Fill Your Mind with Truth, Not Poison
By Rick Warren
“A wise person is hungry for knowledge, while the fool feeds on trash” (Proverbs 15:14 NLT, second edition).
If you want to become wise, the first thing you have to do is listen to God’s Word every day.
Proverbs 2:6 says, “It is the Lord who gives wisdom; from him come knowledge and understanding” (TEV).
You don’t get it from television. You don’t get it from the internet. You don’t get it from magazines. Wisdom comes from God.
The Bible says in Proverbs 15:14, “A wise person is hungry for knowledge, while the fool feeds on trash” (NLT, second edition).You can either feed on truth, or you can feed on trash. Whatever you fill your mind with is what’s going to come out — garbage in, garbage out. If you want to be wise, you’ve got to feed every day on truth, not trash.
There are three kinds of things you can fill your mind with: You can fill your mind with poison, you can fill your mind with junk food, or you can fill your mind with health food.
Poison is stuff that poisons your system. It’s bad for you. It takes you down. Pornography is poison. You should not be reading “Fifty Shades” of any color! Some people are so open-minded their brains fall out. They say, “I can watch that stuff. It doesn’t bother me anymore.” That’s the problem! When you can watch and read stuff that is profane, blasphemous, evil, vile, and abusive and it doesn’t bother you, you have a problem. You have become a fool.
Wise people protect their mind. They put on the helmet of salvation. They don’t just allow anything into their mind. They keep the poison out.
Junk food is neither good nor bad. It just has no nutritional value to it. Most of the stuff you see on tv is not evil. It’s just junk food. It’s what I call stuffing. But the problem with stuffing is that when you stuff yourself with stuffing, you have no hunger for truth. If you watch TV for four hours, your mind is full of empty calories that don’t help your body or your mind.
Health food is nutritional food. It helps you grow and maintain your health. It is truth, and the wise person feeds on truth. It makes you wiser — in your relationships, your time, your money, your business, your parenting, your marriage, and every other area of your life.
The first place you need to go to fill your mind with truth is God’s Word. The more you develop the habit of spending time each day reading and studying the Bible, the wiser you will become.
Playtoday’s audio teaching from Pastor Rick >>
Talk It Over
- What kinds of junk food do you allow to fill your mind?
- What difference do you see in your day when you spend more time watching TV and on the internet than you do in God’s Word?
- What practical step can you take today that will help you make your quiet time a priority?
For more Daily Hope with Rick Warren, please visit pastorrick.com!
Daily Inspiration for The Purpose Driven Life - Gift Edition
Would you like to help your friends and family live the Purpose Driven Life? One of the best ways to stay focused on God’s plan is to stay in God’s Word, and Pastor Rick Warren has an effective resource that will enable YOU to quickly find Bible verses that are indispensible for living a life of purpose.
We call this resource Daily Inspiration for The Purpose Driven Life. In it, Pastor Rick has taken all the key verses that explain how God created each of us for five purposes and put them into an easy-to-use reference tool that will help anyone study and memorize God’s Word.
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This devotional © 2016 by Rick Warren. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
You can also listen to Rick Warren on OnePlace.com.