Here are excuses made by tenants who couldn’t pay their rent:
“With my daughter’s graduation, our new boat, and our trip to Europe, we’re a little strapped for cash.”
“I didn’t pay the rent because I’m saving up to move.”
“I would have paid the rent, but I thought I needed it more than you.”
“I can’t pay this month’s rent because my grandfather died.” The landlord said, “He died again? That’s the 3rd time this year.”
“We have the money, but the bank won’t let us have it.”
“I was on holidays overseas for two weeks so why should I have to pay rent when I wasn’t even there?”
One landlord discovered that his tenants were selling off his furniture and appliances to pay their rent. He couldn’t evict them fast enough.
Sometimes it’s no laughing matter. A friend of ours had a tenant trash his basement. The tenant refused to leave and wanted his damage deposit back. “Trust me,” he told us, “I’ll be screening my next renter very carefully.”
I suppose this rule should apply to our minds too. Our heads are for rent, you might say. Thoughts we allow to take up residence are the building blocks of a life. I woke up one morning singing a song I hadn’t heard since 1978, “The love of my life is my best friend’s wife and I just don’t know what to do about it.” I thought: I do know what to do about it. Evict that thought. Love my wife. What inhabits our minds determines the course of our lives. We need to dislodge, expel, and banish certain thoughts.
Warren Wiersbe wrote, “Wrong thinking leads to wrong feeling, and before long the heart and mind are pulled apart and we are strangled by worry” [and a host of other maladies]. 2 Cor. 10:5 (NIV) bids us to
“take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”
Romans 12:2 (NIV) says,
“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
Does a thought rob your peace? Bring shame, anxiety, bitterness, worry? Evict it. Replace it with truth. Have the conviction to carry out an eviction. Send those old thoughts packing. No more excuses. Speaking of which, a guy told his landlord, “I wanted to pay the rent, but I was in a coma.”
