Self-talk and Choices

Hi, this is Bernie Dake.

Welcome to the Salvation Army's Words of Life. Welcome back to Words of Life. It is my distinct privilege to welcome Cheryl Gillum. Hey Bernie, how are you? I'm great. It's good to be back with our listeners.

We hope you're having a great day. This episode is October 31st. Do you celebrate Halloween, Cheryl? Well, I don't celebrate Halloween in the fact of, you know, the... You're not dressing up in scary costumes? No, not dressing up in scary costumes, but I do like to give out candy and I like to be what I call a light in the night. Yeah. That's a very cool thing.

Because in American society, of course, there's all kinds of kids knocking on doors and ringing doorbells, looking for candy, and they're often dressing up in scary outfits. So I like the way that you talk about lighting the night. That's a good thing. Yeah. I think it was back in the late 1990s that I was introduced to this concept of light the night.

And instead of just, you know, shutting my light off and closing my door and being kind of like a Scrooge, you know, during Halloween, really using it as an opportunity to evangelize and spread the light of Christ and, yeah, be a happy Christian. This will be a series for another series. Yeah. It's cool.

There you go. Well, we're currently talking about pathways with Major Mike Harris and discussing our thought life as Christians. And today we discuss self-talk and choices.

And this topic certainly ties into our mental health in a powerful way. What do we say about ourselves to ourselves? That's an interesting question because for me, I just think that I said it before, but I have a constant internal dialogue going on. And sometimes even with myself, I can be mean. Like, you should have done that.

Why didn't you do this? And I'm recounting what just happened and wondering if I would have, could have, should have, sort of thing. I think in our thought life, we can partner with lies that we've told ourselves. We might have said something and we all do it.

It's not like there's anyone that hasn't done it, but you say things and then all of a sudden it becomes a record in your head that you're saying over and over and over, a recording that you're saying over and over and over again. And then you begin to partner with it. And that becomes your narrative of your life. And so it's important that we recognize that we don't have to stay there.

As Mike talked about in the very first episode of Taking Every Thought Captive, we can do that and then we can choose to speak a new narrative in our heads. I don't want to take this out of context, but a life verse for me is found in Proverbs 27, 17. As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. And our thought life and the way that we kind of address things as they come, it's like a small victory when you are able to sharpen the sword per se to steal a line from Stephen Covey. But what happens when that sharpening is going on is like a sword being sharpened or a sharp edge, there's grinding and there's sparks and there's dirt and smoke and all of the things. And our thought life in a very similar way, if you can tackle or arrest some of those things like we read in Corinthians, then you can also, despite the fact that there might be some smoke or sparks, you'll be better for it because the next time it'll be even easier to tackle that and then move forward, not letting the evil one have a foothold. Yeah.

So we hope that you've been enjoying this series. These are important topics that we're talking about, especially the world we're living in right now. It's important to seek out what God's word says about who we are. And so remind yourself today that you are a child of God and that you can do all things through Christ. Amen.

Amen. Hello again, this is Major Mike Harris with another edition of our Pathways session. We'll be looking at the importance of thought life. And today we're looking at how the mind can be used to protect the heart. We've mentioned in the last session that the heart and the mind are very easily intertwined.

So this is basically whether the mind can be used to protect the heart. And in Romans chapter 12, verses one and two, Paul says, therefore I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship.

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is, his good, pleasing and perfect will. This is quite an interesting thing that people would have read at that time, this idea that Paul urges us to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice. And of course, you recognize that in Romans, Christ had already died. His death was seen as a sacrifice.

At this point in history, the sacrificial system was still in full flow where animals were killed and offered as a sacrifice to God that would be pleasing to him. But then Paul writes this where he's urging us to offer our lives as living sacrifice. That means to live a holy life, to live a life that pleases God. And to do this, Paul says, don't let your head be turned by what the world is saying, by what the world thinks is okay and is acceptable. Instead be transformed by the renewing of your mind. In other words, our thoughts and our will must be moral.

And what we're going to do today is to explore the idea of guarding our heart by taking our thoughts captive. That's a very interesting thing. And perhaps best illustrated if I were to tell you a story of something that I experienced a number of years ago as a Salvation Army officer. Although my job these days is at headquarters, I spent 14 years as a Salvation Army Corps officer, or if you will, as a pastor. And it was a glorious 14 years.

I wouldn't swap a moment of it. And I had a number of wonderful experiences and met a number of wonderful people. And one of the more interesting stories perhaps that comes out of our time, and I won't tell you where it was, and I won't tell you the person's name because I think there's a protection that's needed, but it doesn't diminish from the story. But the story goes around a guy that we're going to call Bill.

And the story of Bill started one day when I was sitting at my desk in one of my appointments and my phone rings. And on the other end of the phone was a gentleman saying, I'm the leader of a Bible study. I deal specifically with people who have been incarcerated, most of whom have just come out of jail, are trying to resettle in the world and have a relationship with Christ. And we've been meeting at a church, but that church can no longer allow us to meet, so we're looking for somewhere new to meet. And someone has suggested, he said to me, someone had suggested the Salvation Army. They met this group on a Saturday morning, so I quickly realized that, well, that's a time when we're not actually busy in this building. So I said, yeah, I'd be happy to support that. I'm going to send you over you a document, a facilities use agreement, we call it, and I want you to fill it out.

It's going to have putting information to you, contact information, and also information on your insurance. The guy stops me. He says, hang on a minute. We're just a, we're just a small group. We're not big.

We don't have some insurance we can give you. He said, we just want to meet in the meeting room once a week. I said, I'll tell you what. I said, if you get one of your group to come worship with us at the Salvation Army once a month, then I will consider this to be a Salvation Army program.

Therefore you don't have to, to fill out all the forms, et cetera, et cetera. Now, whether that was right or wrong, well, it's immaterial at this point, but nonetheless, it worked. The group started to meet on a Saturday morning and the first Sunday after that phone call, this guy, Bill walks into our building and worships with us. I expected to see him once a month, but actually Bill came the next week and the next week and the next week until Bill was a regular part of our congregation. Yes, he had another congregation he had been a part of. He would sometimes catch their early service, but he had made the Salvation Army his main worship center. As I got to know Bill, I found more about his story.

In fact, we enrolled him as a soldier and he was very knowledgeable about God's word. In fact, so knowledgeable that when we started to do some small group ministry at that particular appointment, I asked Bill to lead one of them. We got someone to host it and Bill would come along and lead it. He said to me, well, when, when are these meetings going to be? And I said, well, they'll be on a Wednesday evening. And he went, ah, got a problem.

He said, Wednesday nights are when I go to my group. That's when I found out a bit more about Bill. You see, Bill was coming to this Bible study because he had been incarcerated. I figured that out, but I didn't know why, but it turns out that he had an addiction to pornography. Now you might wonder how does an addiction to pornography get somebody in jail?

Well, it just simply snowballed. It started out as pornography often does looking at images, but then it got worse and worse and worse. It got worse in the sense that at some point he started soliciting women of the night. And then to pay for his habit, he stole from work and that's where he really got himself into some trouble.

And that's how he ended up in jail. In the meantime, his marriage had fallen apart completely. I mean, there was no intimacy in that marriage.

Pornography will do that every time, take away the intimacy. He had two daughters, became estranged from them. They were disgusted by their father.

They wanted nothing to do with him. And so Bill went to jail and there he found Christ. There he got wonderfully saved. But of course, then at some point came the day when he was going to be released and he realised that he needed to protect his heart.

He needed to make sure that he was no longer succumbing to any form of this addiction that was still within him. So were you to visit Bill's apartment, you would find no television, no computer. He didn't carry a phone that gave any kind of image.

He didn't have magazines or newspapers. He had to eliminate every image of a woman that he possibly could. And then rather sadly, he had to develop not a hatred, please, please understand this is different.

It wasn't a hatred, but a disdain for women as a point of protection for his heart. He in his mind had to decide to do all of these things. So then he said to me, as we're talking about this small group on a Wednesday night, he said, if I can't make my accountability group, I'm going to have to ask you to read through some questions for me, to be my accountability partner.

I said, of course, I'll be happy to do that. So the first Wednesday we went, we did the Bible study, then we came back to my office and he gave me a piece of paper with 10 questions on. And then I started to read these questions and I ended up asking this man probably the most intimate questions I've ever asked anyone ever.

And I had to look him in the eye as I asked these questions. He was living Matthew chapter five, verse 29 and 30 in order that he might protect his heart. And it says in Matthew chapter five, if your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than your whole body be thrown to hell.

And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off, throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go to hell. Friends, just like Bill, do what you need to do in order to protect your heart by eradicating the things that tempt you. The things that make your thoughts wander to places they shouldn't. Because to paraphrase Jesus, it is much better for you to lose access to the things that tempt you than for you to spend eternity in hell.

Allow your mind to protect your heart. The Salvation Army's mission, Doing the Most Good, means helping people with material and spiritual needs. You become a part of this mission every time you give to the Salvation Army. Visit salvationarmyusa.org to offer your support.

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