How do you shape your mind? How do you shape someone’s mind? Do you base it on the worldly trends? Or on how you were brought up before? How do you preserve your principles given all the possible influences around you? How do you keep your standards on the same level without being affected by other people’s standards?
We are all surrounded by different perspectives in life and different standards in life. This world is full of different opinions and some people will push their opinions on you. It is very hard to keep our personal perspectives and principles if the world seeks to change you.
The Bible reminds us Christians to not conform to the pattern of this world. God knows that this world will always try to sway us away from the truth so God is telling us through the letters of Paul that we shouldn’t conform instead we should be transformed by renewing our minds.
Our true act of worship according to Romans 12:1 is through offering ourselves as living sacrifices holy and pleasing to God and in doing so, we should always stand firm on our faith and not be swayed by the pattern of this world. Just like what Jesus told Peter before that Satan wants to sift him away, and that also applies to us.
We can easily be swayed and sift away by the devil through fooling us into loving the pattern of this world but God is so faithful that He doesn’t want us to completely give up, so He warned us and reminded us that our true act of worship is to live our lives as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to the Lord.
How do we do that?— by not conforming to the pattern of this world, but instead renewing our mind. However, our enemy will always try his best to sway us from it and to push us to conform so God also gave us a solution for it— to meditate on His word day and night (Joshua 1:8).
We can stand on our faith through meditating His words. Let us not forget that Jesus who died on the cross for us is so faithful and that His sacrifice was for our atonement, now we can never do anything to pay for that, so we must only believe that He raised up from the dead and defeated death for us. If before, the people of the Old Testament sacrificed lambs to ask for forgiveness, we also had our lamb which is our Lord Jesus Christ.
So now, since Jesus already died for us, His forgiveness is flowing like a river and the only thing we can do is to worship Him but how do we properly worship Him? It is through living our lives as a living sacrifice— holy and pleasing to God.
Now, how do we shape our mind and other people’s mind? We should shape it through being transformed by renewing our minds, not conforming to the pattern of this world. How do we keep our principles and standards? How do we stand firm? Through meditating on His word day and night.
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