I want to examine one of the most critical areas of your life—your thought life. Our thought patterns are controlling us in ways we often do not even realize. Truly we must learn to think about what we think about.

In 2 Corinthians 10:5 Paul says we are to bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.

Honestly, we are in a daily battle as to who will control our thoughts. And when we practice this most important principle of bringing every individual thought into captivity—making certain our thoughts stay within biblical guidelines—it is absolutely transformational. Most of your problems begin with wrong thought patterns, and so often you are unaware of it because you don’t think about what you are thinking about.

Philippians 4:8 gives us some clear guidelines for our thoughts.

Finally, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things (Philippians 4:8).

The secret to controlling your thought life is to agree to these limits and to bring your thoughts into these parameters. These are guardrails for your thought life, and when you stay within those guardrails, you avoid lots of accidents, lots of problems.

If you’re driving on a mountain road that is curvy with steep drop offs, staying within those guardrails is the difference in life and death, right? In the same way, God has set boundaries for our thinking, and within those boundaries we have tremendous freedom. But when we choose to ignore the guardrails and drive wherever we wish, we lose our freedom because we become victims of our own wrong thought patterns. We find ourselves in a mental wreck of some kind, allowing wrong thoughts and thought patterns to steal our joy, ruin our peace, and cause us to say and do things that are not helpful.

This is one of the most important and critical spiritual disciplines in the Christian life, and not too many of us take it seriously, to our own detriment.