A Sober Mind

God wants our minds to be sober, free from fleshly or worldly intoxication.

Our minds can be intoxicated by the world, their way of thinking and behaving. Our minds can be affected by distress and difficult circumstances.

I Peter 1:13 says we must gird up the loins of the mind. To gird up the loins of your mind in the original means to tie a belt around your mind. It comes from the action one does when tying a belt around the waist to gather up a tunic so you can be unhindered in getting where you need to go.

Remember one of the pieces of the amour of God is the belt of truth. To tie a belt around your waist is representative of protecting the productive area (the loins) with God’s truth as we do our mind.

In other words, our imagination is very potent and creative. Anxiety can influence the mind making it intoxicating and inflame the thoughts. It can impair judgment and fuel a wild imagination into a blazing forest fire. You begin to imagine things waiting around the corner that don't exist! Shadows loom tall and monstrous, but they are only shadows. David said in Psalms 23, though I walk through the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

Fear is another toxin that can feed on your imagination to distort what you see or don’t see. And soon we are not fixing our minds on the things above but on earthly things.

Isaiah 26:3 gives us a promise of peace for a mind stayed on Christ. That promise would extend to our imaginations – we are not imagining the worse – but we are at peace.

You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on you: because he trusts in you. (KJV)