“You are what you think, even more than you think?”
(anonymous)

What do you spend your time thinking about? It is the only true privacy we have anymore. With social media, the entertainment industry, and intense marketing strategies, we can become so distracted that we forget to think about our relationship to our Lord Jesus Christ and doing His will. We need to take the time to analyze our thought life.

Rev. Steven J. Cole quoted Mark Twain in an article posted on bible.org:

“What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those other things, are his history.” (Reader’s Digest [1/93], p. 155).

I was having lunch with a man who was the comptroller of a large paper mill. He had recently received Christ Jesus as his savior following some poor choices and the breakup of his marriage. We were discussing the will of God in our lives. I asked him how many willful decisions he had made that morning. He thought long and hard. “None” was his answer. Knowing his responsible position in the company, I was surprised. He said circumstances determined the decisions he made, not willful decisions.

This should not be true of those of us who are born of God and have a relationship with Him. Often, I find myself distracted from considering the most important subject in my life, the will of God. Is this true with you?

I am not referring to meditating. An internet post distinguishes between thinking and meditating:

Thinking and meditating are fundamentally different cognitive processes, with thinking being an active engagement with thoughts, while meditating involves observing thoughts without attachment. (see)

While meditating can be spiritually uplifting, it does not mean engaging the will. Thinking is gathering information to decide to act. Interestingly, the English terms meditate and meditation occur only twenty-one times in the NASB and then only in the Old Testament. Never in the New Testament.

Why is this? There is not enough room in this blog for a thorough study of the subject of thinking biblically. However, Paul gives us a clue as to a reason why thinking rather than meditating occurs in the New Testament:

For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. (1 Cor 2:11ff)

We need to constantly be engaged in Holy Spirit-controlled thinking. Then we will be able to discern the will of God.