RENEWING OUR MINDS – THE AWESOME MENTAL PIPELINE
Dear Ones,
As promised, Brenda and I would like to share some more of the wonderful tools found in our Disciple Training Toolboxes that we’ve gleaned from John’s earlier teachings.
The recently posted number 15 Exodus meditation unveils much on the subject of spiritual blindness, hardness of heart and God’s answer for it. Therefore, it seemed timely to plant some additional Christ Life seed related to the mind renewal process each disciple must undergo. I’d like to begin by sharing a word picture with you. It may seem a little strange at first, but I assure you, it has had great impact helping many disciples break up their mental concrete.
Picture yourself today – an adult who has met God and found Him to be faithful. And also picture your former self during the time before you were born again and still operating in headlessness. Now picture the current you choosing to go back on a rescue mission to free the former you. No, I’m not promoting schizophrenia or new age inner child teaching. What I’m trying to say is this: We (who we are right now) have the ability and, dare I say, the mandate to revisit what’s stored in our brains about who we once were. Why?
Well, it’s kind of like a reverse treasure hunt. But treasure (the seed of God’s Word) is what we are going to plant in the fields of our minds and what we are looking for in this exercise is any remaining ‘grave clothes’ from our former belief system. We don’t do it to wallow in past failures or lies we have believed… we do it in order to discover any remaining ‘weeds’ that exist so that we can dig them up, throw them away, and replant that part of the field of our soul with the new Good seed we’ve received. This is a key part of the process in transforming the hard concrete of former misbeliefs into a prepared and fertile field for the planting of the Lord.
Remember, anything that you picked up along the way, you can lay down along the way. In other words, anything you picked up that still reflects headless beliefs or thinking, you can – and must – lay down and forsake. That stuff is simply not compatible with God’s unchangeable Truth and if it’s allowed to keep its place in our brains and thinking patterns, it pollutes the purity of Truth that we’re trying to embrace and walk in. It must go!
We have to see those headless thoughts and beliefs like a mental cancer. Even just one cancer cell in a physical body is one too many. And so it is in our brains… we do not want any of that old, moldy mental ‘cancer’ to remain and we have to be ruthless in our ‘weeding’ efforts until it’s been replaced with the Lord’s Truth and Reality.
It’s a step by step process of trusting, and it all starts with a new awareness… a waking from mental slumber. I’d like to introduce you to what we call “The Awesome Mental Pipeline.”
We’ll use the word, “Paradigm” here, which is defined in the dictionary as an example, a model or a pattern. Your paradigms are what determine the way you see things – they not only determine what you CAN see, but also (and just as importantly) what you CANNOT see. This is exactly where our mental pipeline begins, because…
- The way you SEE things determines what you think about them, what you think of God and can expect from Him, from others, and from yourself;
- The way you THINK about things determines what you feel about them;
- The way you FEEL about things determines how you choose to act and react;
- And what you CHOOSE to DO about it determines:
- What you can and cannot do
- What you will and will not do
- What you expect from God and how much of his life can come out of you
- What kind of relationship you are going to have with yourself
- What kind of relationship you are going to have with others.
- What you will dare aspire to and the lines you will not be able to cross
- What the results will be of what you create that you and those around you have to live and die with.
So this part of the mind renewal process begins with us donning our ‘Sherlock Holmes’ hats and beginning to see, really see, and asking ourselves hard questions. The pipeline is our guide on this journey and you can start wherever something trips your awareness. For example, you notice that you’re feeling angry at a person. Possible questions for the current you to pose to the old brain storage… what thoughts led to this feeling? What experiences led to those thoughts? Does any of it line up with my blessed calling as an image and likeness of Yeshua?
This careful and consistent examination of our thoughts and beliefs is an essential part of renewing our minds and building in them that new ‘path of least resistance’ (or, our preferred title, our ‘path of most acceptance’) into that Yeshua-centered, Yeshua as our only source way of thinking, seeing and believing.
There is much more on this important mind renewal process that we’ll be sharing later. In the meantime, please know that the disciples who’ve walked this road ahead of you are praying for your inward journey as well. It’s sometimes long and difficult, depending on how much of that mental concrete we’ve accumulated through the years, but it is essential and well worth it to diligently cooperate with the Holy Spirit as He transforms us from glory to glory.
But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit. 2 Corinthians 3:18
With love, Nancy