We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. ~ 2 Corinthians 10:5 NIV

We all have our areas in our spiritual walk that we need to “work on”. One of mine is taking my thoughts captive. About 20 years ago, my spiritual mentor invested a lot of time in explaining this and making it a tangible concept for me. She said to think of each thought as if it were a piece of paper. Now it’s something tangible that I can grab hold of and study in my hand. When I look at it, I need to decide if this is something that is good for me or not. If it’s good, then I can open my hand and let it go. If not, I need to throw it to the ground and stomp on it.

Now, I need to teach it to my girls and Holy Spirit has been faithful to help me.

The other morning, I had the girls write down 2 Corinthians 10:5 in their journals. When they were done, they could go outside and blow bubbles. After a few minutes, I began blowing bubbles and said that their job was to catch all the bubbles. At first, I would alert them to the next batch of bubbles, but after a few rounds, I stopped telling them and just kept blowing bubbles, making it increasingly harder to do their job.

After a minute or two, I had them sit down so we could discuss what had happened. We agreed that catching bubbles is hard, for the following reasons:

• They can go anywhere
• They come out too quickly
• There’s a lot of them
• There’s not always warning

I explained that catching bubbles is a lot like taking our thoughts captive. If we don’t focus on our thoughts, they can quickly become overwhelming.

Then we made a plan: Take every thought captive and make sure it lines up with the Word of God.

• If my thought does not line up with the Word of God – if it’s not honoring to God and He wouldn’t want me to focus on it – I need to pop it, like a bubble, and send it back to the pits of hell!
• If my thought does line up with God’s Word – if it brings God glory and honor, and He’d be glad that I’m thinking about it – I will blow on it and let it go.

How do you practice taking your thoughts captive to the obedience of Christ? If it doesn’t come naturally or you’ve never tried it before, I want to encourage you to make this a habit.

It’s important to take our thoughts captive, so we don’t become captive to our thoughts.