Thought for the Day 16/06/21 - brainWASHING

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The total advertising spend in the UK was estimated to peak at over £26 billion by the end of 2020. 

This number has increased markedly since 2010 alone, when British companies invested a cumulative £15.5 billion in their advertising campaigns ... and yet the critics of Christianity still accuse the Church, with it's low key publicity and it's formal Sunday sermons, of being in the business of brainwashing!

Brainwashing?!

Not a nice word, really. 

It was one that was thrown at me when I first became a believer by some people who seem to have wished I hadn't done. I'm happy to say, it didn't shake me much.

Now I have to say this, that over the thirty-six years I've spent in Christian ministry this is not an objection to someone's new-found faith that I've really come across very much ... but it does happen. 

When confronted with a major change in someone's life, concerned friends and family members have in my experience been much more likely to allege mental illness!

It's understandable, quite honestly.

It's a common response to something we don't understand in or coming from a person to conclude that what we can't understand IS actually irrational and that person MUST have taken leave of their senses.

But the allegation of brain-washing doesn't seem to go away, and there do still seem to be strange cults out there that actually DO coerce people's thinking against their will ... and that really helps no-one at all.

What is actually meant by the term 'brainwashing'?

It seems to me that the issue of a person's genuine freedom of choice is really the defining issue with 'brainwashing'.

It is usually defined as something like this:

"any technique designed to manipulate human thought or action against the desire, will, or knowledge of the individual."

• technique ... a particular method for achieving something
  
  
• designed to ... the end goal is deliberate
  
  
• manipulate ... to manipulate is to control or influence a person or situation cleverly or unscrupulously
  
  
• against the
  
  
• desire
  
  
• will, or
  
  
• knowledge
  
  

of the individual.

Now, that is a million miles from the things a Christian does by their own disciplined, conscious choice to grow spiritually, and to establish themselves in their Christian faith.

There's a world of difference between controlling the thoughts of your mind, and ceding control of it to another.

Taking control of your own mind

What the Christian, in fact, does with their mind is to stop it from just sucking up the ideology pushed at it by the world around them that is organised without reference to God.

Choosing instead deliberately the wisdom of God, Christians seek to focus their minds on the truth and the wisdom that they find laid out in God's Word, choosing to do to their thought lives with God's truth what the less voluntary 'push' of the modern media and advertising industries do to conform our minds daily to stuff we haven't chosen to be shaped by.

You see, what the Bible's about is providing what is wanted by the individual, not pushing at a person what is not.

What the Bible is about is embracing voluntarily a discipline and a practice (but NOT a technique!) that goes back at least to the time of Moses and Joshua before the people of Israel ever got their Promised Land.

The purpose of all that we read in our verse for the Day today is to seize the initiative and responsibility for our thinking, to 'wash' and to clean up the Christian mind in rejection of the godless attitudes and ideas that are pushed at a believer every day.

It's a matter of ...

Deliberately grounding ourselves in wisdom for living by

So as young Joshua took over the awesome responsibility of leading God's people into the Land, God spoke to him about deliberately shaping, forming and controlling his own thinking:

  (“After the death of Moses the servant of the Lord, the Lord said to Joshua son of Nun, Moses’ assistant: Be strong and courageous, because you will lead these people to inherit the land I swore to their ancestors to give them.”)

‭‭Joshua‬ ‭1:1, 6‬ ‭NIVUK‬‬

How would Joshua have the wisdom and understanding he'd need for this task?

That's where our Verse for the Day today came in:

“Keep this Book of the Law always on your lips; 

meditate on it day and night, 

so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. 

Then you will be prosperous and successful.”

‭‭Joshua‬ ‭1:8‬

https://www.bible.com/113/jos.1.8.nivuk

This verse specifies:

Keeping God's Law on your LIPS ... what is THAT?

The ancient practice of reading aloud quietly to oneself as an aid to memorisation is what's in view here ... get to know God's Word, that is, MEMORISING it!

The very next phrase supports this practise by repeating the idea: 'read it in undertones', it says.

Keeping to God's ways is the objective

Joshua's heart was devoted to the Lord ... Joshua WANTED to walk in God's ways because he acknowledged that God's ways were right, but the pressure of his culture and his peers and the cultures of Canaan that they would come across would be constantly pushing him the other way.

Joshua needed to seize the initiative over his own thinking to AVOID being brainwashed by the flow of ideas that weren't God's!

The point of this was to 'be careful to DO' the wisdom contained in God's Word.

This leads to success in God's cause and to wisdom

This verse says that if Joshua does this he will make his way prosperous 'and be wise', with the understanding that the fruit of wisdom in his mission would be success.

The Point

Memorising and meditating over God's Word is the key in a world full of pushy godless messaging to living in God's way and building foundations for life in wisdom and attainment.

If you don't wash your brain with God's Word our world will slush it with its ideology, and that doesn't lead to prospering in God's ways or to wisdom.

The Takeaway

Two 'M's: memorising and meditation ... as a habit.

How might we seriously start to set about this?