Surrender Your Thoughts Series

Surrender your thoughts

Next week is December 1st, the first Sunday of Advent and that means that today is the last Sunday in our Surrender Series. And over the past few weeks I’ve been mulling over where I would land for this last message.

Since Thanksgiving we’ve looked at various areas of our lives that we need to surrender to God. Our will, our speech, our anger and our design. And I understand that surrender isn’t always seen as a positive thing, that for some it means giving up or giving in. But as Christ followers it is essential for us to surrender our lives to the Christ we follow. And not just bits and pieces but all of our lives.

It’s easy to give some parts and hold on to other parts; “Lord you can have my Sunday mornings, but leave my Saturday nights alone.” “Lord you can have the Sunday part of my life, but I want to choose what I read, what I watch, what I listen to and how I spend my money.”

That attitude reminds me of the poem, Three Dollars Worth of God by Wilbur Rees

I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please.

Not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep,

but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk

or a snooze in the sunshine.

I don’t want enough of God to make me love a black man

or pick beets with a migrant.

I want ecstasy, not transformation.

I want warmth of the womb, not a new birth.

I want a pound of the Eternal in a paper sack.

I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please.

But when that is our philosophy it means that have really haven’t embraced Jesus as Lord, we’re simply using him as a fire escape from Hell.

So, I was wondering where we should land on this last message. I had thought about “Surrender your Appetites” and then thought that with my recent weight loss that people would think that I was pushing a particular agenda. And I know that appetites embrace so much more than simply food, they speak into our lives, but still I decided not to go there.

And then I thought about maybe I could speak about “Surrender Your Jerkiness”. And I would talk about how our negative actions reflect poorly on Christ and his Kingdom. But because I can be a bit of a Jerk sometimes, that seemed to be cutting a little close to home.

And as I pondered both of those options over, I realized that they shared common roots, that is that they started in the same place. And that is they began with a thought.

Regardless of whether we are talking about our appetites or our jerkiness it begins in our minds.

It was Stephen Covey who wrote, “Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.”

We often excuse our bad behaviour by saying, “Sorry, I guess I just wasn’t thinking.” But the reality is, while we may not have thought it through and realized the consequences of our actions or our words, we definitely were thinking.

If you were paying attention over the past few weeks, I’ve ended my messages by saying things like, “If we don’t control our speech, our speech will control us” or “If we don’t control our anger, our anger will control us.”

Let be upfront with this one, if we don’t control our thoughts, our thoughts will control us. Paul told the early church in 2 Corinthians 10:5 We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

We take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. That is an interesting concept. Taking our thoughts captive, so they will be obedient to Christ.

Most of us have had the experience of our thoughts wandering to places they shouldn’t go. Sometime hurtful places, or hateful places or lustful places, but places we’d rather they not take us. That’s what happens when we allow our thoughts to control us, not only do they wander to those places, they stay there.

You’ve heard me say before, we can’t keep the birds from flying over our heads, but we can stop them from building nests in our hair.

Let’s start with a couple of warnings from Jesus, it was during what we think of as the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus said, Matthew 5:21-23 “You have heard that our ancestors were told, ‘You must not murder. If you commit murder, you are subject to judgment.’ But I say, if you are even angry with someone, you are subject to judgment! If you call someone an idiot, you are in danger of being brought before the court. And if you curse someone, you are in danger of the fires of hell.”