Happy New Year!!!
So why do I start the new year with a picture of a brain lifting weights?! So glad you asked!
Ok, so another year is upon us and the usual recriminations about our failings last year or contemplations of potential new year’s resolutions flood our mind as we consider how we ought to live in the new year. Will we be able to live our life the way we want to?
First off, let’s just pause on this amazing truth: we are alive! We get to live! We don’t know our end, but God does. And as we face another year, we get to choose how we face each day. When bad stuff happens. When we encounter hardship and blessing. At all times, we can choose the mindset we carry as we walk through this life.
Sometimes we can feel powerless to affect our outlook, like a victim of our circumstances, But all of the mindset battles are distractions from the enemy of our souls to distract us from our true purpose here on earth. This is why we need to guard our minds and strengthen them. But how?
Mind renewal.
Making up our mind about the mindset we have is not about willpower as much as it is about feeding our mind content that changes our mind and redeems our thoughts to be more like Christ’s. We need to be in God’s word. Our minds are flesh but we can walk in the Spirit as we saturate our minds in the word of God.
But sometimes we need a little help, right? it is so hard to take our flesh. The Apostle Paul gets that. (Check our Romans 6-8 and be encouraged, friend!)
Romans 7:18-25
“For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature.For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature[d] a slave to the law of sin.”
So in 2020, I’ve put together a bible reading plan with daily reminders, audio links to hear the word if you can’t read it, and daily FB live videos at 8am ET starting on January 1st to help us stay on task to read the Bible through this year. Why? Because when we are in the word of God, we are changed. We think differently. Our minds are set on things above rather than on all of this life’s struggles.
Colossians 3:1-4
“Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your[a] life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.”
Also . . . super exciting . . . I have an app that will be out in January 2020 that will help counter negative mindsets with the word of God!!!!
Check out the Make Up Your Mind app website or the Make Up Your Mind page on my website for more info.
As we embark on a new year, I pray that you can be encouraged that God is enough when we aren’t. He knows our thoughts before we even think them and can help us to let go of anxiety, fear, anger, insecurity, anything that separates us from His unconditional love that enables us to live for Christ.
Let’s renew our minds in 2020 together! I’m praying for each of you who read this and sign up to do the Bible Reading plan. God is at work. And the good news is that HE will complete the work that He has begun in us!