Week 2 Day 4: Choose Your Thoughts

“Today I have given you the choice between life and death, between blessings and curses. Now I call on heaven and earth to witness the choice you make. Oh, that you would choose life, so that you and your descendants might live!” (Deuteronomy 30:19 NLT)

Studies show that people have around 80,000 thoughts a day; 90% of these thoughts (@72,000) are habitual, and 80% of these repeated thoughts are negative. That comes out to roughly 57,600 negative thoughts a day. These studies also show that the most successful athletes speak a maximum of 20,000 words or less to themselves. Of their self-talk, less than 50% of that is negative. That’s less than 10,000 negative thoughts each day. In other words, when we control what we think we increase our capacity for success.

If we don’t choose our thoughts, our thoughts will choose us. Everything we are, everything we feel, everything we say begins in our minds. So many times we say, “I can’t help how I feel.” That is partly true, but not entirely. In the heat of a moment, we can lash out with our emotions and hurt someone physically or rake them over the coals with our tongues. It is difficult to control ourselves when our emotions kick in hard. We may yell, cry, or even hit out of feelings that are deeply ingrained in us.

Trying to control our emotions, words or actions is like trying to pull weeds in a garden. Unless we get to the root and control it, the weeds will keep growing back. It gets tiresome pulling the same weeds over and over again. We exhaust ourselves trying to control them so we throw our hands up thinking that’s just how it's going to be. We let the weeds overtake the garden, choking off and killing what we want to grow. But that doesn't have to be our truth.

We can't control our emotions, tongue or actions if we don’t try to control our thoughts; the root of where they come from. We all struggle with our thoughts, some more than others. But just because our thoughts feel natural doesn’t mean we have to allow ourselves to think them. Remember, we are wired to be negative. Through the power of the Holy Spirit we can all learn to re-wire our thoughts including the negative habitual ones.

Our thoughts bring us life or death and they are ours to choose. If we want to live out the abundant life that Jesus points us to, we must choose to get our thoughts under control. When we do, not only will we live the life we were created to live, we will help others live out the life they were created to live.

Do you think you say far too many negative things to yourself? What are some of the negative thoughts you say to yourself on a daily basis?

Meditate on Deuteronomy 30:19 today