Charles J. Clarke III is the creator of the BOLT personality profile concept. BOLT profiling was mainly created to build better relationships and to develop better interpersonal skills.

The BOLT personality test acronym stands for bull, owl, lamb, and tiger. Today we are going to pick on the owl personality that we all tend to lean on for processing our internal thoughts.

Let’s examine 2 Corinthians 10:5-6 (NLT), “We destroy every proud obstacle that keeps people from knowing God. We capture their rebellious thoughts and teach them to obey Christ.”

We should know by now that sin evolves from our thoughts. Let’s be honest, our minds can either work for us or against us. Our minds can either be in tuned with God’s truth or in tuned with the devil’s lies. When our brain works for us, it helps us to stay consistently positive, reach goals, and maintain a sense of gratitude. But when the stinking-thinking kicks into overthinking it makes us become bitter, resentful, nasty, less focused, negative, and discouraged. All of these factors can potentially lead us to the point of self-sabotage and self-destruction. Hence the reason Paul is instructing us to captive those negative-sin producing thoughts.

Proverbs 12:5 confirms, “The thoughts of the righteous are just, But the counsels of the wicked are deceitful.”

It’s imperative that we train our minds to work for us and not against us. When we line God’s truths up and compare them to the devil’s lies there should be an unequivocal distinction that propels us to the light of God’s will, plan and purpose for our lives!

Beloved, much like we exercise our bodies, we too must train our brains (minds) to submit to God’s truths and by doing so we are able to destroy those ‘obstacles’ Paul is referring to in the above scripture.

Dr. Caroline Leaf, a cognitive neuroscientist, points out that the brain takes 18 years to grow, and a lifetime to mature. Interestingly, while every organ in our bodies are fully formed at birth and got bigger as our bodies grew, our brain actually takes a full 18 years to grow. Not to mention, it continues to develop and matures until the day we die. This simply means no matter how old we are our brain is incessantly evolving.

So to my fellow Owls, don’t be an over-thinker and when you do think make sure what your thinking about lines up with God’s truths and not the devil’s lies! Many of the psalms were written by over-thinkers who were facing danger, emotional unrest, fear, or despair. But they overcame their propensity to overthink by incorporating scripture and prayer into their thoughts.

David gives us an excellent example of this in Psalm 94:19 he said, “When doubts [thoughts] filled my mind, your comfort gave me renewed hope and cheer.”