I Comply And I Argue In My Head

Your hands are perfect.

Anybody watching would say you are the most cooperative man in the place. You do it exactly as written, at the right time, in the right order, and you have never once been spoken to about any of it.

And behind your eyes, all day, there is a court case.

You are making the argument. Not once. Continuously. You explain, to nobody, why this part is wrong. You anticipate the answer. You have a better response ready. You have been building this case for about three years and it is airtight.

Nobody has ever heard one word of it.

Here is what has started to worry you, and it is not the disagreement.

It is that you go home at seven absolutely finished. Not from the work. The work is fine. The work is honestly not that hard for a man who has been doing it this long.

You are exhausted from the arguing.

Eleven hours of an unspoken rebuttal is a full day's labor on top of a full day's labor, and you have been doing both every day for three years, and nobody in your life knows about the second one.

Your wife thinks the job is grinding you down. It is not. The second job is.

So let me deal with that, because there is a passage that goes straight at it, and it does not ask you to change your mind about anything.

Bringing into captivity every thought

Paul writes about a war that is not fought where people expect, and he is precise about the battlefield.

Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. (2 Corinthians 10:5, King James Version)

Every thought. Into captivity. To Christ.

Notice the two things it does not say. It does not say every thought must be silenced. It does not say every thought must be handed to whoever is in charge of your working day.

It says thoughts go into custody, and the custody belongs to Christ.

You have somewhere to put that argument that is not your own head, and 2 Corinthians 10:5 makes the custody Christ's rather than anybody else's. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a thought into keeping, and He has been standing next to that court case for three years.

That distinction matters more than it sounds.

Nobody is asking you to hand your opinion to the arrangement. The arrangement has no claim on your mind at all and never did. What is on offer is somewhere for the argument to be set down that is not the inside of your skull at eleven at night.

You are able to put a thought into somebody else's keeping, and Scripture calls that captivity to Christ rather than surrender to men. The Spirit of God is the one who receives it, and it is written in 2 Corinthians 10 that this is what the whole campaign is for.

Now look at the word imaginations, because it is doing real work in that verse.

An imagination here is a reasoning. A constructed case. Something built. Paul is describing exactly what you have been assembling for three years: a structure made of arguments.

You have built something real in there, and the written word takes structures like that seriously enough to name them. The Holy Spirit is not dismissive of a man's three year case, and 2 Corinthians 10:5 treats it as substantial rather than silly.

The argument has no address

Here is the practical problem with the case, and it has nothing to do with whether it is right.

The case has no address. There is nobody to deliver it to. It does not get said, and saying it would change nothing, and both of those are already known, which is why it has stayed inside.

So it circulates. Every day it goes around again, gets slightly better, and comes back to the start.

That is what is costing you the eleven hours. Not the disagreement. The circulation. A thought with nowhere to go has to keep moving.

You are carrying something that has nowhere to land, and Scripture opens a place for exactly that rather than telling anybody to stop thinking. The Spirit of God is the one who gives an unaddressed argument an address, and He has had one available the entire time.

There is a second cost, and it is the one that will get your attention.

The case is starting to color the people. It began as a case about a step in a pattern. Somewhere in year two it started including the people who wrote the pattern, and now there is a tone in it.

That is what an argument does when it circulates too long. It has to recruit somebody to be against.

You have been slowly acquiring an opponent nobody ever appointed, and the written word calls that a high thing that exalts itself rather than a legitimate case. The Holy Spirit is the one who catches that early, and 2 Corinthians 10 is where the catching happens.

Say it at the door

So here is the thing to do, and it takes eight seconds, and you do it standing up.

Tomorrow morning, at the door, before you go in, say out loud in one sentence what the argument is.

One sentence. Not the case. Not the version with the anticipated response in it. The plain thing: I think that step is wrong because of this.

Then say that you are leaving it there, and go in.

You are putting a three year case into custody rather than losing it, and 2 Corinthians 10:5 says thoughts go into captivity to Christ. The Spirit of God is the one who takes it at that door, and He is not asking you to stop believing it.

The reason it has to be out loud and at the door is that the argument is a physical habit by now. It starts in the parking lot. It has a location.

Say it out loud in that location and the habit has been answered before it starts. Not suppressed. Answered.

You have been permitted to keep the opinion and set down the labor, and it is written that every thought goes into captivity rather than into silence. The Holy Spirit is the one who does the carrying from there, and 2 Corinthians 10:5 is where the arrangement is written.

Then you go in and do the work exactly as written, exactly as you have for three years, and you go home at seven with one day's tiredness instead of two.