Mind over matter — that’s a phrase I’ve heard since I was a kid. It suggests that our mind is powerful enough to control and master anything we set it on. Entire cults have been built around this lie.
Every one of us has had things we wanted to change, yet we’ve found ourselves with little or no success. Why can it seem impossible to stop thinking about something our flesh loves, even when we know it’s not pleasing to God?
The answer is simple:
We’ve convinced ourselves that we love things God says we shouldn’t.
Love and affection create desire.
Love and affection for sinful things create lust — and lust leads to disobedience.
Here is the critical key:
Love creates desire… but hatred destroys desire.
It creates a repulsion toward sin.
So yes — there are some things you must learn to hate.
“But Pastor Tim, isn’t hatred bad?”
Hatred toward people is always bad.
But hatred toward sinful thoughts, desires, and actions is godly and necessary.
God created the emotion of hatred so it could destroy the desire for sin.
Unless fleshly love is replaced with godly hatred — or at least holy repulsion — that sin will continue to pull on you. And when it does, it leads straight into the devil’s playground: sin, guilt, shame, condemnation, and ultimately, running from God.
Psalm 97:10 (NKJV) — “You who love the LORD, hate evil; He preserves the souls of His saints…”
Proverbs 8:13 (NKJV) — “The fear of the LORD is to hate evil…”
We’ve all said, “That’s it! I’m never doing this again!”
But too many people try to mentally overpower their flesh — and the success rate is miserable. That’s why people fall back into drinking, smoking, pornography, sexual sin, anger, greed, lust, and more.
So what’s the answer?
The answer is to reframe your thinking so you learn to love what God loves and hate what God hates.
Proverbs 23:7 (NKJV) — “For as he thinks in his heart, so is he…”
Romans 12:2 (NKJV) — “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…”
Your mind is renewed by replacing stinking thinking with God’s thinking.
Take pornography, for example. Thinking about it because you “like it” is stinking thinking. It produces desire and lust. God says to hate what He hates. He hates pornography — not the people involved, but the evil behind it.
Over 35 years ago, God began changing my thinking about pornography. He opened my eyes, and I began to think like this:
“Tim, statistics show that most of these girls were sexually abused.
They are someone’s daughters — God’s daughters.
Satan tormented them until they were trapped in this darkness.
They were meant for a beautiful future — marriage, family, love.
I hate what the devil has done to them.
I hate how pornography destroys lives.
If I watch it, I support the industry that ruins them — and destroys me in the process.
I hate porn.
God, send laborers to rescue these women. Deliver them from this evil.”
When I started thinking biblically and praying for those women, it didn’t take long for me to develop a deep hatred for pornography.
So whenever temptation tried to creep in, I reframed my thinking, prayed again, and the desire vanished. Again and again, the temptation lost its grip.
This principle applies to anything — food, lust, anger, greed, bad habits, and more.
There are godly ways to think about everything.
There are things we should hate — especially the things that destroy people’s lives.
We all want to be godly examples.
Framing what was once a lust through God’s perspective — paired with prayer — gives us strength and victory.
As Scripture says:
Proverbs 23:7 (NKJV) — “For as he thinks in his heart, so is he…”
So when temptation comes, ask God to help you think the right way — to love the proper use of something and to hate the sinful misuse of it. That’s why God gave you the emotion of hatred: to break sinful desires and create godly repulsion toward sin.
Romans 6:18 (NLT) — “Now you are free from your slavery to sin, and you have become slaves to righteous living.”
