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.
                       ________________________________
         Yours in Christ,
         Paul N. F.