Doing the Christian life means more than merely putting off the anxieties that monopolize one’s thoughts, it means replacing adverse thoughts with the spiritually advantageous; consuming the true, consuming the honorable, consuming the just/righteous/good, consuming the pure, consuming the lovely, or aesthetically pleasing, consuming the commendable, or worth offering to others and directing the mind to think upon those things, to reckon this content, this subject matter, as profitable.
The content that ought to populate our minds throughout our days is the stuff of divine virtue that inspires worship toward God, even as we live and interact in a world marked by depravity. Though our present earthly citizenship requires that we interact in world around us – a world full of content quite the opposite of what Paul advocates as the object of Christian thinking – we refuse to let content detrimental to the Christian life take center-stage.
Now, when Paul commands the Philippians to think on these particular qualities, he does so as a man who understands the holistic nature of the human creation. Paul is not a gnostic, after mere knowledge or information, data; he’s after a transformed behavior that actually reflects God’s own ethic, that is, a life lived out as a reflection of the gospel, a citizenship that manifests the Kingdom. And Paul understands that we act in accordance with what we think.
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