What Does it Mean to Renew Your Mind? Effective Change Because of the Word.

Renewing Your Mind

What Does it Mean to Renew Your Mind?

Effective Change Because of the Word.

Book 1

By Joshua Ray

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2016 by Joshua Ray

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

without the express written permission of the author

except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

You may contact Joshua Ray at:

[email protected]

ISBN: 9781310753411

Table of Contents

My People Are Destroyed for Lack of Knowledge

From Tradition to Renewing Your Mind

What Exactly is the Meaning of Renewing the Mind?

What Did Paul Say About Renewing the Mind?

Helping Other to Renew the Mind is in Demand Today

The World Wants Lasting Change Like Peter and Paul

Identify Your Belief System

Stronghold, Ways of Thinking, and Tradition

Healing the Emotions

Your Vision Matters to God

Speak your Mind and Your Heart

Gratitude Creates a Happy Heart

Action is Your Outward Sign

Conclusion

Press Release – Bible Prosperity Secrets Exposed

Press Release – Revelation: The Beast, The Bride

Introduction

The Pride of Youth and Then My Encounter with Christ

I couldn’t help but feel alone, like I was the only one going through a spiritual dry spell. It felt like God was not listening to me. Nor did I think that He was even talking to me. My mind was filled with stuff. It was clear to friends and family that I was distracted by life, worry, health, finances, and basically living each day. I knew better than to go backwards in my life, but that’s exactly what I did. I was going backwards - spiritually, financially, and physically even though I had committed my life to Christ. After talking to Christians from all walks of life I found that many of them, at one point in their lives, had gone through these same type of dry spells as well.

I have been a Christian as long as I can remember. I practically grew up in the Roman Catholic Church. By the time I was 13 I was convinced that my calling was to be a priest. There was one Biblical figure I admired most, other than Jesus, and that was king Solomon. I admired him for one primary reason, his wisdom. I prayed the same prayer that Solomon did and asked God for wisdom. At that time I believed that God heard and answered my prayer.

By the time I was 16 I found that I was curious about my faith and wanted to know everything there is to know about God. Because I had friends in high places in the church I had access to some of the most brilliant minds in the realm of faith and spirituality. We would chat about everything God and I would ask questions regarding the Church. It wasn’t long afterwards I began to ask questions that even they didn’t have an answer for. I didn’t realize it at the time but I was delving into the realm of theology at an early age.

I knew there was more to God beyond the scope of the Roman Catholic Church, so I began to explore other Christian faiths. I’m not sorry I ventured off into other faiths because during that time I got a bigger, clearer picture of an awesome loving God whom I can call Father.

In my youth I knew exactly where I wanted to go in life. I charted a course to reach that goal and I pursued it relentlessly. However, like Solomon, even though he ruled with wisdom he failed to see the dangers of relying exclusively on his mind to live his life. He was not wise to heed God’s word and took too many pagan wives. It was his trust in the wisdom that God gave him that caused his kingdom to fall apart after his death. Although Solomon did great things for God and acquired great wealth, on occasion you can sense that he felt somewhat empty inside as outlined in various parts of Ecclesiastes and Proverbs.

By the time I was 18 I thought I knew it all. I didn’t realize it at the time but pride puffed me up. I graduated near the top of my high school class. I got accepted into a well-known and respected college. I took religion and philosophy as my major and minor. In my mind, I was on my way to greatness.

I hadn’t been in college for very long before I unintentionally began to distance myself from God and started trusting in myself. I was tempted in every area of my life. I made decisions that were going completely against God’s word and my world gradually turned upside down. It’s no wonder why Solomon wrote Proverbs 16:18 Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.

At that time, what was once a promising outlook for myself - one that was filled with peace and enjoyment, became riddled with sorrow and moments of regret. I began to experience the kind of sorrows that Solomon felt and wrote about. I felt like I was experiencing that same gap that was created between himself and God. Prior to my pride filled years I remember reflecting on the fall of Solomon and asked myself, How can it be that a man with his wisdom could mess up so badly? Only years later, during my pride filled life did I ask myself, How could I, in my wisdom, fail to see the consequences of my actions?

My life went into a direction that I hadn’t planned for myself. I married and joined the United States Air Force during Desert Storm. I had two children. I wasn’t married long before it ended in a divorce. At that point I was adamant about not marrying again for my own sake. As if written in the stars, I met a woman by accident who seemed to be a Godsend. My family refereed to her as, God’s angle sent down to be with me.

She was what I call; the best of everything I wanted in a woman. What really drew me to her was her strong desire to know Christ. I introduced her to Jesus and those two became the best of friends. Because of her closeness to Jesus I could not help but want to be with her for the rest of my life. We married and started our life together.

It’s been 22 years and we are still married. Our life together is all about following Christ. We support each other on our down days, but we also celebrate our sporadic moments of joy. The journey of our marriage wasn’t easy. There were many forces that attempted to wedge itself into our marriage while simultaneously trying to shred our individual spiritual life. Needless to say, because of those forces, our life was sprinkled with bitterness and it overshadowed many of our happy times and our joy.

Our moments of joy and blessings came in the form of 3 children. My wife had 3 reasons to press in closer to God; a boy and two girls. I had six reasons; my wife and all my children (including the ones from my previous marriage). Like most people, my wife and I wanted the best for our kids. We made many sacrifices to take care of them. Money was tight back then so we didn’t take vacations or do a lot of elaborate things for the kids – we kept it simple.

After many years of sacrifice and a lack of finances, the needs of life eventually filled our minds and hearts. Without noticing, God was no longer a priority in our life. Even though we attended church regularly and prayed together as a family, our concerns for life eventually filtered God out of the picture. Once God became a secondary thought in our life it began to change the dynamics of living each and every day.

Thus began my long, long journey to understand myself in relation to God. It wasn’t until I was in my 30’s did I have an encounter with God so powerful did things begin to change for me. My wife and I went to a church service where the guest speaker was preaching about having a personal relationship with God that was filled with power and meaning.

That night I prayed and asked God to tell me what He thought was holding me back. Without any hesitation I could sense that He spoke to my inner man and said, pride. I thought I was just imagining things and said, It can’t be pride. There must be something more than that. So I pressed in and asked again, but this time I could feel the answer in my whole being, almost to the point where it felt like he actually spoke to me. He said, pride.

And get this - my response was, No God. Your wrong. It’s not pride. It’s got to be something else. And the bizarre thing is, He made my own words echo loudly for hours until I figured out that this is exactly what a man of pride would say. A few hours later, I said, Ok God. I’m going to that church tomorrow so that you can deal with it.

I wanted the kind of relationship that the preacher talked about, so I went up to the front for prayer. The preacher, who didn’t know me from anywhere, turned to me and said, God is going to deal with your pride. I was shocked at what he said, I felt like I got light headed, then I felt a power overcome my whole body. My knees buckled underneath me and I fell to the floor as though I was tackled by a football player. I tried to get up twice and each time I felt like my body resisted and fell to the floor. Finally I stopped fighting back and I lay on the floor and wept. I knew something was happening but I just didn’t know what it was because I had never experienced anything like that before.

While lying on the floor, with my eyes closed and full of tears, I could see in my mind’s eye that I was lying on the ground. It was strange because I could swear that I was lying in a meadow looking up at a beautiful blue sky filled with clouds. Then I saw a bright light fill the sky and out of that light came two hands held in the shape of a bowl. They were holding water because I could see the water droplets falling between the fingers. The hands came into my view in slow motion and came from above my head and stopped over my forehead. I could see the hands slowly separate and the water poured out onto my forehead and it drenched my face. I couldn’t tell if the water was real or not because I could feel the drops hit my forehead and splash onto my eyes. It felt real to me and I could feel my eyes physically twitching with every drop.

I had never experienced anything like this before. This was strange to me because I couldn’t tell if this was real or not. I have always been a man of reason, I still am today. Experiences like this don’t usually happen to me. The peculiar thing about this event was that I knew the meaning of what was happening. Although I did not hear a voice, I could sense with my whole being that the Lord was saying, I am washing your mind anew.

From that moment on I realized that everything that I had learned about myself, God, and faith had only been half the truth. I laid on that floor for over 20 minutes, 10 of them was spent weeping. The other 10 was spent engulfed in an indescribable peace and love. Truth be told, I often wished I could visit that moment again over the next several years.

My People Are Destroyed for Lack of Knowledge

That experience many years ago was the start of my journey to experience God on a deeper level and to get in touch with my inner-man. I had a strong desire to train my soul to come in line with my rekindled spirit man - the one that knew Christ and followed Him. My spirit knew His voice and wanted to live a life filled with Christ’s love, peace, and power. This experience moved me so much that my entire family could tell something changed. They wanted to experience the same power for themselves, so they drove over 500 miles to go to that church. God did not disappoint and they experienced the same kind of life changing power.

From that moment on I had a renewed interest in God’s Word and began to see it from a different perspective. I humbly sat under people who experienced God at a deeper level than I in order to learn more about the love of God. After that powerful experience I turned in my pride for the opportunity to learn more about God. It was from then on that I developed a new favorite Biblical figure, Paul of Tarsus; a man who had to be blinded to get his attention and to rely on Jesus in order to stop trusting himself and his own intellect.

The journey to renew my mind deepened with each passing day. Paul said, be transformed by the renewing of the mind. That statement is loaded with wisdom and truth, so much so that I have dedicated this entire book about the transformation that can take place in one’s life by renewing the mind. But it all begins when we allow ourselves to