Thoughts That Need Evicting

My son has been a landlord for years, so he can tell you stories of responsible tenants…and stories of renters who refuse to pay and refuse to move. Stories of banned substances and of mothers showing up to clean the house for their adult children. Thanks Mom!

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing a landlord is collecting cash. How much grace do you show? How hard do you push? How soon do you push them out? Ha! Here are some actual excuses made by tenants who couldn’t pay their rent:

“With my daughter’s graduation, our new boat, and our trip to Europe, we’re a little strapped for cash.”

“I didn’t pay the rent because I’m saving up to move.”

“We’re short on money. But don’t worry, we’ll pay. The artist messed up and my wife’s getting a refund on her tattoo.”

“I would have paid the rent, but I thought I needed it more than you.”

“My son is in law school…so I think you should back off a little about the rent.”

“I can’t pay this month’s rent because my grandfather died.” The landlord said, “He died again? That’s the 3rd time this year.”

“We have the money, but the bank won’t let us have it.”

“I was on holidays overseas for two weeks so why should I have to pay rent when I wasn’t even there?”

One landlord discovered that his tenants were selling off his furniture and appliances to pay their rent. He couldn’t evict them fast enough.

Sometimes being a landlord is no laughing matter. A friend of ours had a tenant trash his basement. The tenant refused to leave and wanted his damage deposit back. “I’m too old to deal with this,” he told us. “Trust me, I’ll be screening my next renter very carefully.”

I suppose this rule should apply to our minds too. Our heads are for rent, you might say. Thoughts we allow to take up residence are building blocks of a life. I woke up one morning singing a song I hadn’t heard since 1978, “the love of my life is my best friend’s wife and I just don’t know what to do about it.” I thought: I do know what to do about it. Evict that thought. Love my wife. Then I thought, I only have so many brain cells, why did I use some of them for that song? Ha! What inhabits our minds determines the course of our lives. We need to dislodge, expel, and banish certain thoughts.

Warren Wiersbe wrote, “Wrong thinking leads to wrong feeling, and before long the heart and mind are pulled apart and we are strangled by worry” [and a host of other maladies]. 2 Corinthians 10:5 (NIV) urges us to

 

“take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”

Romans 12:2 says,

 

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

J. B. Phillips put it this way: “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould, but let God re-mould your minds from within, so that you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good, meets all his demands and moves towards the goal of true maturity.”

When we make time to meditate on Scripture, pray, and hang out with godly people, our minds are nourished by things true, honourable, pure, and lovely, things that help us reflect the heart of God. And His peace will guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

So, examine your thoughts. Does a thought rob your peace? Bring shame, anxiety, bitterness, worry? Evict it. Replace it with truth. Have the conviction to carry out an eviction. Send those old thoughts packing. No more excuses. Speaking of which, a guy told his landlord, “I wanted to pay the rent, but I was in a coma.”