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My cell phone is alerting me again that I am out of storage, and rightly so!  I take pictures of my grandsons, a lot.

I also take pictures of things I want to buy, paint, etc.  I take pictures of things that I want to blow up and look at closely.  I take tons of sunset pictures because God creates the most awesome, beautiful, no two alike.

We are all really bad about over-stimulating our brains and our memories; that is one of the reasons why we take so many pictures.  We have so much in our minds, a lot of the times we crowd out the important stuff.

So, in order to clean my phone up, I could dump everything in the cloud which I will never go to and look at them or I have to go thru each picture and discard the duplicates, get rid of the blurry ones, toss the videos that are not so great, etc.

We should do this with our minds.

Take inventory of what we have stored in our brains.  Write down all the good, solid ideas, discard all the bad ones, clear out the fuzzy ones, and toss all the ones that are just taking up space.  Those are the ones that aren’t great or bad, but just squeezing out all of the good stuff.

The Bible says the road to sin begins in your thought life.  When you commit a sin, it never just happens.  Sinful acts begin as attitudes or temptations in your mind and emotions.

Mark 7:21-22 states “For from within, out of men’s hearts (or minds), come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly.”

This is all the bad stuff we need to discard completely out of our minds.

James 1:14-15 states “Each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.”

That scripture states we are tempted by our own evil desires, so we know those things are in our minds.

James 4:1 states, “What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you?”

You’re probably asking yourself “How do I discard all these thoughts out of my mind?”

Philippians 4:8 states “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable–if anything is excellent or praiseworthy–think about such things.”

It is amazing that when you finally stop binging on Netflix, and listen to preaching or God’s word on audio, or reading your Bible, that all the above things do start coming into your mind.

We have to put the good in for the good to come out.  And don’t get me wrong, I love to binge on Netflix, but I have realized that I will be like the characters on the shows, if that’s all I put in my mind.  The more I put God’s word in, no matter how I do that, I began to look more like Christ.

There are so many creative ways to get God’s word in our hearts other than just reading your Bible.  There are shows that are written to show Christ and His love.  There are so many great Preachers on the internet these days.  There is great Christian music that will fill your mind with God’s love.  You can sit with your friends and talk about a Christian book you read.  There is free audio Bible that you can listen to.  You don’t even have to sit and read.  It will steep into your soul even if you’re not paying attention 100% of the time.

Let’s stop playing mind games and get serious for Christ.

Karen Y. Stevens is Meals on Wheels Executive Director