Audio Transcript

Happy Monday. Welcome back to a new week on the podcast, week number six hundred of APJ. Remarkable. And today we are praying, “Lord, let your word smash our bad theology. May the Bible turn into rubble every lofty thought about you and your ways that is false. Purge from us every error we believe.” A prayer like that was vividly answered by God in a season of your life, Pastor John. And that story is a theme on the podcast too.

When you came to discover God’s sovereignty in salvation, such a revelation shattered your assumptions. So, we’re not talking hypotheticals here today when we read Paul say, “We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). These are moments when everything we thought was true crumbles to the ground. You’ll see how this worked in Pastor John’s life in the episodes I pulled together from the podcast in the APJ book (on pages 23 and 24).

So, how do we cultivate the mental discipline and fortitude that would position us to experience this for ourselves? This is huge. And it’s a wonderful question from a listener named Sarah. Sarah writes in to ask this: “Pastor John, hello to you! What does it mean to ‘take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ’? And how can I take this command and apply it to my incorrect or sinful thoughts, that I may obey Christ and have more joy in him?”

Well, here’s the text. Let’s read it and then we’ll see if we can figure this out. Second Corinthians 10:4–5, “For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh” — that is, they’re not merely human; this is not a mere battle between one philosopher with some human wisdom against another philosopher with human wisdom. “But [the weapons of our warfare] have divine power to destroy strongholds.”

And then he defines this powerful, stronghold-destroying activity in two steps. First, “We destroy arguments and every lofty [or proud] opinion raised against the knowledge of God.” And second, we then “take every thought captive.” So, you move in a battle and you destroy the fortress, and then you take captives. “We . . . take every thought captive to obey Christ.”

So, Sarah asks, how can she take 2 Corinthians 10:5, taking every thought captive, and apply it to herself to be more obedient to Christ in her thought life?

Capturing Whose Thoughts?

The first thing I think that needs to be said is that when we apply this to ourselves, we have to make sure we’re in the right place in the text. When Paul says, first, that he’s destroying arguments and arrogant opinions against God and, second, that he is taking thoughts or minds captive, we need to realize it’s the minds and thoughts of others. He’s not talking about taking his own thoughts captive; it’s the thoughts of others. “I’m moving in to these rascals in Corinth who are so boastful in their philosophical prowess that I am going to demolish them not by counter-philosophy, but by divine power. I’m going to show power, and they’re going to collapse in their thinking, and then I’m going to take their thoughts captive so that they now obey Christ.”

So, he’s the warrior, and the enemy is these people whose minds and arguments are proud and lifted up against God. And when Paul defeats those minds and arguments in the power of the Holy Spirit, their thoughts and their minds are taken captive, and they become people with the mind of Christ or obedient to Christ.

“Lay yourself open to the risen Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit through the words of the apostle Paul.”

I think Sarah might be misreading just slightly. I’m going to come around and say she’s on the right track, but she just might be misreading the verse when she says, “How can I take this command and apply it to my incorrect, sinful thoughts?” It’s not a command. It’s a statement about what Paul is doing to his opponents. He’s demolishing their worldview and then taking their defeated thoughts captive for Christ so that they become right thinkers — they’re obedient in the way they think about Christ. So, 2 Corinthians 10:5 is not a command to do this ourselves, but Sarah’s question is still a very good question.

Humble Captives of Christ

There is a way to apply this to ourselves. We just have to get ourselves in the right place. And the place we belong in is the group whose opinions and thoughts Paul is trying to demolish. That’s where we belong. “We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive.” So, when John Piper reads that, or when Sarah reads it, I should say, or she should say, “Okay, Paul, here I am. Do your demolishing work on me. Do your captive-taking work on me. Destroy in my mind any faults or proud thoughts that I have about God.”

This means really two things, I think, that Sarah and I and anybody else, any Christian, should do.

1. Submit every thought.

First, we should listen to Paul, and submit all our thoughts and ideas and feelings about God and about life. We should submit them to Paul’s teaching, God’s apostle, for scrutiny. And if anything is out of sync with Paul’s teaching, we should let it be destroyed.

I have experienced this very painfully. I mean, if you put your mind and thoughts really at the disposal of the apostolic teaching and say, “Anything in my thinking that needs to be destroyed, destroy it,” it can utterly undo you. There have been seasons in my life where I have wept over the dismantling of what felt like really important structures in my brain. So, I think that’s the first thing we do. We listen to Paul. We submit everything we think — all our ideas, all our worldview, all our viewpoints — to God, and we say, “Paul, let your word dismantle me if necessary.”

2. Pray for power.

The second thing we should do is we should ask the Holy Spirit to work, because Paul said, “We don’t fight with mere human, fleshly arguments; our ministry has power.” So, we should expose ourselves to that power. Second Corinthians 10:4 says, “The weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power.” In other words, he’s tearing down arguments and God-belittling ideas, but he’s not doing it merely by argument. So, when I come to the Bible, there’s a lot of study I do, and I love to study, and I love to assess arguments and figure them out, but I should also be crying out, “O God, I know that mere intellect will not dismantle the deeply rooted errors of my mind. So, I avail myself, I open myself to the Holy Spirit, and I seek your face.”

Paul said in Romans 15:18, “I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me to bring the Gentiles to obedience.” Now, I think that’s the same obedience as in 2 Corinthians 10:4–5, when he brings our thoughts into obedience to Christ. And here he says, “I won’t speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished.” So, that’s what I’m getting at when I say to expose yourself, lay yourself open to the risen Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit through the words of the apostle Paul, so that everything can be dismantled, and then your brain, your mind, your thoughts can be taken captive, and everything brought into conformity to Christ.