Guard Your Thoughts
              By A. W. Tozer

              Make your thoughts a clean sanctuary.

                 God reveals to us that our thoughts are a part
             of us.  Someone has said that "thoughts are things,"
             and the Spirit is all-seeking and all-hearing and
             all-loving and pure.

                 Can you imagine a man with malicious and
             evil thoughts in his heart having companionship
             with the loving Holy Spirit?

                 Can you imagine a man bloated with egotism
             knowing the Holy Spirit in anything like intimacy?

                 Can you imagine a man who is a deceiver having
             blessed fellowship with the Holy Spirit?  Never!

                 My friend, if you are habitually given over to
             thinking and harboring and savoring dirty
             thoughts, you are habitually without the
             communion of the Holy Spirit!

                 Keep your mind pure. Clean out the sanctuary
             the way old Hezekiah did.  They had dirtied up
             that sanctuary, so when he had taken over,
             Hezekiah got all of the priests together.  It took
             them days and days, but they carried out all of
             the filth and burned it, threw it over the bank
             and got rid of it, and then went back and
             sanctified the temple.  Then the blessed God
             came and they had their worship again.

                Our thoughts are the decorations inside the
             sanctuary where we live.  If our thoughts are
             purified by the blood of Christ, we are living
             in a clean room, no matter if we are wearing
             overalls covered with grease.

                 Our thoughts largely decide the mood and weather
             and climate within our beings, and God considers
             our thoughts as part of us. They should be
             thoughts of peace, thoughts of pity and mercy
             and kindness, thoughts of charity, thoughts of God
             and the Son of God --- these are pure things,
             good things and high things.

                 Therefore, if we would cultivate the Spirit's
             acquaintance, we must have the control of our
             thoughts. Our mind ought not to be a wilderness
             in which every kind of unclean thought makes its
             own way.

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             Yours in Christ,
             Paul N. F.