Home Pastors Articles for Pastors 5 Ways Leaders Must Guard Their Minds

5 Ways Leaders Must Guard Their Minds

Leaders are readers. Leaders are learners. And leaders are definitely thinkers. Your mind is a special gift from God. It’s one of the most important tools in a leader’s arsenal. Your mind can potentially store 100 trillion thoughts, yet the average person only uses 3½ million thoughts a year. We only use about 10 percent of our mental (or brain) capacity.

While our minds can be the epicenter of creative and influential leadership, our minds are also battlegrounds that must be guarded. All moral failure begins in the mind. 1 Peter 1:13 says, “Prepare your minds for action. Be self-controlled.” Notice that self-control and mental preparation go together. God says that the self-controlled person is the mentally fit person. We can love God with our minds. We’ve often talked about loving God with our hearts, but God says we can love Him with our mind. I believe that God wants you to make the most of your mind. As that commercial says, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

We battle an old sinful nature that often clouds our thinking. We live in a world that bombards us with false and counterfeit philosophies. And we have an enemy who is constantly on the prowl seeking to devour us. So how do we guard our minds well? Control what you allow in.

Second Corinthians 10:5 says, “Take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” The Bible is very specific in giving us five threats we are to guard our minds against. Share this list with your staff members and the key leaders of your church.

We are to guard our minds against false teaching.

Doctrinal errors, being diverted from the gospel, will run our minds. Scripture talks about “the faith once delivered to the saints.” That means it’s been around. The message of the gospel has never changed. I often say at Saddleback, “If it’s new, it’s not true.” So we’re to guard our minds against false teachings and false religions.

How do we do that? By knowing the truth. If you know the truth, you can instantly spot a lie. Treasury agents are trained to detect counterfeit not by handling counterfeit bills. They give them real bills and study them so well that when a counterfeit dollar bill is put in their hands, they immediately know that it’s false.

We are to guard our minds against temptation.

The Bible says in Matthew 26:41 that we are to “Watch and pray to avoid temptation.” Psalm 101:3 says, “I will set no wicked thing before my eyes.” That’s a good verse to put on your television, your computer screen and even your mobile devices. A.W. Tozer said, “America has lost its ability to blush.” If we’re going to guard our mind, we have to guard what we watch and look at online because it causes temptation.