Wednesday: Think on These Things . . .
Daily Lesson for Wednesday 11th of February 2026
The peace that surpasses understanding will also “guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:7, NKJV). Our inner life needs protection. Interestingly, Philippians 4:7 uses a military metaphor in connection with God’s peace. The Greek verb (phroureō) is used to describe a garrison of soldiers guarding a city against invasion (2 Corinthians 11:32; compare Acts 9:24).
Another very important aspect of inner peace involves living in harmony with God’s will. “Great peace have they which love thy law: and nothing shall offend them” (Psalms 119:165).
Read Philippians 4:8-9. What specific actions are urged?
Image © Rolf Jansson at Goodsalt.com
Paul introduces Philippians 4:8-9 with “furthermore” (GNV) and a list of six virtues, followed by a succinct summary of them and encouragement to imitate Paul’s example. This closing cross-cultural exhortation fits well within the Greco-Roman setting of Philippi, with its dual emphasis on virtue and example. Interestingly, though, the focus is on biblical virtues, which is quite obvious from Paul’s omission of the four cardinal Greek virtues (prudence, justice, temperance, and courage).
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True—not accidentally, the list begins with the cardinal biblical virtue of truth, which Jesus (“Truly, I say . . .”) and the whole New Testament frequently emphasize (see, for example, Acts 26:25, Romans 1:18, 1 Corinthians 13:6, 2 Corinthians 4:2, Ephesians 4:15, 1 Timothy 3:15, James 1:18, 1 Peter 1:22, 1 John 2:21).
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Noble—the Greek word refers to a personal virtue (compare its other uses in 1 Timothy 3:8,11; Titus 2:2, where it is translated as “reverent” in the NKJV).
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Right—this virtue is defined by God’s righteous character (compare its use in Philippians 1:7).
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Pure—thought and action flowing from God’s justifying righteousness received by faith (see 1 John 3:3).
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Lovely—aesthetic beauty, seen widely in God’s creation.
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Admirable—“kind and winsome and gracious” (AMPC).
Paul gives two further qualifications, lest a pagan meaning be imputed to any of these virtues: “If anything is excellent or praiseworthy” (Philippians 4:8, NIV), we are to think on these heavenly virtues. Then, to remove all doubt and potential misunderstanding, Paul calls us to practice what we have learned, received, heard, and seen from his own example (Philippians 4:9).
Before I went to bed last might I had a deep conversation with Gemini. I observed how much time I had spent developing algorithms and data structures to support concurrency control mechanisms to support concurrency in transaction systems, Artificial Intelligence could create those same mechanisms within a few seconds. Then Gemini gave me quite an interesting response pointing our the value of the sort of work I do. It described its work as, “an LLM can now hallucinate a workable B-tree implementation in seconds”. That was in the midde of a several paragraph answer, but it stuck out as a contradiction, and I asked for an explanation.
Then Gemini gave me one of those mind-blowing answers that was not only important from the AI angle, it had deep ramifications for our spiritual experience as well.
Gemini said that its work was essentially that of a “Stochastic Parrot” (I love that description). It did not provide answers from reasoning from first principles about computer hardware, and programming strategies. Rather it assembled it from predicting each “word” in the algorithm from thousands of examples. It was hallucinating a workable illusion without reasoning it. It went on from there to describe the work of a modern computer engineer.
There was a lot more to the answer, but I slept on that notion of a “Stochastic Parrot” and awoke this morning with my comment for Sabbath School Net in my head.
Today we are reading one of the most powerful scriptures about the Christian experience. Many of us will remark on its importance and we will cobble together a few ideas and quotes from Scripture and maybe Ellen White about their importance. Think carefully! Are we acting like Stochastic Parrots, putting together a few sentences for a Seventh-day Adventist audience, hallucinating a “workable” experience? Or are we using the principles of experience to guide not only our words but our interaction with one another.
Paul said:
“Put into practice”, goes beyond the stochastic parroting of Christian words. I could, given a big flock of Galahs (Australia’s talkative pink and grey parrots), teach them to say the words of the Bible, but they would still be Galahs, not Christians.
Paul reminiscing on his life’s journey was able to pen down six cardinal principles that guided him through with the help of Christ. Paul was bold to recommend these principles of “true”, “Noble”, “right”, “pure”, “lovely”, “admirable” including “excellence” and “praise-worthy” to us, identifying them as tools that aided him to live a Christ-centered life.
As leaders in various fields of life endeavors, courage may fail us recommend our principles and approach to life issues to people around us, but consistency is key especially in the right principles that are yielding the best results. People may not openly confess their admiralty or appreciate every effort, but are watching and adapting with kin interest while coping and emulating every move secretly. CONSISTENCY is the watch word.
May God continue to help us, amen.
I first learned of computers after high school and was able to interact with them in college, where I remember we used to share one computer among ten students because they were few. In my class, there were a few who knew how to operate a computer, and those of us who did not know made numerous mistakes. I used to think it was the computer that was faulty until our lecturer taught us a universal truth in the computing world: if the raw data is not good, the computer can only generate bad output—GIGO, meaning Garbage In, Garbage Out.
The human mind, being far more complex than any advanced computer ever designed, also operates on the basic principle of GIGO. On any normal day, the human mind processes over 10,000 thoughts, translating to 3.5 million annually. If one lives to be 75 years, this amounts to over 26 million different thoughts. Negative thoughts, at best, poison our minds and ultimately our souls. These thoughts range from self-pity, blaming others instead of ourselves, victim mentality, to anger and bitterness.
Paul, in Philippians 4:8, prescribes a solution by saying, “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” The truth is that sin is so sinful that we must stay as far away from it as possible. One does not have to open a sewer in order to know it stinks. As Jesus said, “Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”