Get Your Pretense On!

96 • Get Your Pretense On!

Renewal of the Mind and Its Connection to Life and Ministry If you choose to renew your mind, you can begin by following a few simple steps. First, engage in self-observation of your internal stream of thoughts and self-talk . You simply must become more aware of your habits of self-talk, i.e., what you habitually tell yourself about yourself and your life as you live it, day by day. The better you identify what you are saying, and learn to challenge those sentences and ideas against what you know to be true in the Scripture, the more you will be set free from the old identities that have plagued you for so long. You must become aware of them so you can begin to see how those falsehoods and beliefs are undermining your life, determining how you react to others, and making sense of the circumstances you are encountering day by day. Second, you must start to establish life disciplines to saturate your mind in the truth . Start your day with a quiet time (or a loud time, if you are like me!) with the Lord, in reading the Scriptures, praying and praise. Carve out weekly time to study God’s word, and to discuss it with a friend or mentor. Set up a simple, doable plan to begin to begin to memorize the Scriptures, and learn how to meditate on the truth of your new identity in Christ. 15 Finally, be patient . Remember, you have conditioned yourself in certain kinds of self-talk and ways of speaking and seeing things for years, and those years of thinking have conditioned you to respond and react to things in a defined, programmed way. God here is saying that we change, we are transformed, as we put off the old ways of thinking and self-talk, and be renewed in the spirit of our minds by living consistent with the Word of God. We begin to get our pretense on; this won’t happen overnight, but it will occur! Give yourself time to form new habits of thinking, new ways of talking, and different ways of responding. The more we do this, the more we will reprogram ourselves into what we