Starting Right
Starting Right is a 5 minute Day Starter to help keep you motivated, encouraged, and focused throughout your day. DannyMac is a pastor, teacher, motivational speaker, husband, and father. His years of leading and training people have given him vast experience in helping individuals to accomplish change in their lives and meet their goals. He can help you set the course for your day by offering practical advice from God's Word in a positive and fun way. There is no better way to begin your day than by Starting Right with DannyMac.
Starting Right
Sleep Better Tonight: Taking Your Thoughts Captive
Ever noticed how your exhausted body betrays you the moment your head hits the pillow? Danny Mac tackles this universal frustration in today's episode, offering both spiritual wisdom and practical advice for those nights when your mind races at 100 miles per hour despite your physical fatigue.
Drawing from 2 Corinthians 10:5, Danny unpacks what it truly means to "take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ." With a vivid analogy of calf roping at a rodeo, he illustrates how we can lasso our runaway thoughts—those anxious worries about tomorrow's challenges or unfinished business that seem to accelerate just when we need rest the most. The image is powerful: just as a skilled cowboy can stop a charging calf in its tracks, we can learn to halt our racing minds and redirect them toward peace.
As you face another night, remember you have the spiritual authority to stop anxious thoughts in their tracks and enter the rest God intends for you.
Good morning and welcome to Starting Right with Danny Mac. I'm going to be here every Monday to Friday to help you get a great five-minute start to your day. So grab your cup of coffee, sit back, relax and let me help you start your day right. How was your sleep last night? No, seriously, it's. How well did you sleep last night?
Speaker 1:Most people I know are saying that they are not sleeping well at all right now, and that's a real shame and it also is a real problem. Now, one of the things I dislike the most and this is what usually happens to me when I don't sleep is that I can be up and I can be reading a book or something before I go to bed and I'm really, really tired, and so I put the book down, I get ready for bed, I climb into bed and now, all of a sudden, I am 100% awake, my body is ready to get up and go do something, when just a few minutes ago, I was so tired. It is like as soon as my head hits the pillow, my mind hits the gas pedal and all of a sudden it is now roaring and every thought about every situation and everything I'm going through throughout the day or that I will have to go through tomorrow, comes racing back and racing through my mind and causing me all kinds of grief. Rarely are those thoughts positive thoughts. They're all worried about having to get this done, having to get that done. What if this bad thing happens? What if this doesn't work out the way I need it to? What if the pieces don't come together in this the way I'm hoping it will? And all of a sudden my mind is just blazing down the road at 100 miles an hour and it's so frustrating.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I need to do is take this portion of scripture from 2 Corinthians 10 and verse 5 and be able to apply it more effectively. In my life I've known the truth of this scripture and I have taught from the scripture a number of times. The truth of it can still elude us if we're not careful. Number of times the truth of it can still elude us if we're not careful. It says this we demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. Often the part that is so important in that particular verse is the last portion, where it says we take every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ, we stop the thoughts from running away from us so that when our mind all of a sudden starts to explode at a hundred miles an hour, particularly in a direction we don't want it to go, we need to learn how to stop that and to bring it back to the place that it should be.
Speaker 1:In my mind I see it played out like this have you ever seen calf roping in a rodeo? Where the calf breaks out of the stall and behind it comes the cowboy on the horse who lassies the calf and the horse stops when that calf comes to the end of the rope, all of a sudden it stops, it's thrown and it turns completely around and comes to a dead stop. Its momentum is completely canceled. And that's how I see what this portion of scripture is trying to tell us when it says to take every thought captive. When our minds start to run at that hundred miles an hour, we need to be able to lasso it and to stop it, and to stop it right there in its tracks, and we must learn to make that happen on a regular basis.
Speaker 1:God promises that he will give us rest, but he also tells us in Romans, chapter 12, that we must have our minds renewed.
Speaker 1:We must learn to think in a different way.
Speaker 1:Our thought processes have to become those that are more in line with God than they are with the world, and so that means we have to learn to stop the old thought processes from happening, to bring us back in line with what God has for us and to stop it in its tracks so that we can literally take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ.
Speaker 1:If we can do that and learn to do that effectively, we will then learn how to stop our minds from racing when we're trying to get our rest and trying to get our sleep, and we will then learn how to stop our minds from racing when we're trying to get our rest and trying to get our sleep, and we will then be able to enter into the rest that God has for us. So I hope you have a great day, gang, and I hope you have a wonderful sleep tonight and know that when your mind starts to take off on you, you can stop it in its tracks and find the grace and peace of God to help you get through the night and to sleep well. Have a good day. We'll talk to you tomorrow. Thank you for listening today and I invite you to join me Monday to Friday, right here on Starting Right with Denny Mack.
