Their Thinking Became Futile
Over the years of managing people I have learned never to say, "Can I have a meeting with you?" and leave it there, because I know exactly where that person's mind will travel in the meantime. Nobody thinks, they must be about to give me a raise. Everybody thinks, they have found me out, I am in trouble, something is wrong. Our thoughts do not naturally travel in a positive direction.
I think the greatest diseases of our generation are not diseases of the body but of the mind. Anxiety, depression, despair, melancholy. What I have come to call the Thoughtpocalypse is what happens when our thinking starts to rehearse the end of the world. The pay is short one fortnight and we decide we are heading for bankruptcy. One setback at work and we conclude we will never advance again. A relationship ends and we are certain we will never know love. The event is small and the story we build on it is enormous.
Romans 1 tells us where this comes from. Paul says that since the creation of the world God's eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen in what he has made. We live in a beautiful world. Sunrise and sunset, a river running through the middle of our city, laughter, parks, lights. Everywhere we turn we are invited into wonder and into worship. Then comes verse 21: "For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened."
Their thinking became futile. Notice the order. They stopped thinking about God, and then their thinking went dark. Futility was not the starting point, it was the consequence. The reverse is just as true. When God is absent from our thoughts, our thoughts are empty and foolish. When God is present in them, our thoughts are full, purposeful and wise. I am convinced the greatest waste of time in the world is not doom scrolling. It is doomsday forecasting, sitting down and rehearsing the collapse of your own life.
That is not the life Jesus described. He said he came that we might have life and have it in all its fullness (John 10:10). That does not sound like a mind under siege. In Jeremiah 29:11 God tells us the actual content of his thinking towards us: thoughts of peace and not of evil, thoughts to give us a future and a hope. God's thoughts towards you calm you and make you feel secure. They awaken your imagination rather than your nightmares. And that is not only how God thinks about you, it is how he designed you to think.
For weeks and months of my life I found myself saying one sentence over and over. God is after my thoughts. Not just my Sundays or my offering. My thoughts. Because as we bring God into our thinking, we are lifted out of futility and into life.
I have never once left a genuine moment of worship more discouraged than when I walked in. If your heart is open at all, worship moves you towards hope every single time. Which tells you that worship is not really the songs, or the moment we pray before we eat. Worship is a mind centred on Christ. It is bringing God into my waking and my reflecting, refusing to live whole hours of a day as though he has no interest in them. Worship is the ultimate use of the mind, because it aligns the mind to work the way God designed it to work.
Think of it like a car. Some of us have driven what we used to call a dunga. You sit behind the wheel before turning the key and pray the prayer of Samson: Lord, just one more time. Just get me to the office. It finally starts with a bang the neighbours mistake for gunfire, and you bunny hop down the driveway plotting a route with no traffic lights, because you cannot risk stopping. Then there is the other kind of car. Something German, perhaps. You put your hand on the handle and the doors unlock, you sit down, and the whole world and all its noise is sealed outside. That car makes you want to take the long way just to enjoy it.
Both cars are made of much the same stuff. The only real difference is that the new one works the way the manufacturer designed it to work. Our minds were created by God not for death but for life, not for emptiness but for purpose, not for futility but for hope. A mind whose thoughts are centred on God is an engine tuned to perfection.
There is power in your thoughts, which is exactly why there is a battle for them. God is after your thoughts, and so is the enemy. The devil is your accuser, the one "who accuses them before our God day and night" (Revelation 12:10), and what an accuser does is exploit your past. He cannot determine your future, so he works on your memories, dragging up setback, failure and pain to convince you there is no tomorrow. But Jesus is your intercessor. He "always lives to intercede for them" (Hebrews 7:25). An intercessor stands in the gap between present reality and future potential, and tells you that it does not matter what you are in right now, keep going, because there is something on the other side.
Which gives you a simple test. You can discern the source of a thought by where it is leading you. If the thought says this is the end, it did not come from God. If it says my life is over, it did not come from God. But if it says even in this God will use my life, or Jesus has taken me through every storm so far, that one has his fingerprints on it. This is what Paul means by taking every thought captive and making it obedient to Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5). My wife Gillian once described our thoughts as errant children skittering off in every direction. Jesus came to help us gather them up.
The most highlighted passage in the Bible app, across more than a billion downloads, is Philippians 4:6 to 7, on not being anxious about anything but presenting every request to God so that his peace will guard your heart and your mind. So if you thought your anxiety made you unusual, it turns out there is nothing unique about you at all. The tragedy is that people stop highlighting at verse 7. Verse 8 says, "whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things." Verses 6 and 7 are how you get out of the Thoughtpocalypse. Verse 8 is the guardrail that stops you driving off the edge again.
This is why I am so strongly against the idea that when you feel a thought or an emotion you should sit in it, meditate on it and let it define who you are. A mind that is intentional lifts itself to function the way God intended. The moment you discern anxiety, pray. Bring God in. Pray until it lifts. Then deliberately ask, where is something true here, something noble, something praiseworthy? You might have sickness in your body and an empty bank account and still have people who love you.
None of this means you will wake up tomorrow and get every thought right. It is hard enough for me to get to the gym five days in a row. But Colossians 3:2 tells us to set our minds on things above, and in the Greek "set your mind" is a single word meaning to direct your mind. We do not think by chance. We think on purpose.
And Romans 12:2 tells us where that leads. "Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is, his good, pleasing and perfect will." Read that order carefully, because it matters. It is as God changes the way I think that my eyes are opened to see his will. Not before. The renewed mind is how you come to see the plan.
You do not have to live in the Thoughtpocalypse. Bring God into your thinking today, in the small moments and the ordinary hours, and see what he does with a mind that finally runs the way it was built to run.
