Transforming Your Mind

God has a plan to redeem you, buying you back from your enslavement to sin and restoring you to his image. As a Christian, your role in this process is to live a life of repentance, to continuously transform the way you think. This includes changing your attitudes, perspective, priorities and standards. Transforming Your Mind explores the subject of repentance by examining such topics as forgiveness, thankfulness, success, integrity, judgment and feelings.

The world you live in applies constant pressure to get you to appease your sinful nature and accept its way of thinking. To offset this pressure, you must take decisive action and aggressivly change your thinking until it conforms in every respect with God's thoughts.

Transforming Your Mind offers practical steps for changing the way you think about yourself and your part in God's kingdom. The only barrier to your success as a believer is the way you think. God has done absolutely everything he needs to do for you to be a successful Christian. You can become the person God created you to be and become more effective than you ever imagined if you will begin transforming your mind.

Links within this page: Chapter Titles || Comments from Readers || Chapter Summaries

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Chapter Titles

Part 1 - Changing the Way You Think About Yourself

• Changing Your Attitude
• Repentance is for Believers
• Believing by Choice
• Forgiving When it Hurts
• Thankful for What?
• An Alien in a Human Body
• An Integrated Guidance System
• Personal Success
• Being Perfect While Becoming Perfect
• A Matter of Integrity
• How Do You Feel About That?
• Proper Judgment

• Kingdom Values
• Legal Matters
• Logistics
• Personal Initiative
• Kingdom Business

178 pages, 8.5"x11" format, paperback, 17 chapters, "Personal Study" sections

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Comments from Readers

"I read your [online chapter entitled] "Being Perfect While Becoming Perfect." Fantastic. I, too, am a believer in the New Covenant, not the New Free Ride. It seems like so many think that Jesus did everything and we don't have to do anything now. In reality, Jesus did for us what we could not do for ourselves -- live the sinless life -- but that does not relieve us of the responsibility of becoming perfect, bringing more and more of ourselves into submission to His will. I like how you pointed out that different levels of responsibilities are associated with different levels of maturity, even in earthly families. That is a great analogy. Faith is an action word. It is not resigned. It is refreshing to know that there are others who understand that as well." -- CM

"I have just gotten started on your new book. My, how much study, energy and effort went into that book!" -- LW, self-employed

"Transforming Your Mind has really challenged my Christian walk and I have used it in several teaching situations. The personal study questions are excellent and achieve a deep study of the materials presented. Both [Redeeming Your Character and Transforming Your Mind] are well organized. The examples/illustrations used are excellent and very practical. Some are applicable to children when explaining biblical questions. I like the use of scripture throughout the text and the Greek word definitions that give greater meaning to the biblical references." -- WFB, retired engineer

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Chapter Summaries

Part 1 Changing the Way You Think About Yourself

The following are brief chapter summaries from Transforming Your Mind.

1. Changing Your Attitude

You have lived like the world too long and need to be transformed, changed into an entirely different being. You have a vital role in that transformation because it can occur only as you renew your mind. This means to change how you think, what you think about, your attitudes, perspective, priorities and standards.

To repent is to change your mind and the New Testament's statements about repentance are mostly directed at believers. The world applies constant pressure to get you to appease your sinful nature and accept its way of thinking. To offset this pressure, you must take forceful action and aggressively change your thinking until it conforms in every respect with God's thoughts.

You decide what you will believe, so accepting God's truths is a matter of choice. God does not treat disbelief lightly. You not only choose whether to believe, you also choose what you will believe.

The issue of forgiveness is not the offender's repentance or their punishment, rather it is how you respond to your sinful nature.

Biblical thankfulness is based on faith and knowledge. When you understand that God works all events together so they have a compounded benefit for you, you can be thankful in everything as well as for everything.

You are a natural citizen of heaven; your roots are there and that is your culture. You are living temporarily in this world and you will eventually leave and return home, so you need to change the way you think about this world.

God has a purpose and his will is that everything support that purpose. He reveals his general will and purpose through the Bible. His Spirit helps you understand how to apply scriptural principles to your situations and assures you when you make good decisions. He also works out the details of your circumstances to assure and assist you. He places you in interdependent relationships with other believers, so they can help you understand God's guidance. Everything God gives you (including your character) enables you to do your part in fulfilling his purpose. Therefore, God's will is for you to develop your character and use it; that is why he gave it to you.

God's standard of success for you involves your becoming the person he created you to be and allowing him to use your unique abilities and personality to do his work through you. That requires a radical transformation in your mind.

Perfection relates to your spiritual and mental state, not to your action; action is the result of perfection, not its definition. One key to perfection is renouncing yourself and committing yourself entirely to God's care. Perfection in your relationship with God means that everything else is comparatively worthless.

Integrity motivates you to focus all your effort and use all your resources to adhere to a standard or achieve a goal. As a Christian, you will find your standards continuously changing to become more like God's and your goals becoming increasingly like his. Holiness is complete commitment to God's purposes and service, and every deviation reveals a lack of integrity. Because God realizes you are still human, he graciously offers you the benefits of holiness while allowing you to develop greater integrity. As a result, integrity will be more of a process than an event.

Your feelings and emotions coincide with what you think and believe. Therefore, you can expect the way you feel to change as you repent. God has a broad range of feelings and, because he created you in his image, you have emotions, too. You are not a slave to your feelings, any more than you are a slave to your sinful nature, but you are accountable for your feelings just as you are for your thoughts.

Evaluating, judging and forming opinions are an important part of Christian living. The character God gave you affects how you do it and the conclusions you come to, so you can expect your judgment to be different from others'. It is equally important to consider other believers' opinions, because their character allows them to see the same situation from a different perspective. This helps you see past your limited perspective.

13. Kingdom Values

Based on the kingdom values God presents in the "beatitudes," we can identify some worthwhile changes for you to make in your thinking. These changes will help you make the transition from slavery in the world system to effective partnership in God's kingdom.

The legal matters are complete. God has legally transferred you to his kingdom and adopted you as his child. He has authorized you to operate under the laws of his kingdom and use his resources to conduct his business in his behalf. You are his child and legal representative on earth. He has given you everything you need to be effective in his kingdom.

You are God's dwelling. He has not left you alone on this planet; his Holy Spirit lives within you, sustains you, helps develop you into God's image and empowers you to do God's work. Therefore, God himself works through you to conduct his business, providing the necessary power and authority, and developing you into his image so you can perform his work effectively.

God has chosen to conduct his business through cooperative people. He expects you to use what he has given you and exercise initiative to do his work. God alone can produce the desired results, but he can only produce results as you give him opportunity. At some point, you need to stop asking God to do everything and begin using the resources he gave you.

Every believer is a member of God's kingdom and is responsible for spreading the news of the kingdom, making disciples, baptizing them and teaching them to obey all that Jesus taught. We recognize that not all of us will be equally effective at all these tasks, yet each of us should be ready to do kingdom business.

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