should live. If a thought arrives that does not agree with God's word, God does not want me to entertain it, ruminate on it and then become it. When Peter said something that was not inspired by heaven, Jesus did not sit with it. He said, get behind me, Satan (Matthew 16:23). Some thoughts need to be told they cannot live here anymore. Jesus said you will know the truth and the truth will set you free (John 8:32), and part of what he came to free is your mind.
And none of us can turn our thinking off. When you wake, you are thinking. When you fall asleep, you are thinking. When you are doom scrolling, you are still thinking. The danger is not that we stop thinking. The danger is the direction our thinking travels when nobody is watching it.
We have come to accept that melancholy is par for the course, that depression is to be expected, that anxiety is simply part of life now. That was never the manufacturer's intention. Jeremiah 29:11 is not a joke. God has plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a future and a hope, whatever season you are walking through.
And yet without God in his rightful place in our thoughts we end up anxious, fearful, worried and tormented, self-loathing when we should be self-loving. To put it another way, in our thoughts we see the end of the world. This is what I have come to call the Thoughtpocalypse, when the setbacks of an ordinary life arrive dressed as the end of everything. The great diseases of our generation are not principally of the body but of the mind: depression, despair, anxiety and melancholy. We live in the most prosperous age in history and we are struggling in our thoughts like no generation before us.
Romans 1 tells us where it starts, and the order is everything. They neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, and then their thinking became futile. They were in need, they prayed, God answered, they were blessed, and then they simply stopped thinking about God. God blesses us, we forget God, and the mind we cannot switch off keeps running without him in it. "The mind controlled by the sinful nature is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace" (Romans 8:6).
So we defeat it the way it began, by giving God our thoughts. When the hurt starts screaming and you are staging a small revenge film of everything you would like to say to the people who wounded you, that is the moment to say, Jesus, I need you. What do you want me to do? That is life and peace.
It is also why Scripture tells us to give thanks in all circumstances (1 Thessalonians 5:18). If you barely know God that verse sounds cruel. If you know him well you realise it is kindness, because the moment I least feel like praising him is the moment I most need him. Lord, none of this is what I wanted, but I still thank you that you are my King and you make a way. And then he becomes close. Everything changes when God enters your thoughts.
Paul promises that when we pray instead of worrying, the peace of God that transcends all understanding will guard our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:6-7). Notice that it transcends understanding. My mind carries me a certain distance and then I need God to carry me the rest of the way. Sometimes what arrives is not clarity. Sometimes it is simply lightness.
To follow Jesus is not to have a perfect thought life. I have never met anyone who has one. It is to keep welcoming him into your thinking, to keep handing back the one part of you nobody else ever sees. Do that, and peace comes. Confidence comes. Strategy and ideas come. You do not have to live in the Thoughtpocalypse.
God is after your thoughts. Give them to him.
