If you stop and evaluate where you are in life, what would you see as your mindset? Are you a positive, can-do person who has set goals and believes you can achieve them? Or are you the opposite-aimless, with a negative attitude and very little clue how to reach your goals, if you even have any? Sometimes it take a shift: you must change your mind in order to change your life. What happens around you and to you is often shaped by your thoughts- your view-of what life presents to you. You’ve heard many times that your attitude can determine what you get out of life, the heights or the depths you will reach. Your attitude is a function of your mindset. It may be difficult to accomplish, but changing your thinking can greatly affect your life. It is totally within your power to control the way you react to life. This is controlling your mindset! Having a specific mindset will determine whether situations will control you or you control them.
Two people can experience the same set of circumstances, such as extreme poverty, but the outcome may be completely different because of the way they respond to their circumstances. Their mindset determines their course of action. For years, whenever I had a problem, people would tell me, “Well, just give it to God”. Now, that’s great and true! But I never understood exactly how to do that…until now! Daily, I go through these steps (and sometimes two or three times a day if I’m in a particularly hard situation). At those moments when I am dealing with doubt, hurt, fear, pride, bitterness, resentment, anger, and any other negative feelings, I’m often too emotional “to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5).
I need some guidelines to help me through. Having these steps handy has made all the difference in the world. Going through these four steps every time we are confronted with a thought or a feeling, “that is not of faith”, is the only way we can stay cleansed and open vessels so God’s life can continue to flow and He can use us. We have to allow God to manifest in our lives as we follow His footsteps to guide us and see us through our situations. The steps are as follows:
- Recognizing, acknowledging, and experiencing our ungodly thoughts and emotions as they come in.
- Confessing our sins and choosing to “turn around” from following them.
- Giving over to God all that He has shown us is “not of faith”.
- Reading His Word and replacing the lies with the truth.
Just think, if we didn’t have Christ in our lives, all our fights with loved ones, all our guilt, our failures, mistakes, ungodliness, errors, wrongs, immorality, and every sin we have ever committed would always be with us. We would try to bury them and forget about them, but they would always be there to motivate our actions. We could never get away from them or have a fresh new start. No wonder so many relationships “without Christ” fail. I weep at the thought because those miracles, that answer, that cure and love is there. Most of the things that God shows us are “of the flesh”, and will usually go away immediately or at least within a few days if we are faithful to go through these cleansing steps.
The renewing of the mind is the single most important factor in living the transformed life. If we will change our minds, we can change our lives. If we can change our lives, God can change our world through us. #Transformyourmind #RenewYourMindsetInGod #BeYeTransformedByTheRenewingOfYourMind #EvaluateYourMindset
Lucretia Cargill 