In his letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul spoke of one of the keys to victory in the Christian life, and it starts with our minds, literally how we think.
Every action starts with a thought. Negative emotions, such as fear, worry, or hopelessness, often start with a simple planting of a seed thought. These thoughts grow and begin to beat us down, causing us to simply give up and fall back into old sin habits.
Paul states that the battle starts with our mind and actually used imagery of war to describe what we need to do:
5 We are destroying arguments and all arrogance raised against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, (2 Corinthians 10:5)
In this verse, he talks about ‘taking every thought captive.’ It was a word that described how a victorious army would take people into captivity after breaching the walls of a city.
Jesus used the same Greek word when He prophesied how the Jews would be hauled away to foreign nations after the city of Jerusalem was besieged (Luke 21:24).
We have a vivid description of what it was like being led away into captivity. After Jerusalem fell, the commander of King Esarhaddon’s Assyrian Army put bronze shackles on King Manasseh’s feet, forcing him to shuffle as he walked.
Then we are told that they inserted a hook through his nose. This was then attached to a rope, as the Assyrians dragged arguably one of Judah’s most evil kings off to Babylon (2 Chronicles 33:11).
In fact, many Assyrian archaeological images portray captives having hooks put through their nose and even through their lips to control them.
It was humiliating and brutal, but this is how we are to treat these thoughts that flood our minds.
It is a battle.
In a recent Saved Not Soft podcast, Emy Moore shared the struggle that is involved in controlling our thought life:
“It’s hard for us to take thoughts captive because thoughts can be very very loud,” she told her audience. “How do I take captive of this thought if it’s right in front of my face? I can’t get rid of it. How do I find peace if my adversary is right here and my opposition is right here in front of my face, screaming in my face? It’s all I see, it’s all I hear.”
She then says that often these thoughts are not our friends. They are our enemy and need to be treated accordingly.
“Just because it’s loud doesn’t mean that it’s right. Because the Bible says that the enemy prowls like a roaring lion, but the Lord comes in a gentle whisper,” she says.
“So just because something is screaming and crying right in front of your face, doesn’t mean you should pay any attention to it. Because it might be the one thing that wants to rob you of peace,” she added.
Time is not our friend in the battle for our minds
During ancient battles, it usually took months to breach the walls of a city. The attacking armies would set up siege equipment and battering rams and part of their campaign frequently included cutting off food supplies, to eventually starve the inhabitants into submission.
However, when it comes to the battle for our minds, time is not our friend. According to one psychologist, we have about 90 seconds to take a thought captive.
In other words, we have just over a minute to take action and cast it out of our mind. We can purposefully quit thinking about it or even quote God’s word to confront the issue
If we fail to cast it out, in an ironic twist of fate, we will become its captive.
READ: Emy Moore Talks About Taking Our Thoughts Captive AND King Manasseh’s ‘Nose Hooks,’ in the Bible and Archaeology
OpentheWord.org 
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