In a society that is becoming more aware of the realities of mental and emotional health, chances are you’ve heard of neural pathways. What you may not be aware of is that long before it became the current hot topic God was talking to us about it.
Romans 12:2 – ”Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.”
Renewing your mind is the same process as creating healthy neural pathways, and it’s a practice that anyone has the ability to learn.
Steps to renewing your mind:
1. Be aware of what you are thinking. The Bible refers to this as ‘taking every thought captive’ (2 Corinthians 10:5), essentially if the thing you are thinking or saying to yourself goes against what the Bible professes to be true, you have a good indicator of a thought/feeling that isn’t healthy and needs to be ‘taken captive’. If you aren’t sure what the Bible says, a good indicator would be if you would agree with the comment if someone you love said it about themselves.
2. Once you are aware of your thoughts and have taken them captive (singled them out) now is the time to test them against what the Bible says is true. Finding out what the Bible says about a specific thought or feeling can be made easier by searching a concordance, or typing the topic into a site like BibleGateway or Open Bible. Use these search results to build a list of truth’s that stand against any lies you believe around that thought.
3. Now that you are aware of your thoughts, and have truth to dispute any lie you might believe, its time to meditate on the truth. By this I mean that you have the truth you collected in point two, write those down and put them somewhere you will see them regularly, record them and play them back to yourself. But more importantly each and every time those captive thoughts pop up you remind them of the truth that God’s word has given you.
The beauty of this process of renewing the mind (creating new neural pathways) is that you can use it with every new thought that doesn’t line up with God’s word, and with every thought you renew you receive a deeper knowledge of our God.
Today I encourage you to take every thought captive, if for no other reason than that you get to know God’s good, perfect, and pleasing will.