Access Point

Sunday, April 25, 2010


I heard a story recently about thieves who broke into the same house twice. The troubled homeowner asked the police why thieves would return to her house for a second robbery. The officer told her the robbers checked to see if their access point was still open. It was, so they entered for a second time. He warned her, “The thieves will come back as long as the access point is open.”

Negative thoughts are like those thieves. As long as we leave open the access point in our mind, they’ll keep coming. We can close off the access point by filling our mind with positive thoughts so there is no room for negativity.

Research indicates that an individual thinks approximately 50,000 thoughts per day. Since we tend to recycle our thoughts by repeating the same ones we had yesterday and the day before, we need to make sure we’re filling our minds with positive thoughts. Pessimistic, downbeat, or gloomy thoughts rob us of our joy and can affect our mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health.

How often in a day do we say aloud or silently these kinds of off-putting comments:

I am just hopeless.
It is a terrible day.
I feel awful.
I will never get this job done.
Nothing ever works out right.
I’ve always been this way. I’ll never change.
I feel miserable.
Bad things always happen to me.
Why can’t I ever catch a break!
Business is terrible.
Woe is me!

These thoughts make us feel sad, anxious, guilty, depressed, inferior, and angry. They also move us farther away from right living in Christ.
Every thought we have either moves us closer to God or farther away. Negative thoughts move us away from a close relationship with God. In Matthew 16:23 Jesus said, “You are a stumbling block to me. You think as men think, not as God thinks.” Author and pastor, A.W. Tozer said, “We have all found that God will not dwell in spiteful and proud and selfish thoughts. He treasures our pure and loving thoughts, our meek and charitable and kindly thoughts. They are the thoughts like His own!”

In 2 Corinthians 10:5 Paul tells us to “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” The Message version of this verse says that we have “powerful God tools” available to help us tear down barriers against God’s truth. Negative thoughts are barriers against God’s truth. The good news is that we can replace negative thoughts with positive ones, but it takes mental discipline. Every time a negative thought tries to enter the access point of our brain, we must switch it. We must use “powerful God tools” in order to think like God thinks and close off the access point to negative thoughts.

2 comments:

Craig L. Adams said...

I'm not very good at ridding myself of negative thinking. Especially right now. Anger and rage arise from deep hurt. All I know to do is plant positive thoughts, get myself into honest reading of Scripture and prayer. Trying to stop the anger is impossible and frustrating and further guilt-producing. I can only hope that prayer and meditation on the message of Christ can bring some measure of hope and healing.

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