Fix your thoughts

My brain never stops running. It’s always going, like the Energizer Bunny, a constant blur of thought jumping from one subject to the next without slowing down. And most of the time that’s the way I like it. I can be extremely productive when my brain is in high gear but only when I’m focused on something productive. If I get hung up on something non-productive, I can’t accomplish anything. So much of our lives revolves around our focus. We do what we focus on. We are what we think. That’s why it’s so important to have a healthy thought life because what you think is eventually what you will do.

This month I’m studying the Fruit of the Spirit as outlined in Galatians 5:22-23: “But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!” And in yesterday’s post about peace, I realized that there are two kinds of peace. Well–there may be more than two kinds, but two kinds stood out to me. Emotional peace and intellectual peace. Peace of heart and peace of mind. Both are gifts that God gives us when we accept Christ, but both are qualities that are easy to ignore, especially if you’re a control freak like me.

The old schoolhouse at Safe Haven Farm, Haven, KS

Today’s verse is Isaiah 26:3.

You will keep in perfect peace
    all who trust in you,
    all whose thoughts are fixed on you!

First thing this morning, I set out to discover if the same word for peace in Isaiah was used in Galatians, and after I spent a few minutes on that, I remembered that Isaiah is an Old Testament book that was written in Hebrew. Galatians was written in Greek. And since I know neither Hebrew nor Greek trying to figure out whether or not the word is the same is probably a bad idea (instead, I just got another cup of coffee). So I may be totally off with this, but I don’t think so.

Peace of mind, peace in our thoughts, is something that everyone has always searched for, even in the Old Testament. No, the Holy Spirit didn’t come to live inside us until the New Testament, after Jesus died for our sins, but intellectual peace was something that God gave to His followers from the very beginning. At least, it was an option they could choose. They could choose to take Him at His word and live the way He instructed.

It’s the same today. For grins, I looked up this verse in the Amplified Version just to get the particulars of the word meaning:

You will guard him and keep him in perfect and constant peace whose mind [both its inclination and its character] is stayed on You, because he commits himself to You, leans on You, and hopes confidently in You.

Check that out. The inclination and character of your mind matter. What is the inclination of your mind? What is the character of your mind? Those are tough questions that make me cringe because the inclination of my mind is to think about myself. The character of my mind is to think about myself. But my mind won’t be in “perfect and constant peace” until both the inclination and character of my mind is focused on God.

Wow. I don’t know about you, but I never thought of it that way.

Peace of mind eludes us so many times because our thoughts are fixed on things they shouldn’t be. We worry because we think about things that don’t matter. We’re upset or frightened or disturbed because we’re focusing on ourselves or on our circumstances, and we’re not supposed to focus on those things. We’re supposed to focus on God and commit ourselves to Him and lean on him and hope confidently in Him.

Peace is a gift. God has given peace to every one of His followers, and it’s our choice to use it. Part of that peace is peace of mind, tranquility of our thoughts. God has given us the power to choose what we think about, and if we fix our thoughts on Him and what He’s doing and who He is, peace will follow. Why? Because God is awesome. God made the universe. God made the atom. God invented time. God created the concept of spring, summer, autumn, winter. God made everything we see. He’s all-powerful. He’s all-knowing. He’s everywhere. And He’s available to us to help us. He not only cares about what goes on in our everyday lives, but He wants to help us get through it and reach out to others who don’t know Him yet. And if you think about it that way, what on earth in our lives is so big that we have to worry about it?

God has given us peace. We just have to use it. And the first step to using it is thinking about it. So fix your thoughts on who God is today. Remind yourself exactly who your heavenly Father is, and then look at your circumstances. And I bet your perspective might change a little.