October 7, 2025

Minding Your Thoughts

A Biblical Overview of Obtaining and Maintaining a Biblical Thought Life

Isaiah 55:7 Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the LORD, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.

It is possible to forsake thoughts or God would not invite the unrighteous man to do so. God would never command or even invite a person to do something that was impossible to do. You can control your thoughts. In fact, I would go as far as to say that if you don’t control your thoughts, your thoughts will control you.

Thoughts of unrighteousness are like a cancer that spreads throughout the body causing sickness and sometimes death. Like a cancerous tumor, thoughts of unrighteousness must be eliminated. In cancer there are several ways this is done, surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, or pharmaceuticals. Likewise, there are ways to eliminate wrong thoughts.

Replace them with proper, holy, and right thoughts. Or sing them out with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Chase them out through submitting yourself to preaching, attend as many services of your church as possible, purchase some preaching CD’s and listen to them in your car, or think of messages you have heard and try to remember the key points. Cause wrong thoughts to be chased away through the light of the Scripture by reading it, memorizing it, and discussing it with others. And certainly, you can pray wrong thoughts away by simply praising the Lord for all of His numerous blessings toward you.

There are ample ways to forsake thoughts of unrighteousness, but one thing is in common with all who do so. They desire to do so. By harboring, enjoying, entertaining, and fostering wrong thoughts, unrighteousness comes. Before a person falls into unrighteousness, that person has been thinking unrighteous thoughts for a long time. Many preachers have said something like the following: “When a person falls, they fall into the area of their thinking.”  Just as a tree will fall the direction that it is leaning, so too will people fall in the direction that they are thinking.

The above is a wonderful invitation that is every bit as practical today as it was when Isaiah spoke it. Take heed and beware of the thoughts of unrighteousness.

May the Lord bless and be pleased with your thought life today.

Dr. William Howe