Think About
Such Things

Devotional

Furnishing Your Mind

Yesterday Paul promised that the peace of God would guard our minds, and today he tells us our part in the arrangement.

You can’t control every thought that arrives, and you’ve enormous control over which ones you feed. The word Paul uses for think about means to reckon or dwell on, describing sustained attention rather than a passing idea. He isn’t talking about the thought that shows up uninvited. He’s talking about the one you decide to keep.

Then he gives eight categories, and it’s worth reading them slowly rather than as a blur.

True, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, praiseworthy. Notice the list is entirely positive. Paul doesn’t tell us what to avoid, which is what we usually expect from a passage about thought life. He tells us what to pursue, because a mind isn’t a room you can empty. It’s a room you furnish.

That reframes the whole struggle. Most attempts at mental discipline fail because they’re subtraction only, and telling yourself to stop thinking about something has never once worked. Paul says to crowd it out with something better.

Then verse 9 keeps the whole thing from becoming an interior exercise. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me, put it into practice.

Thinking rightly is where it starts, but it isn’t where it ends. Paul assumes that a mind furnished with true things will produce a life that does true things, and if that connection isn’t happening, then the thinking has become a hobby.

Look at the two promises in these verses, because they’re slightly different and both matter. Yesterday we were given the peace of God. Today we’re given the God of peace. One is a gift He sends, and the other is His actual presence.

You won’t think your way into peace, and you won’t act your way into it either. But a mind aimed at what’s true and a life that practices it’s where the God of peace tends to be found.