The Habit of Holy Thought

Thinking stirs feeling, and feeling triggers action (Tozer, Born after Midnight).

The relationship between our thoughts and our actions is undeniable. A lot if not all of our actions are first conceived as thoughts. Not only do our thoughts lead to actions, but our thoughts “predict what we become”, in the words of Tozer. Your thought life deeply influences who you become whether or not you realize it. Pastor and author John Mark Comer writes: “The mind is the portal to the soul, and what you fill your mind with will shape the trajectory of your character” (Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry).

Why is this important? The fact that our thoughts influence who we become is important because, as Christians, we are trying to become someone, namely the person God has made us to be in Christ. When we read Paul write, “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling”, we think about our actions (Phil. 2:12), but in this write-up I would like to argue that we must also be aware of our thoughts when working out our salvation.

Although the New Testament authors might not explicitly write that our thoughts influence who we become, they definitely hinted to that idea by the importance they placed on our thoughts and what we fill our minds with. Paul especially places a huge emphasis on our thoughts because of the impact it has on our actions and who we become. He tells us in many places about how important it is to maintain what Tozer would call a “habit of holy thought”. Below are a few of those passages:

• “...be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” - Romans 12:2

• “We have the mind of Christ” - 1 Cor. 2:16

• “...take every thought captive to obey Christ” - 2 Cor. 10:5

• “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus” - Phil. 2:5

• “Whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” - Phil. 4:8.

• “Set your mind on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” - Col. 3:2

Of course Jesus was no stranger to this idea of the formative power of our thoughts. “For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person” (Matt. 15:19-20). Here, Jesus ties our thoughts to our identity. Our evil thoughts defile us.

Elsewhere, in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, Jesus traces actions back to their antecedent thoughts for sin such as anger and lust (Matt. 5:22, 28). Theologian Vincent Cheung writes, “What appears to be sins committed in the body are in fact first conceived in the mind; therefore, although not all sins of the mind result in expression in the body, all sins in the body imply prior sins of the mind” (Cheung, Systematic Theology).

We can now conclude that our thoughts are connected to our actions and who we are becoming.

Thoughts and Worship

According to an article written by Mission.org in 2017, the National Science Foundation claims that the average person has about 12 000 to 60 000 thoughts per day. 80% of those thoughts are negative thoughts. In combination with the aforementioned biblical evidence about the formative nature of our thoughts, this is insight we cannot overlook.

“Thinking stirs feeling, and feeling triggers action”. Can we all agree that this is often true? A silly example: I think about shawarma at Pita Boss - the flavours, the joys of feasting on it and the memories that will be made. Now, I feel like eating Pita Boss shawarma. Finally, I commit to acquiring Pita Boss shawarma.

This silly, inconsequential example archetypes many spiritual thought realities: lustful thoughts that lead us deeper into sexual immorality or contempt that leads us to anger manifested in physical violence.

We must place a larger emphasis on our thoughts. We do not take it seriously enough because of its private and secret nature. “It doesn’t really hurt anyone” is perhaps what many of us believe subconsciously. However, if we ask ourselves the question, "Who am I becoming?", then this matters, and as Christians, we should be asking ourselves this question. The formative nature of our thoughts is biblical wisdom about our human nature that we cannot ignore.

The Renewal of Our Minds

We should be pleased and thankful to know that God does not leave us powerless to our negative and/or evil thoughts. The fear of being enslaved to those thoughts can be overcome through Jesus Christ.

I have listed several passages above on the importance of the “habit of holy thought”, but how does this look practically? Until the end of this blog post, we will begin to dig into this passage: “When one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:16-18).

What does this text tell me? It tells me that when I behold the glory of Christ, I can be transformed into his image from “one degree of glory to another”. What an anthem of hope this is! God is greater than our thoughts and when we look to Him he will transform us.

Indeed, there are still some ends to tie together. Until this point, I have not answered (1) What is the glory of the Lord, (2) How does one behold the glory of the Lord and (3) How does this renew our minds. So it is to these questions that I now turn.

What is the glory of the Lord

Jesus Christ is the complete revelation of the glory of the Lord. “For in [Jesus] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Col. 1:19). “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3). “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

Jesus is the fullness of God made manifest among us and because he is God, the glory of God is revealed in him. In the Old Testament, the shekinah or glory of God, was the visible manifestation of the invisible God. God’s presence was made manifest in a bright cloud like in his encounter with Moses on Mount Sinai. For us, Jesus is the presence of God made manifest in human flesh! Jesus Christ is the glory of God.

How does one behold the glory of the Lord

In The Pursuit of God, Tozer gives his readers a commentary on John 3:14: “Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life”. Tozer writes:

Our plain man in reading this would make an important discovery. He would notice that “look” and “believe” were synonymous terms. “Looking” on the Old Testament serpent is identical with “believing” on the New Testament Christ; that is, the looking and believing are the same thing. And he would understand that while Israel looked with their external eyes, believing is done with the heart. I think he would conclude that faith is the gaze of a soul upon a saving God” (Tozer, The Pursuit of God).

I think this connection is relevant to the 2 Corinthians passage quoted earlier. We must "turn to the Lord" and "behold his glory" (2 Cor. 3:16, 18). Looking or beholding is not meant in a physical sense, but a spiritual one - the “gaze of a soul” as Tozer would say. As we look to the Word of God which reveals to us who Jesus is, we gaze upon Christ himself. “The Word was God” (John 1:1). The Bible is the Word of God. It reveals to us all we need to know about God and his character. Although the Bible is not God (because the Bible is not the Word in the same way Jesus Christ is the Word), what the Bible says about Jesus gives us sufficient knowledge about him for us to claim that we can know him. Paul writes, “All Scripture is breathed out by God” (2 Tim. 3:16) and Jesus says that the Bible is all about him (Luke 24:27, 44). Therefore, when we look to the Bible and what it says about God, we are beholding the glory of the Lord. Reading the Scriptures with the illumination of the Holy Spirit is gazing with our souls upon God. It is looking to and beholding Christ - the glory of God.

How does beholding God’s glory renew our minds

What does the Psalmist mean when he says, “I have stored up your word in my heart that I might not sin against you” (Ps. 119:11)? What does storing up God’s Word in our hearts mean and how does it aid in helping us to not sin against him?

The storing up of God’s Word in our hearts can mean nothing else but memorizing it. The memorization of Scripture is what the Psalmist is encouraging us to do. Yes, reading Scripture is a good practice, even a mandatory one, but the memorization of it - the storing up of Scripture in our heart - will renew our minds more deeply so that we can live wholly for God and be dead to sin.

Jesus, who had just been baptized, was sent into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit to be tempted. There, he battled the devil with the Word of God. Jesus stored up God’s Word in his heart and did not sin.

To memorize something you must put in the effort of becoming familiar with it and understanding it. Personally, I’m a forgetful person and if I do not spend time either writing things down or thinking about them, I will most certainly forget it.

Forgetfulness is no stranger to our fallen humanity. The Old Testament gives us many examples of God having to remind his people of what he has done for them because they keep forgetting. For example, the freeing of his people from Israel and the splitting of the Red Sea was a major act of salvation in the lives of his people that he wanted them to remember. God had to install a feast called Passover in order to remind his people periodically so they would not forget what he had done. Passover was an opportunity to meditate on their salvation.

Let us be reminded that we are forgetful people too. We are no different from those forgetful ancient Israelites. Memorization takes effort. We are working against the natural tendency to forget. We have to deliberately set aside time with the Bible open in front of us and think about it. Sloppy, half-hearted, distracted skim reading will not do.

But the work you put in to memorizing Scripture is worth it! It is worth the cost! John Piper writes:

The joy-producing effects of memorizing Scripture and having it in my head and heart are incalculable. The world and its God-ignoring, all-embracing secularism is pervasive. It invades my mind every day. What hope is there to have a mind filled with Christ except to have a mind filled with his Word? I know of no alternative (Piper, When I Don't Desire God).

As you are hopefully starting to see, even the process itself of memorization gives no room for us to sin. We are constantly thinking over the Word and what it says. We are asking questions. We are reading it repeatedly. We are reciting it. We are praying through it. And when we get up and leave our Bibles, it remains in us. His Word abides in us deeply. “Thinking stirs feeling and feeling triggers action”. Instead of thinking negative and/or sinful thoughts, we are thinking about God, who he is, what he’s done and what he will do. By God’s grace and Holy Spirit, our "habit of holy thought" will eventually stir us unto surrender and obedience and continue to sanctify our hearts.

Practice #8

There are tons of resources out there giving you a plethora of helpful techniques in memorizing Scripture. I will not be talking about them here, however, I found An Approach to Extended Memorization by Dr. Andrew Davis to be very helpful (There is a free PDF somewhere on the Internet if you google it).

There are more benefits to memorizing Scripture than I have mentioned here, but may our intentions always be godly when it comes to memorizing the Bible. Let’s ask ourselves, "Why am I doing this?" before we begin our memorization journey. I hope that what I have written above frames for us a biblical motivation for memorizing Scripture: conformity to Christ’s mind and the development of a “habit of holy thought” in order that we may not sin against God.

I will leave you with a challenge to memorize Scripture from John Piper:

Let me be very practical and challenge you to do something you perhaps have never done. If you are not a memorizer at all, shift up to memorizing a Bible verse a week. If you only memorize single verses, shift up to memorizing some paragraphs or chapters (like Psalm 1 or Psalm 23 or Romans 8). And if you have ventured to memorize chapters, shift up to memorize a whole book or part of a book. Few things have a greater effect on the way we see God and the world than to memorize extended portions of Scripture (Piper, When I Don’t Desire God).