September 20, 2025

Minding Your Thoughts

A Biblical Overview of Obtaining and Maintaining a Biblical Thought Life

Job 20:2  Therefore do my thoughts cause me to answer, and for this I make haste.

Zophar just couldn’t wait to answer. His thoughts built up to the point that he was about to burst. This was one of Job’s friends, one of the three that came and sat with Job for a week without saying a word (Job 2:11-13). Such a comfort, right! Worse than their silence they began to speak, accusing Job of all types of hidden sin, pride, and hypocrisy.

Zophar could have benefited from having the book of Proverbs, for in it Solomon included: "Seest thou a man that is hasty in his words? there is more hope of a fool than of him.” (Proverbs 29:20)  A Zophar moment is when in haste our thoughts become so dominant that we must speak, even if we don’t know what we are talking about.

Once, just after my wife had our third child, I was sound asleep in our waterbed when about 2:00 in the morning I woke up to a horrible condition. My legs were soaking wet. My thinking was not clear, and I immediately began to wonder what type of disease I could have contracted that would cause severe night sweats, but only in my legs. I was like the person I read about the other day who said, “The only disease I don’t have is hypochondria.”  Anyway, I was drenched. When my thoughts settled down, I remembered that I was in a waterbed. So I jumped out of bed, found a flashlight and a magnifying glass and began to search for leaks in the bed. By now my wife was awake, the baby was crying, the house was in chaos, and my legs were still wet.

I found the holes. I just knew that my other two children had been playing in my bed and punctured those holes. So, my thoughts caused me to answer, in haste I woke up my other children, second grade and pre K. In a Zophar moment I immediately made a ruling that they were no longer allowed in our bedroom, for the rest of their lives they were banished. They simply looked at me through their sleepy eyes and seemed not to care.

I patched the holes and we all tried to go back to sleep. The next night it happened again. Another Zophar moment! Then the next afternoon, which was a Saturday, I was in the den doing something very spiritual (watching sports no doubt) when my wife came into the room chuckling. She had solved the waterbed mystery. She was using real diapers and when changing the baby, she would stab the safety pens into the bed. This way our daughter would not get stuck if she rolled over. Needless to say, the safety pens were going through the bed linen and punching the holes in the bed.

In my haste my thoughts caused me to answer, but I didn’t know what I was talking about. That was a Zophar moment.

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

Dr. William Howe