Renew The Mind

"So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you."

(Romans 12:1-2; The Message Translation)

The NIV version translates this passage to say,"Be transformed by the renewing of your mind." I like to read the Message because it helps me to think about passages in new ways at times. I have been thinking a lot lately about our thought lives and about the type of conversation and people that we are around and how that effects us. Here. Paul is saying that we can get sucked in by the culture around us to the point of becoming like it and not even thinking anything of it. We become bitter, angry, and negative and don't even realize we have become the culture around us. His remedy for this-- Fix your attention on God. Think about God things. Put God things into your mind. Listen to God music. Read God's Word. Talk to others about God things. Hang out with Godly people. Fix your attention on God. This stuff renews our mind. And we are transformed by it. Changed. For the better.

What do you have your attention fixed on? Fix your attention on God.

Love today.

In Christ's love and mine,

Doug