Detox Your Mind

I'm kinda on a detox programme.

That means I am eating even more fruits than usual to substitute for processed foods. I usually gulp down lots of water daily, and I'm careful to monitor my exposure to toxic chemicals in my environment. But I recently decided to turn things up a notch with even more fruits.

Someone from church noticed me gulping down fruits last Sunday, and, much to his amusement, heard my two sons clamouring for the fruits too. When he commented on that I suddenly remembered what I learned years ago: We can be satisfied and sated with taste of natural food, but with processed foods (loaded with additives and artificial flavourings) we can't, so we'll keep eating them over and over.

Kinda like the way the thinking of this world, being unnatural to who we are as born-again believers, can actually be quite addictive to our thought patterns. And I suddenly saw the parallel between using fruits to detoxify the body and using the Word of God to detoxify the mind.

"… offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." (Romans 12:1-2, NIV)

Notice that immediately after we are admonished to offer our bodies as living sacrifices (a form of worship), we are told to renew our minds? One aspect of renewing the mind I personally struggle a lot with is the removing of wrong and erroneous ideas so that they can be replaced with the truths of God's Word.

For example, if you struggle with fear, you will have to meditate on God's love, because perfect love (obviously comes only from God) casts out fear. If you struggle with ill-health, you will have to meditate on God's forgiveness, because often people who struggle with ill-health don't really believe, in their very heart of hearts, that they are forgiven of all their sins in Christ.

So to correct all my wrong beliefs and to grow even further in my salvation, I will labour and strive to feed my mind with the truths of God's Word. I am deadly serious about this matter, I consider it a life-or-death issue in the area of spiritual growth.

Why do I put in so much effort in this area? Because I want the results: transformation. I want to live life the way Jesus would, and that comes from thinking the way HE thinks and not the world's way. For that I had to force myself to actively engage in God's Word everyday, until my soul acquired a taste for the things of God. Once I got to that point, I had to press on until my soul acquired a hunger for the things of God. And I found, to my pleasant surprise, that I actually enjoyed spending time in God's Word.

However, I soon found that I was beating myself up emotionally when I slipped. It's even worse to slip if you're spending a lot of time in God's Word and seeking him in worship and prayer. Because you think you should know (and do) better than that. Therefore it's way too easy to come down hard on ourselves when we slip up.

Ever been there?

Why is it that detox-ing the mind (removing the wrong ideas and thought patterns) can be difficult at times? Two reasons:

1) We don't realize how much mental junk we've accumulated over the years.

Stop and think: we are continually exposed to worldly thinking and all that pretty much from birth onwards. It can be in major things (copying the behavior of the people in Hong Kong soap operas) or even in minor things like the way we speak.

For example: do we say "I feel angry" or "I am angry"? If we use the word "feel" we give ourselves room to feel other emotions too, besides anger. But when we say "am" we are telling ourselves that anger is part of our innate identity, the way I'd say "I am Junjie, I am a father, I am a compulsive teacher, I am… "

All those things are part of my identity, I will always be those things. But when we add negative emotions to the mix, like anger, frustration, laziness, and all that, we are wiring all that into our personal identities. And we then become more prone to all these emotions.

They then become self-fulfilling prophecies. Sneaky, right?

I spent some time as a pub musician doing Chinese and Cantonese pop songs, and I'd tell you one thing: Usually the songs that sell (and get requested more often in pubs) are songs about messed up romance lives. I find it very disturbing that many of the professional pub singers also have messed up romance lives also. You'll find lesbianism, single mothers, lousy marriages or other problems amongst the singers.

Just goes to show how much damage mental junk can do in people's lives. We can accumulate so much of it unthinkingly, so we need to give ourselves much more time to let God clear it out of our system.

Seriously, seeing all these just made me realize how much power there is in a song. Because what people sing often becomes their reality, we worship leaders and musicians have been entrusted with a very heavy responsibility in the lives of God's people.

2) We don't realize God's role in this process.

And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory… (2 Corinthians 3:18, NIV)

I must confess that for years I subconsciously read the above passage as "… we transform ourselves into his likeness…" And Romans 12 as "… transform yourself by the renewing of your mind". I was wrong.

God is the one who transforms us. We renew our minds, God transforms us. We reflect the Lord's glory, he transforms us.

If we fall into the error of believing that we are the ones transforming ourselves, we deny God the opportunity to work his power in our lives. When we try to do what only God can do, we doom ourselves to frustration and failure. We may not see it immediately, but it's only a matter of time before it becomes obvious.

This principle is a parallel of the one that applies to God's word: we think, ponder and meditate on the Bible, God is the one who gives the understanding. (This came out in my blogpost here: http://jvworship.blogspot.com/2008/01/bible-regime.html)

No matter how I turn, I still keep coming back to the wineskin and wine analogy: we can produce the wineskin, but only God can give us the wine. Our role is to prepare a wineskin that can adequately hold and contain the wine of God. His is to give us the wine of his Spirit.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that by creating the wineskin we're automatically creating the wine too, get what I mean?

In conclusion, I'd like to urge you to always be on the lookout for ideas, assumptions and thought patterns that will contaminate your mind with the thinking of this world. And when you feed yourself with the truths of God's Word, remember that you can feed yourself, but only God can transform you to be more like Jesus. Be blessed!