John Walt

“Most of what we think, just isn’t so.” - Larry Mills

Renewing the mind is a big topic for me and Heather. In many ways, our relationship has revolved around it from the first time we met. We probably wouldn’t have gotten married if I hadn’t been taught how to renew my mind. I want to share the story with you, but first, I want to redefine what it means to renew your mind. I am afraid that most of the time, that phrase has become an empty platitude. Misunderstanding the concept of renewing the mind can cost us our peace, purpose, identity, relationships, and connection to God, in other words, everything.

Jesus talked a lot about renewing the mind, but what does that actually mean? I have heard it explained as turning away from the world's patterns of thinking and aligning with God’s perspective. The picture I get is that Jesus is telling us to turn around and go in a different direction by changing our thoughts.

It is interesting how closely aligned the original meanings of renewing the mind and repentance are. In the New Testament, the Greek word most commonly used for repentance is "metanoia" (μετάνοια), which literally means "to change one's mind". Repentance is not an emotion or feeling, but like renewing the mind, it is a decision to change your thoughts that results in a change of direction.

Both these words are often interpreted in a moralistic sense. Stop sinning and go down the righteous path, or stop thinking the evil thoughts and start thinking the Godly thoughts. In a sense, those are both true but I think it misses out on the underlying truth that we often miss. Our brains are malleable, and we can change our thoughts and behaviors in ways we never imagined possible. Our deeply held beliefs that drive our daily actions and behaviors are shaped by patterns of thinking.

When we think a thought repeatedly, it creates and strengthens pathways in our brains through a process called neuroplasticity. These pathways are formed as neurons communicate and build stronger synaptic connections, making the thought easier to recall or repeat. Over time, related thoughts can link together, creating interconnected neural networks. We can visualize these networks as "thought trees," where each thought is like a branch that connects back to a central trunk, representing the core idea or memory. Just as tree branches grow and intertwine, our thoughts connect and expand, shaping the way we perceive, learn, and respond to the world around us.

What ends up happening is when that core thought or memory is triggered, it can activate other thoughts in the tree (neural network) through a process called Spreading Activation. Thought trees can be good for us or bad for us. If we have healthy mental hygiene, then a core thought can trigger other positive thoughts. On the other hand, if we have unhealthy thought patterns, then these thought trees can be very unhelpful, often leading us to lose perspective on reality. Have you ever seen someone catastrophizing? It's when they take one thing that happened to them and jump to a worse case, scenario, belief, or conclusion.

For instance, someone's boss is in a bad mood, and the employee starts to believe they are going to get fired. Or when a dating relationship ends and someone believes they will never find love. Catastrophizing is a simple way to see the activation of the thought tree in action. There is a lot more to understand about neural networks, and I am by no means an expert. I hope this simplification helps you the way it helped me visualize how patterns of thinking grow into neural networks over time.

My Story

When I met Heather, I had a problem with catastrophizing. My fear was that I would end up trapped in a life I didn’t want, unable to live the adventure I craved. So lots of things that happened would trigger my fear, most of all getting married. A mentor of mine at the time told me, “John if you don’t marry Heather, you are crazy. You are always leaving yourself a back door, and in marriage, there is no backdoor.” I loved her deeply but I was always coming up with reasons why our marriage could end up being a bad idea. In every scenario, I ended up back on a plane to Africa. I knew God had clearly led me to her, but my patterns of thinking had shaped beliefs that were now affecting my actions. I was not free in my own mind to marry the woman I loved.

The counselor I went to was the first person to explain these thinking trees to me and helped me see that I had developed some really weird narratives about marriage in order to avoid getting trapped. He helped me write on a notecard what was true to counteract the lies I struggled with. He told me every day multiple times a day to pull that card out and read it out loud until I started to believe it was true… Wow, I wouldn’t be married to Heather or have the family I do today if I hadn’t been taught to renew my mind. My misguided beliefs and catastrophizing would have kept me from this beautiful life of adventure I live.

Usually, our patterns of thinking are rooted in a fear we have. Once I renewed my mind, I could see that my deep fear was that my wife would ultimately leave me for someone else who was taller, more handsome, richer, and cooler than I was. In short, I felt that I was not enough. Instead of addressing that simple fear, I had grown a complex tree of thoughts in my mind to protect me from what I feared.

We all have thinking trees in our brains, and we aren’t often aware of them. We have patterns of thinking that we can’t see because we have accepted them as truth. Our patterns of thinking drive our beliefs, and our beliefs drive our actions. Many people spend lots of time on behavior modification but very little on evaluating their beliefs. Very rarely are we taught the importance of shaping our patterns of thinking which are the ultimate source of our actions.

Well, I believe that through renewing our minds, Jesus was inviting us to reshape our brains, to change our patterns of thinking, and create new ones. If you look at what the Bible tells people to do regarding their minds, it is pretty much what brain research today tells us we should do if we want to improve our thinking and get out of mental ruts.

There is one catch to all of this, though. If you want to change your patterns of thinking, it only works if you believe that you can change and grow. If you believe that you are the way you are and that you can’t change that, then you will not be able to change your thinking. That is the first pattern of thinking that must change. We have to believe that we can grow. The psychology term for that is a growth mindset.

We all must be transformed, that is what Jesus was inviting us into. The calling that God has for each person is only attainable if we let go of lies and grow. I believe that healing and growth start in our minds. If we want to step into who we were really created to be, we have to continually practice changing our patterns of thinking, in other words, renew our minds.

Are you open to the idea that some of what you believe is true isn’t actually true?
Do you believe that have control over your mind and that you can change and grow?
Have you ever been taught how to change your thinking?

Heather has a PhD in performance psychology, so over the years, she has taught me a ton about how we can renew our minds. She says that most things that happen in life are the result of patterns of thinking. Don’t like where you are in life, identify your patterns of thinking and then start to change them. Here are some basic steps we can all use today to start changing our patterns of thinking.

Identify

Identify your beliefs about a situation or area of your life. Let’s say the topic is career, what do you believe about yourself and God, and it pertains to your career? Maybe you believe that work isn’t something you will get to enjoy. Or maybe your belief is that God doesn’t have a plan for you. Or that decisions you made years ago mean you will be trapped in your current role forever. Or maybe, like I did, you believe that you can’t be fulfilled unless you make piles of money.

What are your beliefs that need to be renewed? If you don’t identify them, then you can’t change them.

Validate or disprove

When I work with companies and non-profits, one of the first things I try to do is help them identify assumptions they have that are limiting their perspective. For instance, let's say their margins are too tight, and they say they can’t reduce costs or raise prices. I will ask are those things assumptions or facts. Usually, we all have tons of assumptions in business and life that we think are facts.

I see this with people in their relationship with God, they have beliefs that are actually just assumptions that they treat as facts. For instance lots of us have beliefs that we aren’t worthy of God’s love. Our shame-filled patterns of thinking help us build deeply trenched beliefs that God can’t love us or want relationship with us or have good things in store for us. So we end up choosing not to trust him, why would you trust someone who doesn’t really like you and want the best for you?

Two of Scott’s questions to me that always set me back in my seat are:

“Do you Trust God’s kind intentions toward you?”
“Either God’s promises are true for you, or he is a liar. What do you believe?”

Hold up each of your beliefs against God’s promises, then ask yourself if that belief is true or an assumption you have made. Whatever beliefs you have that don’t align with God’s promises need to be renewed.

Renewal

Now that we know what beliefs aren’t true, we need to identify what is true. There are several ways to do this. One way is to choose one of the over 7000 promises God made to humanity in the Bible and write it down in place of the false belief you have. The other is to ask God to show you the truth that he has for you in place of your false belief. My favorite is a combination of both of these.

After I renewed my mind about marriage, I still had a longing for adventure. I always believed that adventure required danger and global travel. Both of those things got harder to reckon with and make time for as our family grew. So some part of me always felt I wasn’t able to be fully alive. One day in a time of prayer on the beach God put a thought in my head that felt like waves of freedom. The thought was this, what you love isn’t what you think of as adventure (danger and global travel), what you love is play. That moment changed my definition of adventure. Now my family and I go on tons of adventures all over the country, from camping to hiking to mountain biking and wake surfing. I feel fully alive and really don’t crave the kinds of adventure I once did. That was a unique word from God specifically for a limiting belief I had.

We need to hear God’s truth in place of the lies we believe and then practice thinking them over and over again.

Repetition

Beliefs are shaped by patterns of thinking. Jesus talked about meditating on God's word. The original Greek and Hebrew words for meditate in the Bible translate to mean reckon, consider, practice, visualize, murmur aloud, revolve in your mind, and ponder deeply. Eugene Peterson likens meditating to the way a dog chews on a bone. I take this to mean that God wants us to think his truth over and over again, to visualize it, speak it aloud, and to think deeply about it.

My note card before Heather and I got married was pretty simple. It said, “God is trustworthy, Heather is trustworthy and God has a good plan for my life.” Really not rocket science, but it rewired my brain. Once we know God’s truth it is time to put that track on repeat. For me, that was reading my note card over and over every day until I started to believe it.

Alignment

Just because you replace a false belief with truth doesn’t mean those old ruts of thinking go away overnight. It takes time for them to go away, and the only way that happens is if you stop thinking them. We can still easily be triggered into those old patterns of thinking. And when we do accidentally start thinking them it usually feels really good. Like putting on a broken-in pair of jeans. That is why it is really important we “guard our mind.”

The Bible says we should take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. The work of renewing our mind is taking our patterns of thinking and aligning them with what God says to be true. Scott would tell me when a lie starts to creep its way back in, you have to grab it, throw it to the ground and crush its head. Strong visual, I know, but this is quite literally mental warfare, and your future is on the line.

I have been through many rounds of renewing my mind in different areas of life. I assume I will be doing this forever. I avoid content, people, and situations that encourage my old thinking patterns. I surround myself with older, wiser men and ask my wife to partner with me as I change my thinking. If I am going to engage with stuff that encourages my old ways of thinking, then I try to do it very consciously and practice identifying the lies as they come up. Over time the old lies lose their appeal and sometimes go away completely.

Renewing the mind takes time, it is not a quick fix. I believe this is a way of life we are called to. On the other side is freedom from fear, shame, insecurity, loneliness, stress and anxiety. Who you were created to be is on the other side of renewing your mind. That is, I believe the primary battle we must fight in our lives, the battle for our minds.

- John Walt

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