REMOVE THE OLD – INSTALL THE NEW

“If we want to walk with God, know His perfect will and experience the fullness of His plan for our lives, we must change continually. This is the transformation that Paul is talking about in Romans 12:2. A lifestyle involving regular instruction and correction moves us forward in Christian growth.

Throughout the book of Proverbs, the words reproof, reprove, rebuke, correct, instruct and teach show us that to have the wisdom and ways of God, we must be willing to change…renewing the mind is more than learning and changing oneself. It involves more than just gaining new insight or information. The process of change has as much to do with “taking off” as it does with “putting on.” It involves bot subtracting and adding.

…there are many Christians who want to put on the clean “diaper” of Christianity but don’t want to deal with the dirty one that was there before the new birth. They put new thoughts in, but it’s not long before the old thoughts start stinking up the new. And soon their lives are back in the same old problems.

They’re like a park built on a garbage dump. The grass is pretty, the flowers smell good; but it isn’t long before the garbage begins to come through. You can’t build a successful Christian life on the garbage dump of negative thinking. Change involves removing the old, as well as installing the new.

Remember the old saying, “Don’t curse the darkness; light a candle”? This holds true when it comes to renewing the mind. Taking off the old and putting on the new are simultaneous changes. We can’t sit down and try to make negative thoughts leave our mind. The whole time we are trying to make them leave, we’re thinking on the thoughts we don’t want. We must not spend our time trying not to think about the old thoughts of fear, anger, sin. Instead, we must learn to think on the things the Scripture commands. As we set our minds on God’s thoughts, His truth with drive out the old….

Change isn’t an easy thing. We are programmed from our childhood to believe that once we’re out of school, we stop growing. Except for functional learning, we usually don’t make any changes in our lifestyle. In fact, we build facades and images to act like we know everything, and we try not to change. We want to give the impression that we’ve got it all together and don’t need to change.

Then there are the family traditions, religious traditions and just fleshly stubbornness that keep us from growing and changing. All of these tendencies must be dealt with to make change a positive thing, not something we avoid.”