Filling Your Mind with Truth to Fill Your Speech with Wisdom

All unmarked Scripture quotations are taken from the New American Standard Bible 1995 Ed. (NASB95)

The Lord Jesus famously declared to the crowds following Him, “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Matt. 12:34 ESV). The context of this teaching was the Pharisees accusing Him of casting out demons through the power of the devil. Although they claimed to be righteous, their obvious slander of Jesus proved that they intended evil.

Then, He laid down that fundamental principle that what we habitually say results from the thoughts and desires that fill our minds. This is a seemingly condemning statement for many of us, since it points out to us much of our sinfulness. For believers in Jesus, we ought to be characterized by speech that is overwhelmingly truthful, helpful, and wise. Unfortunately, too many believers demonstrate that their minds have been more conformed to worldly values and ideas than they’d like to admit.

So, what is your speech overwhelmingly like? For what you speak of most often is what most occupies your thoughts. As God’s children, we ought to be setting our minds on “things above, not on the things of the earth” (Col. 3 ). This is especially true when we’re talking with brethren in Christ, yet I would venture to guess that a significant part of our talks is about matters of relatively little importance.

Given the fact that many of us are so unspiritual in our habitual thinking and speech, what steps should we take to cultivate our hearts toward greater heavenly-mindedness and focus on God’s glory? Let me suggest some practical disciplines that need to be more attended to in our daily lives, especially as western, technologically-consumed, believers.

Devote Yourself to Prayer

As you would probably guess, the most important discipline for controlling your thought life is prayer. And let no one fool you – prayer is a discipline. As the most important habit of the child of God, prayer is both the most needed and the most neglected practice. How can we best cultivate a prayerful attitude and direction in our thinking?

First, it’s almost always the best practice to set aside a lengthy portion of time soon after waking up – say 10-15 mins within the first half hour – for concentrated prayer. The lives of our Lord, the apostles, and the New Testament Christians repeatedly demonstrate that they devoted the best time of their days to talking to their heavenly Father. And in our constantly distracted society, we must do this even more.

Second, don’t just pray anything, but follow the guidelines and examples that we find in Scripture. The Lord’s Prayer is obviously the best prayer outline you can find in the Bible. So how does it structure prayer?

  1. Community-minded: We’re taught to talk to our Father, not my Father. That is, our routine prayers should always have our brethren in Christ in mind, as well as ourselves.
  2. Consecration of God: We’re to always pray with a recognition of the “hallowedness” or holiness of our God. In our prayers, we first acknowledge that God is holy in Himself, as well as seek Him to show Himself more and more hallowed in our lives.
  3. Kingdom-advancement: Next to God’s honor, our next overarching request should be for the increased manifestation of His kingdom through the body of Christ.
  4. The Decree of God: After asking for God’s reign to be increased through His sanctification and salvation of people, we ought to ask for His desired will, or decree, to be increasingly carried out by us and others. That people would increasingly obey Him on earth, as all obey Him in heaven.
  5. The Necessities of the Body: After making sure we’ve sought the Lord to hallow His name, advance His kingdom, and make people more obedient to Him, then we should also acknowledge Him for His provision of our bodily needs. Every physical necessity we have comes from His hand, so we should attempt to begin our days by acknowledging this, lest we think that we deserve any of it, or get it by ourselves.
  6. The Cleansing of our Consciences: Next, we ought to confess our sinfulness and besetting sins to God, and ask for His forgiveness. As we bring our failures and betrayals to our Father, we’re forced to recognize them as He does, and begin to think of them as the evils they are. We also actively trust in His promise of forgiveness, and are reminded that He holds no sin against us, but has given us forgiveness and the power to overcome sin through obedience to Jesus.
  7. Christlikeness-oriented: The Lord’s Prayer ends with a request that God would refrain from guiding us into temptation, but would instead save us from evil and spiritual harm. As we begin our days, we can make this one of our last petitions – that the Lord would enable us to think in such a way that we would avoid tempting situations, and would instead increasingly grow in obedience to Him through love.

With these categories in mind, we can structure our daily prayers in ways that pursue the Lord’s interests, while making them applicable to our individual, daily, circumstances.

The final way to devote yourself to prayer is to just constantly acknowledge God’s presence and work in your daily experiences. This is what Proverbs means when it says, “In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight” (Prov. 3:6). This is also the meaning when Paul urges the Thessalonians to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5). We ought to be constantly recognizing that the Lord is working in us “both to will and to work for His good pleasure” (Phil. 1:13), as well as the fact that He is orchestrating every circumstance of our lives for our spiritual and eternal good. With this in mind, we’re able to give thanks to Him for all things, and to ask Him for help in all our activities. So, we’re to be constantly God-focused in our thinking through prayer. But this is only one side of the conversation. We must listen to Him as well, which involves more effort than most believers admit.

Let the Word of Christ Dwell Richly Within You (Meditation)

The next key to cultivating spiritual and heavenly thinking and speech is clearly to learn God’s Word, the holy Scriptures of the Bible. If we want to learn how to think, we must learn from God Himself, and the most pure, clear, and perfect place to hear His voice is the Bible. Sadly, next to prayer, this is the second most neglected habit of western believers.

Let me point out that we have no excuse for our negligence of God’s Word. Most of us have nearly constant access to it in our pockets or hands, and many of us have more leisure time than we often recognize. Why wouldn’t we use much of our leisure time to learn the greatest story ever written, and to learn what God has determined to do in and through our Lord Jesus Christ?

There are numerous passages of Scripture that explicitly testify to the preciousness of God’s Word. Perhaps one of the most poignant is Jesus’s quotation directed toward Satan, when He states, “’Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds from the mouth of God’”. And where are those words that proceeded from God’s mouth? They are now safely contained and articulated in the Bible.

A great question for us to think about is, “why has God given us such easy access to the entirety of His direct revelation?” I think the answer is clearly that He desires that we seek to learn the Book that He’s given us. And that Book is no mere obligation or even a bonus – it’s the most precious and necessary physical resource we have. As followers of the Lord Jesus and the Apostles, we ought to be devoted to the Scriptures and teachings that they knew intimately, and loved with radical devotion.

With our short attention-spans, dizzying busyness, and disordered routines, how can we take steps to hear God’s voice through Scripture every single day, so that we’re consciously and desperately living on it? The discipline that will allow our thinking to be increasingly indwelt by the teaching of Christ (Col. 3:16) is called “meditation” in the Bible. Contrary to the popular form of Eastern meditation in our pagan culture, biblical meditation is not an emptying of your mind. It’s an intense exercise or your attention on the Scripture that you’ve read.

Let me sum up how to engage in Bible meditation every day.

First, just as with prayer, you must set aside a specific time of day for the usual delight of meditating on Scripture. And like prayer, it’s usually best to do this near the beginning of your day, before your mind is crowded with a million things not specifically related to what God has said. And meditation can’t be done in a few minutes. If you have a very limited amount of time, I would suggest that you attempt to spend half an hour, and no less than 15 minutes.

Second, unless you’re a Bible expert, you should first prioritize simply reading Scripture. The Bible is a big book, and it’s important to seek to understand the general flow of its story. This will require reading more than a verse a day. This will require reading multiple passages every day, ideally from both the Old and New Testaments. Before you meditate, make sure that you’re just attentively reading the story of God’s Word as it unfolds, and is explained in the Bible.

Third, although you ought to be interested in all of Scripture, there are usually parts of the Bible that don’t seem immediately applicable to us, or even comprehensible. You should recognize that you’ll never understand everything in the Bible, and that much of it contains things that are difficult to understand. Nevertheless, the more you read, study, and meditate on Scripture, the more you’ll see what it means. But what I want to advise you is to make sure that part of your Bible reading is something that interests you. You should come to God’s Word with some fascination and longing to learn. If you don’t have this, pray for it.

Fourth, I highly recommend that you attempt to read every passage you’ve decided to read at least twice. We rarely pick up the essential elements of writing through one reading, and this is especially true of the uniquely ancient, profound, and complex text of Scripture. So on your first reading, just read to see the main points or events of a passage. Then, on your second reading, pay attention to the specific details, and look for things that you didn’t notice before.

The fifth step of Bible meditation is actually meditating. This should take at least a few minutes, but may take your thinking at several points throughout the day. The biblical meaning of meditation is pondering, ruminating, or reflecting on. In order to gain the most understanding, retention, and insight from this practice, you’ll probably have to focus on a small aspect of the passage or passages you’ve read.

Then, meditation usually is best done through asking such questions as:

  1. What did this mean to the people to whom it was originally written?
  2. How does Jesus’s teaching affect what this means today?
  3. How is the situation or problem addressed by this event or truth similar to what I face?
  4. What does this event or truth tell me about what God and Jesus are like?
  5. What principle about obeying Jesus does this teach me?
  6. How can I put this principle into practice in my everyday life?

And finally, meditation is never complete until you pray about what you’ve learned from God’s Word. Whenever you read and learn the Bible, the Lord is speaking to you. And usually, He expects you to respond to you, since He loves to hear His children express their thoughts about His teaching. As before, we should respond to God’s wonderful Word with thanksgiving and neediness. The Lord always benefits us when He allows us to learn what He’s recorded, and our learning always demands us to make even greater efforts to please Him. But our efforts are always dependent on His power or help, which come to us through prayer.

When you meditate on Scripture everyday, and prayerfully put it into practice with an honest heart before God, you’ll inevitably be able to increase in your heavenly-mindedness, and godly control of thought. Also, as you learn what Scripture says, you’ll increasingly have a memorized treasure bank of truth in your heart, from which you can rightly respond to situations, and speak the truth in love.

There are two other brief disciplines I want to elaborate on for our cultivation of godly thinking, so that our speech increasingly reflects the character of Christ: careful selection of listening content, and the right use of reading material.

Careful Selection of Listening Content

In our media-flooded culture, we would do well to follow the example of David described in Psalm 101. Here, he writes,

“I will walk within my house in the integrity of my heart. I will set no worthless thing before my eyes; I hate the work of those who fall away; It shall not fasten its grip on me. A perverse heart shall depart form me; I will know no evil.” – Ps. 101:2b-4

The key resolution of David for our discussion is his declaration that “I will set no worthless thing before my eyes”. This is one of the most ignored principles in all of modern life. Most of us are constantly putting worthless things in front of our eyes, especially on our phones. So our first practical consideration of thinking godly has to simply do with what we see.

What are we looking at on our phones and computers? Are those things worthy of our attention and consideration, or do they have no benefit for our thinking and living? This is a question we would do well to ask whenever we think about looking on the Internet or social media. And we often neglect this though-process to our detriment. As we already saw, what we give our thinking to is what our character increasingly reflects. Thus, we must be very careful with the media content that we see and hear.

In this section, I want to talk a little about selecting wholesome listening content. Think about the countless audio sources most of us possess – TikTok, YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, Prime, podcasts, radio, and TV. Especially when striving to improve our speech, which is one of the most important expressions of our character, we need to take great care in choosing what we listen to.

The fact is, if you want to speak like a Christlike person, you need to focus on listening to Christlike people. This obviously implies that ungodly speech should be one of the “worthless” things you avoid. In many cases, listening to sinful speech is unavoidable, but this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take measures to avoid constantly hearing it when we can. But further, we should all strive to regularly listen to godly brethren in Christ speaking. And this should start with the fellowship of our weekly church assembly. We ought to delight to be in the company of the godly, and to listen to true, good, and wise speech.

But given the many opportunities we have of learning from brethren, teachers, and artists through the Internet, we also can use our leisure time for this purpose. But this should only be the case if you have no compulsion to listen to radio, podcasts, or music. As believers, we need the ability to content ourselves with absolute silence, and be able to control our thinking in that environment.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of good sources of teaching, discussion, and music on the Internet. Among many other Christian ministries I could name, here are some I’ve benefited from through their podcasts or video’s:

I’llBeHonest.com

Wretched Radio

Living Waters

For the Gospel

Abounding Grace Radio

Let’s cultivate our thinking by seeking to only listen to content that’s true, right, lovely, honorable, of good repute, or excellent. The same goes for our reading, which is arguably more important than our listening.

Careful Selection of Reading Material

Social media and Internet news have simply squashed people’s ability to read. But reading, as we should know from the Bible, is one of the best ways to cultivate, inform, and renew our thinking. I’ve already highlighted Bible reading, which takes priority over reading anything else. Yet the same availability of good books which we have of the best Book makes learning from them a great asset.

So how do use books to cultivate a godly mind? Here are several brief suggestions:

  1. Attempt to use hard copies whenever possible. This eliminates distraction and aids in comprehension.
  2. If you have little time for reading, choose a book that addresses a problem you’re having in your life. And make sure its solutions are based on biblical teaching/principles.
  3. As with Scripture reading, determine to spend a specific amount of time reading a book each day, or any day you can. And make sure you can read enough of the book in one sitting to understand a full argument, point, or narrative event.
  4. Read with a pen and/or highlighter nearby, so you can mark any part that you want to remember, or might help you later. This helps stimulate deeper thinking about what the author’s said, and greater retention of what’s most important to you.
  5. As with Scripture meditation, all our learning should impact our spiritual growth. So always look for ways in which what you’ve learned has lessons for how your beliefs, attitudes, feelings, or actions could change for your greater obedience to the Lord.

Communicating the Truth You’ve Thought

As this lesson is in keeping with two previous articles on having godly conversations among the brethren of Christ, I’ll bring all of this to bear on our speech with God’s household. In most cases, you’re learning hasn’t truly transformed you unless it impacts your speech, as Jesus’s teaching implies. So as we’re continually learning what and how to think according to God’s Word, we should seek to speak about our learning material with the brethren.

This doesn’t necessarily mean you say, “You know, I’ve been reading Philippians 3, and this is what I learned.” Rather, it’s the truths and principles that we’ve embraced and obeyed in our personal lives that should come out in our speech. Inevitably, our Scripture meditation and thinking on other profitable things will direct our focus on the concerns of our blamelessness before God, and of the realities of eternity. So when we speak to people, and especially our brethren in Christ, these concerns should come out in what we ask and tell them. If our minds are truly set on the things above, then we’ll want to share the glories of the Lord Jesus and His kingdom with those around us. As we continually seek to think about the most important things, we should also endeavor to speak about the most important things, and to do so in fitting ways.

Let we who worship the Lord Jesus grow in our delight in the word of Christ, so it more richly dwells within us, and also be slow and careful to speak in keeping with this instruction:

“Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word as is good for edification according to the need of the moment, so that it will grace to those who hear.” — Eph. 4:29

Let us embrace our calling to know Jesus in our minds, hearts, and speech, that we may “proclaim the excellencies of Him who called us out of darkness into His marvelous light” (1 Pet. 2:9b).