The Weekly Word: Soundtracks

By Robert Williams, Lead Pastor at The Bridge Church

I am the king of overthinking. I’m not sure when it started or where it came from, but I struggle so much with the day-to-day sometimes, simply because I overthink just about everything.

I’ll be sending a long text message and read it over 10 times before I send it. I’ll have a conversation with someone and spend the rest of the night rehashing it in my brain to make sure I didn’t say or do anything stupid. And if I did say or do anything stupid, I will think about that even more! Can anyone reading this relate?

Overthinking is when we run the same thoughts over and over and over again in our heads, as though we’re unintentionally meditating on them. I heard someone say once that if you know how to worry or overthink, then you know how to meditate.

Recently, though, I’ve been reading a phenomenal book written all about the concept of overthinking. It’s called “Soundtracks” and it’s written by a man named Jon Acuff.

In this book, Acuff talks about the fact that most of the time, when we overthink, the problem isn’t the thought itself, but the broken soundtrack we run through our minds over and over again; things that aren’t true or helpful or kind. These thoughts generally tend to be about ourselves. Anyone else relate to this idea of overthinking and playing broken soundtracks in our heads?

The apostle Paul wrote about the concept of our thoughts in his second letter to the church in Corinth. He writes…

For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. 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.

The bad news? When it comes down to it, the biggest wars we fight in life are greater than the ones that might seem so obvious. They are wars that happen in our minds, and almost no one can see them.

The good news? God has given us weapons and the power to demolish entire strongholds in order that we might take every thought captive to win those wars on a regular basis.

In my best Arnold Schwarzenegger voice… “You have the power!”

Acuff gives us the solution to overthinking. He says that we’ve got to…

• Retire our broken soundtracks.
• Replace them with new ones.
• Repeat the new ones until they’re as automatic as the old ones.

Retire. Replace. Repeat.

Can I ask you something? What would happen if we took the Word of God, the only weapon that God’s given us, that is Scripture (Ephesians 6:17), and used it to replace the broken soundtracks in our heads and hearts?

You see, God has already given us awesome new soundtracks throughout the Bible to declare new truths over our lives. In His Word he calls us beloved, adopted, beautifully and wonderfully made, a royal priesthood. And you know what? Those are soundtracks I could listen to all day.