bible and theology on Taking Thoughts Captive

One of my continual battles is the one that happens in my own heart and mind. I continue to discover and fight negative patterns of thought and emotion that are shaped less by Jesus and more by the wo...

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.

When we have the same thought again, the line of the original thought is deepened, causing what's called a memory trace. With each repetition the trace goes deeper and deeper, forming and embeddin...

The battle for your life is fought and won in your mind. God wants you to take control of your mind, in Jesus' name, through the power of His Holy Spirit. You can think your way into changing your...

The mind in all its intricate beauty can be a place of great anguish. Thoughts can both grip us for the good and plague us for that which is not. In Dickens’ Christmas novella, The Chimes, he describe...

The Clinical psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi describes how our minds, without stimuli, tends to quickly turn towards negative thoughts, our dissatisfaction. Contrary to what we tend to assume, ...

The insight that we can exercise some control over our thoughts and feelings is deep in Christianity.

The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance.

Locked into captivity by an airplane seat, a kindly disposition of keeping a friend company, or a telephone connection, we become ex officio confessors to those with troubled consciences and traces, o...

We get into captivity because of our foolishness and we are more foolish that we want to admit.

My mind withdrew its thoughts from experience, extracting itself from the contradictory throng of sensuous images, that it might find out what that light was wherein it was bathed... And thus, with th...

A man without decision of character can never be said to belong to himself…. He belongs to whatever can make capture of him.

There is in man a mint always at work: his mind coining evil thoughts, his heart, evil desires and carnal emotion; and his memory is the closet and storehouse wherein they are kept.

“One who cannot cast away a treasure at need is in fetters.”

Those who can’t change their minds can’t change anything.

Hence contemplation does not simply “find” a clear idea of God and confine Him within the limits of that idea, and hold Him there as a prisoner to Whom it can always return. On the contrary, contempla...

O God, too often we turn to You when we have no other place to go, but your arms are always open wide. Forgive us for using you as our last resort when you ought to be our first. We confess that you h...

Memory is the treasure house of the mind wherein the monuments thereof are kept and preserved.

No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof. If no o...

God's Word must be so strongly fixed in our minds that it becomes the dominant influence in our thoughts, our attitudes, and our actions. One of the most effective ways of influencing our minds is...

How precious are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If we would count them, they are more than the sand. Search us, O God, and know our hearts. Try us, and know our thoughts....

A young woman confessed to an older man that she had a problem saying too much about people. He told her to go buy a bird and pluck out its feathers one by one as penance for her sin. When she returne...

If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.

Psychologists tell us that one of the most difficult conditions a person can be forced to bear is light deprivation. Darkness, in fact, is often used in military captivity or penal institutions to bre...

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.

The way to a person’s heart is to capture their imagination (mind), move their emotions (affections), and challenge their actions (will).

Gracious and loving God, you know the deep inner patterns of my life that keep me from being totally yours. You know the misformed structures of my being that hold me in bondage to something less than...

My body continually takes me into place . It is at once agent and vehicle, articulator and witness of being-in-place.

When we are regularly shamed away from thoughts that venture near spirituality and transcendence, we learn to avoid it altogether, even in our thoughts. We develop a resistance to thoughts that would ...

We are so accustomed to relying upon words to manage and control others. If we are silent, who will take control? God will take control, but we will never let him take control until we trust him. Sile...