THE RENEWING OF YOUR MIND
By: Neil D. Gass

Don’t like your life the way it is? Feeling inadequate, intimidated, discouraged, depressed? Not achieving your potential? Thinking if it weren’t for bad luck you’d have no luck at all? You’re just the kind of person God wants to bless and prosper by revealing to you HIS method of making your life all it was designed to be! Your problem isn’t people, circumstances, conditions or bad luck. It’s much simpler than that. It’s your THINKING! God says you can change your life by changing your thinking! (Rom. 12:2) Change the things you say to yourself when you talk to yourself and you change your life. I call it “TAKING CHARGE of YOUR LIFE!” Getting out of the PASSENGER’S SEAT of your life and into the DRIVER’S SEAT. And the key is the RENEWING OF YOUR MIND!

If you’re a passenger (a conformer) it’s not because of genetics, luck, circumstances, the devil or other people. It’s because you THINK like a passenger. If you want to be a driver (a transformer) you have to THINK like one! Proverbs 23:7 says, “As a man THINKS in his heart SO HE IS.” You are what you are because of what think in your heart and you can change what you are by changing what you think. Here are two easily grasped principles:

(1) Everything is created TWICE!

For instance, the car you drive. It was created the FIRST time in the mind and imagination of some design engineer. It was created the SECOND time by the hands and skills of many workers. If it hadn’t been created MENTALLY first, it wouldn’t exist MATERIALLY! You were created in the image of your Creator to be like Him – a creative force. And you are! Your life today is the creation of your thoughts in all of your yesterdays. The good news is that if you don’t like what you’ve created today, you can CREATE a life you’ll love living tomorrow! As long as your thoughts, perceptions and ”self talk” are under your control, you can, with God’s power and wisdom, create a life you’ll love living life-long.

(2) Not What Happens TO You But What Happens IN You Determines Your Outcomes!

It’s not what HAPPENS to you but what you THINK about it when it does that is either your problem or your solution. My old Irish dad used to say to me when I was a boy. “Son you just live in your own wee world, don’t you?” He was right, of course. In fact, everybody lives in his own wee world; the world of his own thoughts and perceptions. You have no other world but the self-created world of your thinking. A world of personal experience created by you as you thinkabout, perceive, interpret and explain to yourself what’s going on in your life.

You see, you don’t really experience events, circumstances and people DIRECTLY. You experience them through the “FILTER” of your thoughts and interpretations. The things you SAY TO YOURSELF about events, circumstances and people create your inner world of feelings and experiences about them. In effect, you don’t live with the people or circumstances in your life. You live with your perceptions and thoughts about them. I live with the woman I THINK my wife is. Whether my perceptions about her are accurate or not, I experience her through them. Other people experience her quite differently through their own unique perceptions of her.

Contrary to what most of us were taught, people, events, circumstances are not “doing it to you!” They can’t! It’s an inside job and YOU’RE doing it to you. The wonderful, liberating, empowering truth is that you don’t NEED to change the people, events or circumstances of your life in order to change your life. You only need to change the way you think about them, interpret them, what you say to yourself about them to change the way they affect you and what you feel about them! Yes you can change the only thing that matters, the only thing that needs changed, YOUR THINKING! In doing so you’ll change your life for good and for ever, because “As a man THINKS in his heart SO IS he!” You can TAKE CHARGE OF Your LIFE by taking charge of your thinking. You can “be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Rom. 12:2)