Obedience to Christ is the easy way. Take my yoke...
What is thinking? It is the activity of searching out what must be true, or cannot be true, in the light of the given facts or assumptions.
If we allow everything access to our mind, we are simply asking to be kept in a state of mental turmoil or bondage. For nothing enters the mind without having an effect for good or evil.
Your mind will really talk to you when you begin to deny fulfillment to your desires, and you will find how subtle and shameless it is.
The prospering of God’s cause on earth depends upon his people thinking well.
When the will is enslaved to a desire, it will in turn enslave the mind.
In a world apart from God, the power of denial is absolutely essential if life is to proceed. The will or spirit cannot-psychologically cannot-sustain itself for any length of time in the face of what it clearly acknowledges to be the case. Therefore it must deny and evade and delude itself.
Even professing Christians, by and large, devote to their spiritual growth and well-being a tiny fraction of the time they devote to their body, and it is even tinier fraction if we include what they worry about.
Clinical depression is an extreme form of a ‘bad mood.’
If we are to use our minds rightly, we must live in an attitude of constant openness and learning.
Spiritual formation cannot, in the nature of the case, be a ‘private’ thing, because it is a matter of whole-life transformation. You need to seek out others in your community who are pursuing the renovation of the heart.
The ultimate freedom we have as human beings is the power to select what we will allow or require our minds to dwell upon.
Almost everything worth doing in human life is very difficult in its early stages and the good we are aiming at is never available at first, to strengthen us when we seem to need it most.
When we think of “taking Christ into the workplace” or “keeping Christ in the home,” we are making our faith into a set of special acts. The “specialness” of such acts just underscores the point – that being a Christian, being Christ’s isn’t thought of as a normal part of life.
Many Christians were suddenly prepared to look at traditional methods of spiritual formation. They could not help but see that spiritual growth and vitality stem from what we actually do with our lives, from the habits we form, and from the character that results.
Of course, we do the righteous deed because of our redemption, not for our redemption.
Discipline, strictly speaking, is activity carried on to prepare us indirectly for some activity other than itself. We do not practice the piano to practice the piano well, but to play it well.
Paul followed Jesus by living as He lived. And how did he do that? Through activities and ways of living that would train his whole personality to depend upon the risen Christ as Christ trained Himself to depend upon the Father.
Why doesn’t God just force us to do the things he knows to be right? It is because that would lose precisely that which he has intended in our creation: freely chosen character.
When the light comes into a room, we do not have to say, “Now what are we going to do about the darkness?” It’s gone!