Our “vastly improved methods of communication” of which the shortsighted boast so loudly now enable a few men in strategic centers to feed into millions of minds alien thought stuff, ready-made and predigested. A little effortless assimilation of these borrowed ideas and the average man has done all the thinking he will or can do. This subtle brainwashing goes on day after day and year after year to the eternal injury of the populace—a populace, incidentally, which is willing to pay big money to have the job done, the reason being, I suppose, that it relieves them of the arduous and often frightening task of reaching independent decisions for which they must take responsibility1
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Evangelicals at the moment appear to be divided into two camps—those who trust the human intellect to the point of sheer rationalism, and those who are shy of everything intellectual and are convinced that thinking is a waste of the Christian’s time.
Surely both are wrong. Self-conscious intellectualism is offensive to man and, I am convinced, to God also. But it is significant that every major revelation in the Scriptures was made to a man of superior intellect. It would be easy to marshal an imposing list of biblical quotations exhorting us to think, but a more convincing argument is the whole drift of the Bible itself. The Scriptures simply take for granted that the saints of the Most High will be serious-minded, thoughtful persons. They never leave the impression that it is sinful to think.2
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Make your thoughts a clean sanctuary. To God, our thoughts are things. Our thoughts are the decorations inside the sanctuary where we live.3
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Your thoughts pretty much decide the mood and weather and climate inside your heart, and God considers your thoughts as part of you.4
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To become effective men of God, then, we must know and acknowledge that every grace and every virtue proceeds from God alone, and that not even a good thought can come from us except it be of Him.5
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Deal very much with the human race, and you will find that we are the sum of our consenting thoughts.6
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If you think of the act with consent, you have done it, and if you have done it, you have done what you are.7
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Every person is really what he or she secretly admires.
If I can learn what you admire, I will know what you are, for people are what they think about when they are free to think about what they will.8
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If you can find what I think about when I am free to think about whatever I will, you will find the real me. That is true of every one of us.9