Building A Better Me: Delete Corn

The Bible clearly teaches that you will “reap what you sow.” This is so simple that it is almost embarrassing to mention. However, it can be difficult to put into practice. We sow first and then we reap. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our thinking. When a farmer plants a seed he can’t expect an ear of corn until the seed is in the ground. Give it time to germinate, be cultivated and eventually the planted seed will reproduce after itself and produce a harvest. It’s an easy concept, but the difficulty is living out the principle, especially in our thought life. In Galatians 6:7 we are told, “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap” (NKJV). In 2 Corinthians 9:6, we are warned that if we sow sparingly, we will naturally also reap sparingly, but if we sow bountifully, we will also reap in abundance. This is very evident where I grew up. I didn’t have a hard time with the concept of planting seed and reaping a harvest. Growing up our backyard ended at a corn field. I lost many GI Joes in that Cornfield as I would run its rows searching for the days next big adventure with my trusted companion, an Airedale Terrier.

Year after year I gained first hand experience as to what it took to produce a harvest. Every fall, from my bedroom, I saw the harvesters gather stalks of corn leaving the land barren for snow fall. The next spring I would watch, from the same window that was my looking glass during harvest season, as the farmers come and plant seeds, rows and rows of seed. The produce of choice planted in the field behind that childhood home was, of course corn. As the summer months grew to a close each skinny stalk would reveal a leafy ear. Inside that ear, without exception was as planted, corn. To my knowledge the budding ears never yielded wheat, barley, of acorns. I’m sure the harvesters would have had great concern if after a season of planting corn seeds a wheat stalk or an oak sapling sprouted from the ground.

Your thought life is subject to the same process. What you’re putting in is going to come out. You have to ask yourself – what are you putting in? What are the influences in your life? Our thoughts, like our actions, have consequences. As relentlessly as you may try, you cannot think one thing and experience another.

For most of us everything that you feed your mind comes from past experiences. Unfortunately if you don’t start to sow different seed than the expressions of your past, the plant, the person, the “Better Me” that you’re trying to develop will never change. Unless you train your mind constructively things will never change. Where you have been, what you have done, and where you are now matters far less than where you are headed. If you continue in identifying with a current or prior LIFE by constantly thinking and talking about it, then nothing will ever change. You will forever be a past expression of yourself. If steps are not taken your thinking becomes automatic, impulsive, and often erroneous. Your thoughts often misrepresent reality by bending, distorting, deleting, exaggerating, or otherwise manipulating the truth.

Your mind works much like a computer, when you have a destructive, negative or other wise stupid thought you have an opportunity and a responsibility to delete that impulse. Just as you would hit the delete button on a keyboard after a typing error, you can delete that thought and conversation from mind. Encapsulate the thought by stating “That is not my thought. I will not give it ground to germinate.” Just like a correcting typing mistake repeat “I delete that thought, I delete that thought.” Paul (a writer in the new testament) teaches we are to take every thought captive, examine it, and make sure it lines up with the Word of God (2 Corinthians 10:5). Capture your thoughts, deleting destructive impulses, not allowing them to take root in your life and grow fruit.