How To Overcome and Control Yourself?

Take Captive Every Thought 

Raising children is tough work. What makes it so difficult? Children always test the limits of rule and order. Whatever boundaries we set for them, they always want to test and retest the limits of our patience. Some friends had a rule that their daughter could not go to PG-13 movies until she was thirteen. All her friends could go when they were ten and eleven. Every weekend she would ask her parents if she could go to this or that movie, always rated PG-13. She always tested the limits. Our thoughts are like this girl. Every week they ask us to let them cross the boundaries of rule and order we have established. Our thoughts always test the limits.


It takes discipline and effort in our thought lives to keep our Mind Y in gear and our Mind X disengaged. How do we do that? “Take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). No thought should be allowed to have its own way. Like the daughter who wants to test her parents, our thoughts want to have their own way, but we must take each and every one of them captive. Why? Because, in the words with which Solomon concluded the book of Ecclesiastes, “For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing [our secret thought life], whether it is good or evil” (Ecclesiastes 12:14). When Christ is in control of our lives, the Holy Spirit is in power. When we let the old man—the sinful nature—be in control, then the Spirit is quenched. The solution is to bring every thought captive; and if we find we have sinned, confess it, and ask Christ to again take control. That’s the essence of living by the power of the Holy Spirit.






Morley, Patrick (2011-09-27). The Man in the Mirror: Solving the 24 Problems Men Face (Kindle Locations 4915-4921). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.