We’ve all done it: hung up the phone. Blocked a text sender. Told a scammer we wouldn’t be scammed. An implied or spoken “No” ended these exchanges. In our rebuke was the authority that silenced what would try to impose itself on us.

But are we so definitive when it comes to the thoughts that would intrude on us, bombard us—indeed, scam us—with suggestions of despair, illness, anger, or injustice?

The master Christian, Christ Jesus, is our model for this mental censure. The Gospels relate numerous times in his healing practice when he used rebuke as a tool in his spiritual arsenal—not against individuals, but in casting out intrusive, material beliefs that are the seedbed of sin and disease. This showed his utter rejection of any assumption that challenged the supremacy and reality of God, good, and of man as actually Godlike and spiritual. And following in his footsteps, as he said we could and would, we have this same spiritual capacity, and the inherent right, to reject the evil that would say that we are subject to sickness, disability, injustice, or anything else that isn’t of God.