Pastor Rick Warren: Fill Your Mind with Biblical Truth

You don’t get it from television. You don’t get it from the internet. You don’t get it from magazines. Wisdom comes from God.

The Bible says in Proverbs 15:14, “A wise person is hungry for knowledge, while the fool feeds on trash” (NLT). You can either feed on truth or feed on trash. Whatever you fill your mind with is what’s going to come out—garbage in, garbage out. If you want to be wise, you’ve got to feed every day on truth, not trash.

There are three kinds of things you can fill your mind with: You can fill your mind with poison, you can fill your mind with junk food, or you can fill your mind with health food.

Poison is stuff that destroys your system. It’s bad for you. It takes you down. Pornography is poison. For instance, they may say, “I can watch that stuff. It doesn’t bother me anymore.” That’s the problem! When you can watch and read stuff that is profane, blasphemous, evil, vile, and abusive and it doesn’t bother you, you have a problem. You have become a fool.

Wise people protect their mind. They put on the helmet of salvation. They don’t just allow anything into their mind. They keep the poison out.

Junk food is neither good nor bad. It just has no nutritional value to it. Most of the stuff you see on tv is not evil. It’s just junk food. It’s what I call stuffing. But the problem with stuffing is that when you stuff yourself with stuffing, you have no hunger for truth. If you watch TV for four hours, your mind is full of empty calories that don’t help your body or your mind.

Health food is nutritional food. It helps you grow and maintain your health. It is truth, and the wise person feeds on truth. It makes you wiser—in your relationships, your time, your money, your business, your parenting, your marriage, and every other area of your life.

The first place you need to go to fill your mind with truth is God’s Word. The more you develop the habit of spending time each day reading and studying the Bible, the wiser you will become.