Finding Joy in Trial: 5 Helpful StepsSample

Step Four: Guard Your Heart—Take Every Thought Captive.

What is the heart? And how do we guard it anyway? Paul David Tripp puts it like this: “The heart is the causal core of your personhood.” Charles Spurgeon said it this way: “The heart is the rudder of the soul, and till the Lord take it in hand we steer in a false and foul way.” Stuart Scott provides the following helpful explanation: “The heart can be basically described as man’s control center for living. It involves his thoughts, intentions, belief, desires, and attitudes. Because all these things take place in the mind, we can say that the heart could be thought of as the mind. What a man truly thinks and believes about something is the heart of the matter.” So we guard our heart by guarding our mind, by taking every thought captive to Christ. By comparing every thought to Scripture and giving the boot to any thought that does not measure up.

Think about what you are thinking about during the day. Do your thoughts line up with the Word of God? If you find that they do not, then you must discard them, reject them, dismiss them, and replace them with truth. We must choose not to listen to any thought that does not line up with the Word of God. We must choose not to listen to the enemy throwing things at us from all sides, day after day, minute by minute, tossing up muck at us until something sticks. We must choose not to believe the obsessive thoughts that continue to cycle through our mind, fixating on one thing and then on another. We must choose not to believe the world when it tells us that if God loved us, and if we were worth anything at all, we would be succeeding and everything would be coming up roses. Our mind is so prone to wander to dark places. We must keep it on course. We must take these thoughts captive and instead meditate on the Word of God, feeding our heart and our mind and our soul with truth.

Choose a passage of Scripture or a Bible verse to come against the wrong thinking that you are battling in your own heart day to day. The passage does not need to be long. Even small portions of Scripture can edify. Just make sure it speaks directly to the issue at hand and takes this wrong thinking captive to truth.

· Step One: Rejoice in the Lord—Always, Always, Always.

· Step Two: Entrust Your Trial—Give it All to Him with Thanksgiving.

· Step Three: Think on Truth—Believe God’s Word and Trust His Promises.

· Step Four: Guard Your Heart—Take Every Thought Captive.