When we are eating in restaurants, background music often fills the gaps in our conversations and the times when we let our minds wander away from the needs of the day.
We can also be carrying a background “music” of thoughts in our mind. These thoughts can stream continuously in our mind while we are going about our day. We may be wishing for something we do not have, worried about a need in life, worried for people we love, ruminating about all we need to do beyond what we need to do in the moment, or any other topics that are not focused on God. These thoughts streaming in the background of our mind can and often produce fruits in our lives. A background stream of wrongs we perceive can produce discord in our relationships with others. A background stream of worry can produce greed and hoarding God’s blessings. These are only a couple examples.
However, if we are children of God adopted into His family through faith in His grace alone, we also have the Holy Spirit who can remind us of God and His Word throughout our day. We need to be reading God’s word, meditating on it and memorizing it, for the Spirit to bring it to our minds. Praise to God and thanksgiving can be our background music instead. A continual heart of praise and thanksgiving dissipates worries and frustrations, and instead it produces the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Unlike the world, we are not seeking a generic gratefulness to give us a better life, but we are grateful for God adopting us into His family and providing us a hope for eternal life beyond whatever we experience in this life.
The Apostle John says in I John 4:11: “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” When we remind ourselves of God’s love toward us, we are motivated better to obey Him by loving others.
The Bible also discusses how God’s Words should fill our time. Psalms 1:2 says, “but his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night.” Paul tells us in I Thess. 5:16-18, “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”
The message at church today spoke on a Psalm where David writes,
Teach me your way, O LORD,
Psalm 86:11-13
that I may walk in your truth;
unite my heart to fear your name.
I give thanks to you, O Lord my God, with my whole heart,
and I will glorify your name forever.
For great is your steadfast love toward me;
you have delivered my soul from the depths of Sheol.
David exhibits this continual stream of praise and thanks, with his whole heart, seeking to glorify God. What motivates him to praise God? He remembers God’s love towards him that he delivered his soul from death, temporal and eternal. He remembers that God gives him hope for a meaningful life on earth for God’s glory and a hope for eternal life free from sin and death.
Romans 5:8-9 reminds us of this good news, the gospel, “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.”
If we are children of God, may we cancel the stream of thoughts produced by our sin nature or even evil spirits in our spiritual battles, and instead carry a stream of praise and thanksgiving for God.
If you are reading this and not a born again children of God (John 3), may God open your eyes to your sin nature (Romans 3:23), your enmity with God and His ways (Romans 8:7), and cast off vain hopes of eternal life based on your inherent goodness, rituals, or religious efforts, and trust in the gospel of Christ. The Word of God, the Bible, only provides Christ as the way of salvation (John 14:6).