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Well, happy Memorial weekend everybody and welcome to Prairie Lakes Church. And a lot of you this weekend are gonna hit the grill. You're gonna hit the park, the tent, the golf course, the boat. If you haven't done that already, you're probably gonna do that some this weekend.

Enjoy some of your extra time off this weekend. Hey, glad you're doing that. And here's my encouragement to you while you do take some time to thank God, uh, for the freedoms that you enjoy in this country. Uh, there are many brave men and women that have given their lives so that we can have the freedoms that we do.

And that's what Memorial Day is all about. Anyways, so take some time to do that because listen, I know a lot of people are going to Graves and Gravesides this weekend to add some flowers and remember someone in your family line or one of your friends that paid the ultimate price so that we can be free.

So remember my friends freedom isn't freed. Um, remember to thank God and to thank the families of people that have lost somebody because freedom isn't free. We've got a lot that we enjoy. So remember to thank God for that this weekend.

All right, we're gonna dive in. This is the third and final week of a series called With All Your Strength. And we're talking about how to love God with all of our muchness, with our everything. And it comes from this scripture in Deuteronomy six.

It says, hero Israel, the Lord our God. The Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. That Hebrew word strength is the Hebrew word owed and it means muchness with all you got. So love the Lord your God with everything that you got, everything that you have, everything that you are.

And in this series we've looked at a couple different types of strength. We talked about relational strength and influence in week one. Talked about financial strength Last week we talk about mental strength this week now last week, pastor Jesse summarized why we tithe and why we love God with a muchness of our financial strength.

And if you miss last week, I wanna encourage you, go online, get caught up. It was a powerful and very helpful message. And then after the message our our weekend hosts all talked about how there's about 700 families at Prairie Lakes Church that are either serving or in a group and they're attending regularly, but they're not giving financially to the Ministry of Prairie Lakes Church.

And we challenged you to give for the first time. And I know many of you took that step and I wanna say thank you for that. I know we had a lot of people that went in and increased their generosity, which is huge. Thank you for that. Our goal, the rest of 2024 as a church is to see 250 people give for the first time who haven't been giving.

And so if you're in a spot where you've been dragging your feet or maybe this is new information for you, here's how you can give. You can grab your phone and just text. Give to 9, 9, 5 8 1 and take that step literally right now in this moment.

And I just wanna encourage you friends, pray about how God wants you to be generous and then take that step, love God with your financial muchness and strength. Alright, Hey, this weekend the topic is loving God with our mental strength, with our minds.

And we don't talk about this a lot. We talk a lot about how to say the right things. We talk a lot about how to do the right things, how to honor God, what God wants from us. But we don't often talk about how to love God with our mental strength.

And here's why this topic is important. Here's why it matters so much. Jesus and the gospels of Matthew and Luke tells us that how we love God with our mind is a big part of of how we worship God and how we give our lives to God.

In fact, he says this in Matthew 2237, when they ask him, what's the greatest commandment? He says this, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. And then the gospel of Luke 10 27 says this, he answered, love the Lord you God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength and all of your mind.

Here's why this matters to Jesus, where we put our attention and our focus and how we think is a part of our worship of God. And so it's really, really important. Now, here's the big idea I want you to grasp this weekend. And there's two parts to it. Here's the first part, we become what we behold.

What gets your attention and your thoughts eventually gets your heart. What we focus our attention, our mental strength on eventually captures our hearts. And we become what we behold. We become what we look at, what we think about, what we dwell on, what gets our attention.

We become what we behold. So where are you putting your attention, your thoughts and your focus in your life today? What are you beholding the most in your life today? The second part is this loving God with your mental strength.

Here's what it means. It means continually redirecting your attention and your thoughts to God's character and activity in and around you that when we say, Hey, here, loving God with the ush ness of your mind and all of your mental strength means you're redirecting constantly your attention and your thoughts to God and his goodness and how God is active and at work in you and around you.

That's what it means to love God with your mental strength and your mental muchness. And by the way, that is what heaven is like all the time perfectly. Being able to direct your heart and your attention and your focus to God.

So that's what it means to love God with all of your mental strength and muchness. So just go and do that, right? It's really, it sounds really, really easy to do, not so much, right? Like we know this is difficult to do.

And so here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna give you just three truths about mental focus in the world today about loving God with our minds. And uh, just point out that hey, it's challenging and then I'm gonna give you some real practical ways to do this and to love God with your mental strength.

And so here's truth number one about our thoughts and our mental strength. Our thoughts are powerful. They can be used for incredible good or horrific evil. We, we know this to be true. Ideas have power. They have lots of power.

Our ideas drive our emotions that drives our behaviors. And ideas can have an incredible amount of good ideas like this that all human beings are created in the image of God and have dignity and worth regardless of age, race, eth, ethnicity, family tree.

We all have dignity and worth. That's a wonderful truth in idea. Ideas can be really, really good. Like creating gene therapies for cancer. Amazing, wonderful ideas like GoFundMe or Caring Bridge that do amazing things to help people in need in their most vulnerable moments feel connected and loved and supported.

Ideas can spark creativity like the Sistine Chapel or they can spark humor and laughter like the wonders of the world. Seinfeld and the office. Our minds can bring glory to God. Ideas can be used to heal like forgiveness and love and reconciliation.

And we can contemplate the goodness and the bigness of God with our minds and discover His glory. And we can form great ideas about who God is. We can do a lot of amazing things with our minds. God created it that way.

But we can also do incredible damage with our minds and we can have very destructive thoughts or thought patterns. Ideas like racism or pride or arrogance or greed or resentment or hatred or oppression have devastating impact in our world today.

Ideas that are actually lies about ourselves can be incredibly destructive, thinking that we are worthless or hopeless thinking that we're stuck. And we'll never be able to change thinking that we're too far gone for God to reach or that those are just incredibly destructive thought patterns.

We can also have incredibly difficult or destructive thoughts about God believe that God isn't alive real, believe that God isn't good or loving or present or caring. All of those have destructive consequences. And by the way, bad ideas create bad art.

Like the song Old Town Road. Like where did that come from and why was that ever considered good? Why did people listen to that song? It's evil. I'm telling you, bad, bad thoughts, bad use of mental strength, but listen, good and evil spring from a heart and mind that's producing ideas about God and about this world.

And and our minds can either be harnessed for good or for evil. And our thoughts are incredibly powerful. That's truth number one. Here's truth number two that we all feel a lot. And truth number two is this.

We live in an age of mental distraction. Mental distraction. There has never been a time in recorded human history where there are so many things vying for our attention and our thoughts. There's never been a time when it's been more difficult to concentrate on the most important things.

And there's never been a time in human history when it's been more necessary to remove distractions from our lives. Think about it. Our phones buzz, our watches ding, our computers flash, our notifications pop up in this endless stream of annoyance and activity.

We are constantly pulled, constantly distracted. And nowhere is that scene more than in our screen time. And I know when I say the word screen time, that phrase you as parents, some of you have this wave of guilt and shame that's just starting to boil up in you. Hey, I get it. I've been there. Take a breath.

I'm gonna talk mostly about screen time for adults because here is a crazy stat that you need to look at. Look at this. According to digital marketing firm, Oberlo Americans spend an average of 454 minutes per day. That's seven hours and 34 minutes per day looking at a screen.

And this is not school and this is not work. This is all the other stuff, seven hours and 34 minutes. And it's been going up by 15 minutes a year for the last three years, seven hours and 34 minutes looking at phones, tablets, computers and TVs.

Not only that, but check this out. On average, Americans have six social media accounts. And with those, they spend 54 minutes every day on TikTok, 49 minutes on YouTube, and then 30 minutes each on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. That's three and a half hours on social media.

Plus you add shopping, you add Netflix, you add online stuff, you add streaming and you get to seven hours and 30 for minutes of screen time on average, which means some people are like 8, 9, 10 hours a day. And then on top of that, you're talking about distraction.

In 2023, over $600 billion were spent on digital ads all trying to turn your gaze, your interest, and your money to them. And we see on average 5,000 advertisements a day, 5,000 times, someone's trying to get your attention to get you to buy a product.

Now listen, I'm saying all those things and, and I'm not saying that screens are evil. I'm not saying that everything that we're doing in front of a screen is bad. I'm not saying that social media is bad. I know all those things can be used for good and to add connection and laughter into our lives.

However, here's what I'm saying. If we're giving over seven hours a day to screen time, that usually has very little to do with God and very little to do with the work of God innocent around us. That is a problem, is so much of our time is going to entertainment or distraction or political arguments.

We're missing the point of why God has given us a mind and mental strength to use. And for you, you might be in a spot where you're like, well, I don't do a lot of screen time. I don't do a lot of meeting for you. Your distraction might actually be work where your mental distraction is.

I'm always thinking about work. I struggle with workaholism. I can't turn it off. I'm at home, but I'm really working. I'm never present. 'cause I'm always thinking about work that might be your mental distraction or your mental distraction might be intrusive thoughts, negative thought patterns that seem to run in your brain all the time that you can't seem to conquer or get rid of.

You say, well, why does this matter? Why does it matter that we're distracted? Well, when we're distracted, we can't give our focus and our attention, our mental strength to God who deserves it in the first place. In fact, in Exodus chapter 20, when God first gave the commandments, these are the first ones.

He says, you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them. The very first commandment, don't worship anything or anyone other than God.

Don't create images. Don't bow down to anything other than God. God was trying to say, I alone deserve worship. I alone deserve your focus and your attention and your direction. And anything else is idolatry.

Anything else is false worship. He said, well, what does idolatry mean? Here's a quote from Matt Papa. He wrote this book called Look and Live. And he said this, an idol simply put, is anything more important to you than God?

It's anything that has outweighed God in your life. Anything you love, trust or obey more than God, anything that has replaced God as essential to your happiness, anything that's replaced God is essential to our happiness. I think so often we are distracted by screens or by work or by intrusive thoughts that our minds very rarely get tuned to God.

Very rarely is our attention focused on God and what he is up to in me and around me. And ultimately what that can lead to is idolatry, which which is false worship. It's looking to someone or something other than God for ultimate worth and ultimate meaning and ultimate happiness.

And then the Old Testament, you know, they would make a golden calf and they'd bow down and worship or they'd build an Asher a pole or they'd, they'd, they'd build something else and they'd bow down and worship and read. The Old Testament we're like, what a bunch of knuckleheads.

Like who would do that? Why would people be distracted by that stuff? But that they were distracted all the time? It just looks a little bit different. And whether it is screens or social media or work or intrusive thoughts, our mental strength is often displaced, misplaced, and unfocused.

And we become what we behold and what distracts us can easily become an idol. So we have to be careful with how we are thinking and looking and giving our attention to where and who and what that is given to. Because only God is worthy, only God is worthy.

So point number three is gonna be a lot more encouraging. And some of you're like, thank goodness, because this is getting depressing and heavy. Like I I hear you. Okay, so here's truth number three about mental strength and attention.

That's really, really important. We can learn to direct and change thought patterns and focus them. We can learn, we can grow, we can develop. We are not stuck and we are not fixed. So, so some of you right now, I know you're thinking like man, with mental focus and attention, I am a hot mess.

Like I'm really struggling with this, this one, this one is hard for me. Or, or maybe you're just a little bit convicted, like I need to dial back Instagram, uh, a little bit and focus on God a little more. Or maybe you're in a spot where you're starting to go like, how in the world can I give my thoughts and attention and mental strength to God?

What does it even look like? I'm gonna talk about that in a minute. But here's the thing about our thought patterns and our mental focus. They can be trained, they can be directed, they can be shaped.

We are not stuck with whatever current mental spot we're in. We can be changed, transformed, and different. We can grow and develop and learn to focus and refocus our minds on God and his activity in us and around us. We can literally train ourselves to think and focus differently.

See our minds go down predictable trails. And the more we think about something or someone, the easier it is to think about that someone or someone, the more we think about something or someone, the deeper the trail or the trench in our brains gets.

And pretty soon we can think about things or do things almost on autopilot because our brain learns and we develop these well-worn paths and well-worn trails in our minds. And they can be both positive or negative. And sometimes those ruts in our minds get really, really deep.

Those pathways and patterns get worn really well and it's really easy to do things that are either positive or negative to focus on this or to focus on that. And that is why optimistic positive people tend to stay optimistic and positive. It's why the eos of the world tend to be negative and stay negative.

It's why sometimes friends, I can literally feel my mind slipping into the rut of anxiety because I've had so many anxious thoughts and so many anxious moments and I've walked down that path so many times that it's really easy for my brain to just click into that rut and go down the road of anxiety in a heartbeat.

It's why Henry Ford many years ago was quoted with this, this statement, whether you think you can or you think you can't, you are right because of those mental ruts or those mental pathways. We fall into psychologists, especially sports psychologists call this ability to learn and grow and change our thought patterns.

They call it mental conditioning where you can learn how to control anxiety and learn new tasks and maximize performance and visualize success. You can literally change your mind and thought patterns by focusing differently and by thinking differently.

Neuroscience neurobiologists have this wonderful term for the brain's ability to learn and heal and create new neuro pathways is called neuroplasticity. Try spelling that whenever you can, but here's what neuro neuroscience say with neuro neuroplasticity.

We have a hundred billion neurons in our brain and scientists used to think you're born with a hundred billion as a child, it's fixed. That's all you got and it's just a slow decline throughout the rest of your life. But hear what scientists know now about neuroplasticity.

There is functional and structural plasticity, which means your brain literally changes when you learn new tasks, then we start to think new ways and focus on new things. Your brain literally on a micro level changes its structure, which is mind blowing and amazing and incredible.

But here's what that means. Psychology and neuropsychology, neuroscience are shaking hands and saying the same thing. And here's what they're saying. You actually can teach an old dog new tricks. It just takes a little longer depending on how old you are.

But what it means is this, your brain can change the way that you think can change patterns of thought, can change. The ruts that you've worn in your lives can start to grow over and you can form new ones that are positive directed towards God and different. And some of you right now I know are like, I don't give a lick about psychology and neurobiology and neuroplasticity and all these terms and blah, blah, blah, blah.

Tell me what God says about this. And here's the cool thing, what Paul says about this in Romans 12, two shakes hands with psychology and neuroscience, it says the exact same thing, that your brain is not fixed, you are not stuck, you can change and you can grow.

Here's what Paul says in Romans 12 two, 2000 years ago. He wrote this, do not conform to the pattern of this world but be transformed how? By the renewing of your mind, then you'll be able to test and approve what God's will is, is good, pleasing and perfect will.

That Greek word for renew literally means to remodel or completely change, like tear down the old build the new. What neuroscience and psychology are discovering is what for 2000 years Christians have known. And that's the Holy Spirit of God. The power of God in you can change pathways in your brain by helping you focus, by helping you think differently, by helping you believe differently, by helping you refocus on God, your brain literally can change, your mind can be renewed spiritually, it can be renewed cellularly.

It can change and grow and adapt by focusing on God and thinking differently. And isn't it amazing that science is finally catching up to what the Bible has said for 2000 years? Renew your mind. So those are three truths that I just wanted to walk through that really help us get a framework for, okay, what are we up against when it comes to loving God with our mental strength and our muchness of our minds?

Now the question is how do we do that? How do we continually redirect our thoughts to God's character and activity? And how do we love God with the muchness of our minds? What does it look like to change and grow, to refocus, to renew our minds?

I'm gonna give you three things practically that you can do. And with each one of these three things, I'm gonna give you a scripture and then I'm gonna give you a spiritual discipline, an actual thing you can practice and put into practice every single day that will help you love God with the muchness of your mind that'll help you renew your mind, that'll help you create some new pathways in your mind that will help you love God and the people around you better with all your mental strength.

Here's the first one. Become aware of your thought patterns and where you are placing your attention. If you're gonna love God with your mental strength and the muchness of your mind, you have to first understand here's where it's going. Now here's what I'm looking at, here's what I'm focusing on.

Here's who I'm listening to. We have to focus on, hey, where is my attention going? Where is my mind and my focus currently being placed? And my friends with this one, input equals output. What you fill your mind with is eventually gonna come out of you.

So what are you looking at? What are you listening to? What influences people or media are you allowing to impact your thoughts today? Because you become what you behold and here's a good scriptural diagnostic to evaluate what you're thinking about and how you should be thinking about things.

Paul in Philippians four eight says this, in his letter, he says, finely, brothers and sisters, whatever's true, whatever's noble, whatever's right, whatever's pure, whatever's lovely, whatever's admirable, anything is excellent or praiseworthy. Think about such things.

He says, that's how you love God with your mental strength. You think about those things. So how do you evaluate if you're focusing your mental strength on God and these things or not? Here's the daily spiritual practice I wanna encourage you to practice.

It's this. It's called the prayer of examine. And some of you're like, it sounds like a test. What? What in the world is the prayer of examine? Well, it sort of is a test because the prayer of examine simply put is an evaluatory prayer where you sit with God and just say, Hey Lord, you review your day.

God, how am I doing? How did I do? You can do this in five or 10 minutes. I'd like to do this at night where I just sit with God, invite the Holy Spirit to speak to me and guide me, replay the day, my interactions with people, the things that I said, the things that I did good and bad.

How am I doing? Lord, speak to me, guide me, direct me, show me. And one of the prayers I like to pray as I begin this prayer of examine is this. And it comes from Psalm 1 39. I just say this out loud, Hey God, search me. Know my heart.

Test my test me and know my anxious thought. See if there's any offensive way in me and lead me in the way everlasting. And then just be quiet and let the Holy Spirit guide your heart and your mind through your day, the interactions that you had, the things that you said, where your mental focus, where your thoughts and your attention were going.

Where were those things going? Have I been thinking about the things that are noble and right and pure and lovely and praiseworthy? And use Philippians four, eight as a grid and just walk through those and go, how have I done with these things today?

Where do I need to confess sin and struggle and repent? Where do we need to celebrate and say thank you to God because I've been doing pretty well, but con, confess, confess and invite God's help. And then I wanna encourage you when you do a prayer of examine to write down some things, maybe it's a relationship that God wants you to focus on.

Maybe it's you need to apologize to someone and say you're sorry, but whatever it is, write it down. I'm telling you, when you do the prayer of examine and you start to realize where your mental focus and attention is going, it is a game changer for your life because you begin to understand, hey, here's how I can practically love God with my mental strength and mental muchness better than I have been before.

That's number one. And by the way, a pro tip here, if you really wanna know how much time you're looking at your phone, just look at your screen time app, your phone tracks it and your phone doesn't lie. We can sometimes be deceived, but man, that thing tells the truth.

So that's a great diagnostic too. So that's number one. Number one is you gotta understand where your mental focus is going right now. Here's number two, how you love God with your mental strength and muchness practice. Catch and release. Catch and release.

Now I'm a fisherman, so I love this, this phrase, practice, catch and release. And some of you're like, what are you talking about? Practice, catch and release. Here's what this one means. Catch yourself in negative, wasteful or daydreaming thoughts and redirect them to God.

Train your brain to focus differently, to develop new, healthy ruts in your brain to stop your negative thought patterns and self-defeating thoughts before they get too far and to stop your sinful thoughts before they actually happen.

And here's the thing, we can often feel our minds slipping into anxiety and depression. Those old well-worn trails in our brain, we can feel ourselves starting to go down the pathway of addictive thinking that leads to addictive behavior. We can feel the anger and the frustration sometimes boil up in us.

And we want to go smack Jeff at work. And I don't know why I said Jeff, but some of you, somebody out there has somebody named Jeff at work that you wanna smack because they're always annoying. But before we get to those places, before we start down a negative trail, we before we think lustful thoughts, prideful thoughts, jealous thoughts, vengeful thoughts, we can practice, catch and release when those start, which means we grab that negative thought, that sinful thought, that sinful pattern, we release it to God and then we refocus, we release it to God and then we refocus.

And sometimes it's dozens of times a day that we have to catch ourself and go, oh, I am off track mentally I need to capture that and give it to God. And here's where this comes from, scripturally in second Corinthians 10 verses three through five, Paul write a letter to Corinth, to the church around Corinth.

And he's defending his ministry and he talks about spiritual warfare. And here's what he says about spiritual warfare in the mind He says, for for though we live in the world, we don't wage world war as the world does, the weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world.

On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments in every pretension that sells itself up against the knowledge of God. And look at this. And we take captive every thought and we make it obedient to Christ.

We capture thoughts, we catch and then we release. We catch a thought, we make it obedient to Christ, we release it and we refocus on God. We catch and we release, we catch and we release, we catch and we release. That's what it means to take every thought captive that before we run down that trail of sin or self-defeating thoughts or things that we believe that are untrue, we grab 'em, we release them to God and we refocus on him.

And so some of you're going, okay, well how do I do that practically? There's this great type of prayer, it's called a breath prayer. Some of you're like, what's a breath prayer? A breath prayer is a prayer that you can pray in like two seconds, A single breath, a short little prayer that helps you refocus on God, where you capture a thought, you release it to God and then you refocus.

So here's some breath prayers that you can pray that are really, really easy. One like this. God forgive me for that lutful thought. Help me see your beauty instead. That's a breath prayer, a breath prayer like this. God, I release my anger to you and I forgive them a breath prayer like this, Jesus, I'm grateful for what I have.

Forgive me for wanting the things I don't need. Or how about this breath prayer. God remove distractions and make your words come alive as I read them. See, breath prayers are easy, they're simple, they're in the moment.

It's at work. It's dropping your kids off at school. It's, it's when you're on a walk or a jog, it's when you're in an argument with someone. It's a quick little prayer that you just say that helps you catch negative self-defeating, untrue things. Release them to God and then refocus back on him through a breath prayer.

I know a lot of people that their breath prayer is actually a verse or a line from one of their favorite worship songs and they come back to it throughout their day again and again and again and again. These breath prayers are simple ways of catch and release with our thoughts, catch and release.

And my friends, the more you do it, the better you get at it, and the more you do it, the more sensitive you get to jumping on those things before they start to grow inside of your heart, inside of your brain.

It's a beautiful, beautiful way to do that. So that's number two, practice, catch and release. Here's the last thing you can do to love God with your mental muchness and your strength. It's remove lies and replace with truth. Remove the lies and replace them with a truth.

One of the deepest types of mental ruts that we get stuck into occur when we believe things that are untrue about ourselves or untrue about God. And sometimes it's so easy to believe the lies. Sometimes it's almost like our minds, our sin, nature or the enemy are screaming lies to us that are so easy and so tempting to believe.

And sometimes the the greatest, greatest ploy of the enemy, the devil, is to trick us into believing untrue things about ourselves or untrue things about God. And so I'm gonna go back to Romans 12, two. I'm gonna look at this verse again. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed how?

By the renewing of your mind, the tearing down of the old, the rebuilding of the new, letting the Holy Spirit of God form and shape your thoughts, your beliefs, your neurobiology, letting God change the way that you think about yourself and the way that you think about God.

And here's how you do it. The daily practice of meditating on scripture, meditating on God's word. Notice I didn't say reading scripture, we, we can all read scripture, but meditating on scripture is where you slow down, you read it, you contemplate it, you memorize it, you believe it, you internalize it, and eventually you begin to trust it and believe it as true.

And when you slow down and you allow the words of God, his scriptures, the Bible word by word, line by line to transform you, you can combat the lies that you believe and the lies of the enemy. And and to be honest, as a pastor, here are the three most frequent lies that I see people believe day in, day out.

The first one is, I'm worthless. I'm worthless. But, but here's what the Bible says about your worth of FETs two 10. It says, you are God's handiwork. That Greek word means work of art. You are God's work of art created in Christ Jesus to do good words, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

Here's the second lie I see a lot of us believe I can't change, I'm stuck. I can't do it. Here's what the Bible says. Galatians two 20, I've been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in, the body, I live by faith in the son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.

When Christ lives in you, you can do anything. When Christ lives in you, you can change. That's the truth. Here's a third lie. I see a lot of people believe, uh, life has hurt me. So God can't be trusted. Life is hard and painful, so I can't trust God.

Here's the truth, Romans 8 28. And we know that in all things, God works for the good of those who love him who've been called according to his purpose. Even the hard things, even the bad things, even the struggles can be used by God for our good and the good of those around us.

That's the truth. That's what I mean when I say replace lies with truth. What lies are you tempted to believe? Part of loving God with your mental strength is replacing that light with the truth from His word about who God is or who you are in Christ.

And when you have those verses memorized, internalized, written down on your fridge or your locker or your desk or wherever, where you can go back to that in a heartbeat, when you're tempted to believe a lie, to replace it with a truth, that's a big part of how you love God with your mental muchness and your mental strength.

So those are the three things, the three things that you can practically do. Become aware of your thought patterns and what's driving those and where you're putting your focus, practice, catch and release by taking thoughts captive and practice removing lies and replacing truth.

Friends, listen, I know that this is a journey and some of us are, are pretty far along and some of us are just now gonna start practicing some of these things. So give yourselves grace. You're never gonna be perfect or bad. A thousand.

Our minds wonder all the time. We get distracted all the time. The point is this, allow yourself, give yourself permission to forgive yourself, move forward and refocus. Give attention to God. He's the only one worthy of worship. Come back to over and over and over again.

God, what are you up to in my life and the lives of those around me? God, who are you? Behold his beauty. And you will see your mental strength being channeled and used for God. If you take the time to say the prayer of examine and evaluate where your mental strength is going.

If you practice, catch and release by saying a simple breath prayer throughout your day, if you replace lies with the truth of scripture, you're gonna see amazing things in your life. And you're gonna see yourself loving God more clearly and loving the people around you better as as well.

You're gonna love God with your mental muchness and you're gonna see your heart and your life change because what we believe impacts what we desire, which impacts what we feel, which impacts what we do. So here's what I wanna do, friends, as we close, I just wanna pray and I just wanna ask for God's help in doing all those things right now.

So let's pray. Hey, God, we know that you created our minds to be super powerful and they can be used for amazing, good or just evil things. And God, you alone deserve our worship and our attention. You deserve to be the landing spot for our mental strength and our mental muchness.

So God, help us this week to honestly assess where we're directing our mental strength. Help us to repent and turn back when, when we need to. Help us to believe that our minds can change and grow and be redirected to you. Help us to catch and release our negative or untrue thoughts to you.

And God, help us to love you with our minds and behold your goodness and love. May Your beauty God captivate our hearts and our minds and draw us into worship of you and nothing else. It's in Jesus name we pray. Amen.