Twin City church of Christ Blog
“Oct 22, 2024 - We Live Like We Think”
Categories: 2024 Reading DevotionalsWe Live Like We Think
Reading: Ephesians 4:17-24
Paul grows increasingly practical in this part of the letter, emphasizing that what we believe about Jesus must begin to affect our behavior. “Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds”(Eph 4:17). The Gentiles were notorious for low moral standards (see 1 Cor 5:1 and Matt 5:47), so Paul wants these Gentiles to make some changes from their former way of life. But before they can learn to “no longer walk as the Gentiles do,” they must first see the mental world from which such actions spring: “the futility of their minds.”
He goes on: “They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity”(Eph 4:18-19). The descriptions here center around the mental world. Pointless, darkened, ignorant, callous thinking leads somewhere. When we give ourselves up to sensuality, it is no surprise when we live sensual lives. When we are “greedy to practice every kind of impurity,” it is no surprise when we end up practicing every kind of impurity. When our thoughts are dark, our lives inevitably become dark. We live like we think. So when Paul teaches Christians to “put off the old self” and “put on the new self,” he stresses that we need “to be renewed in the spirit of (our) minds”(Eph 4:22, 24, 23). Without new patterns of thinking, we will find long-term behavior change impossible. We live like we think.
What we dwell on, desire, and aspire to affects our behavior. We are misguided if we believe that our thoughts don’t matter as long as we don’t act on them. Serious sin emerges from a bubbling inner cauldron of seriously dark thoughts and emotions. The good news is that Jesus provides renewal for our thinking: new thoughts, wholesome and good, producing new emotions and leading to a completely fresh, holy way of life. When we ingest and delight in his words and goals, letting his word dwell in us richly, we can begin to live in higher ways.
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One Thing to Think About: What do I spend most of my time thinking about?
One Thing to Pray For: The renewal of my mind
