Fortify Your Mind

God is the deepest thinker in the universe. His thoughts are profound, poetic, purposeful, disciplined, structured, mathematical, full of love and passion. And He created the human mind. Though His thoughts are far above our thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9), He created us for the very purpose of elevating our thoughts to think like Him (e.g. 1 Corinthians 2:7-16).

“Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord …” (Isaiah 1:18). God created you to think and reason, to engage with the creation and the people around you, with the physical, with the spiritual, with your Creator. What a thrilling purpose and potential you have, possessing the gift of the human mind! God created you to experience moments when you can feel your mind being stretched, when you understand something new for the first time, when your heart wells with excitement, when your attitude changes and grows, when you yearn and ache as you awaken to eternal truths.

This is what makes mindlessness so tragic and wasteful. In modern society, more and more of us are thoughtlessly giving our minds over to distraction, fragmentation, immediate pleasures and sensations, emotions, vanity and stupidity. We are interacting with our phones and other devices hundreds of times a day, consuming memes, short-form videos and other content that distracts, destroys attention, lowers alertness, impairs memory, makes us shallow and manipulatable.

Your mind is suffering the effects of mental and spiritual weapons of mass distraction. You must fight back.

On your side is your Creator, who made you for a life of noticing, perceiving, concentrating, scrutinizing, remembering, analyzing, synthesizing, calculating, processing, digesting, understanding—a life of truth, beauty, love, peace and joy. On the attack, sometimes overt but often subtle, is a force that wants to waste your mind with shallowness, vanity, selfishness, emptiness, superficiality, clutter, fantasy, addiction and evil. This force is more intentional and powerful than you can imagine, and if he succeeds, you will squander your God-like capacity for thinking, for reasoning with God, for achieving your purpose and potential.

Don’t be ignorant of Satan’s devices (2 Corinthians 2:11). Few realize it, but he is “the god of this world” who has “blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them” (2 Corinthians 4:4). The gospel of Christ is glorious, full of light that God wants to shine into our lives. Satan works to blind you to that, to obscure it, to draw you away from it.

Throughout this epistle, the Apostle Paul conveys the glory of God’s mind and of the life He wants for you. He warns us that sinful thoughts constrict and limit us, and he tells us to fight.

One principle Paul gives is to avoid what draws us away from God. Read the plain admonition in 2 Corinthians 6:14-18—to come out of the filthiness of this world and build a clean mind and clean life—along with the beautiful promise that, if you do so, God will dwell with you in spirit and be a Father to you! “Having therefore these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God,” he writes (2 Corinthians 7:1). That is very practical instruction in fortifying your mind. Eliminate what sabotages you mentally and spiritually to free up space for God.

Here is more, a few chapters later: “For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:3-5). Yes, you are in a war for your mind—a war God wants you to win.

Satan has strongholds in your mind: imaginations, or reasonings; proud, elevated ideas and arguments contrary to the knowledge of God. He has filled society with them: lies about what is truly important, what constitutes success, how to attain happiness, what is right and what is wrong. He has drawn people into self-destructive sins and addictions and has dulled and handicapped our ability to use our God-given minds for godly purposes. You must recognize those influences to fight them.

How easily we harbor vain reasonings, wrong ideas, ungodly emotions—or let our minds go without being especially aware of what we are thinking. Do your thoughts ever get away from you? Do you ever have unhealthy, ungodly thoughts or destructive emotions you can’t shake?

We need to enlist God’s help to cast down those strongholds! He has mighty weapons to topple those wrong thoughts, fortresses and strongholds of sin in our thinking. God wants us to direct our every thought to obey Christ. We must be asking Him to empower us with weapons of mental discipline and then make use of them!

God commands us to come out of this empty, inattentive and distracted world (Revelation 18:4). Fight screen addiction and social media shallowness. Clean out the mental clutter to clear space for the riches of God. Fortify your mind against the ubiquitous devices of the god of this world. Protect it at all costs, and exercise it for good. Your Creator has so much glorious meaning and experience and joy to give you as you reason together with Him!