I am just so simply amazed by how many ladies have come out the Bible study these past 2 Tuesday nights. Last night there were 15 of us and I loved seeing each and every one of them around my kitchen table!!

Last night we continued talking on “change and the time is NOW” – that’s where God has me right now, dealing with my own self and helping others see what His Word says about it. It’s amazing how the Word is actually jumping out at me, verses that I have read for 30 years!!! are meaning something so new and fresh. I’ve been in church for a long long time but my eyes are seeing a whole new level and a new understanding is coming. A true awakening has happened – just ask my hubby!!! 🙂

Last night I quickly refreshed the ladies and let the new ones there in on what we talked about the week before. Renewing our minds, Romans 12:1-2. I LOVE LOVE LOVE how The Message version puts it, “So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.”

Mind renewal is a constant, ongoing process but doing it is vital to our spiritual growth and even helps our bodies as it effects every area of our lives (we are a triune being) – when you change – you will begin living a more fruitful life! Stubbornness, pride, unforgiveness, arrogance, (which are all fear driven) will stop the process of change and stop the flow of God. We must make necessary changes to line up with the Word of God and quickly!! The time is NOW! I left the ladies with a question last week – “How are you creating positive change in your environment (your home, at work and within your church)?”

We dug around this question for a little while last night, “Is what you’re doing — bringing glory to God?” The way you’re talking about others – would you say that if they were standing next to you, if not… it’s GOSSIP! The way you take care of your body – your eating habits, excessive drinking, smoking, drugs. The clothes you wear. Your attitude. The way your react to others. The language you use. Does it bring glory to His name?!

We need to put on new thinking and put off our old ways which leads us to Ephesians 4:17-24 (again from The Message), “And so I insist—and God backs me up on this—that there be no going along with the crowd, the empty-headed, mindless crowd. They’ve refused for so long to deal with God that they’ve lost touch not only with God but with reality itself. They can’t think straight anymore. Feeling no pain, they let themselves go in sexual obsession, addicted to every sort of perversion.

But that’s no life for you. You learned Christ! My assumption is that you have paid careful attention to him, been well instructed in the truth precisely as we have it in Jesus. Since, then, we do not have the excuse of ignorance, everything—and I do mean everything—connected with that old way of life has to go. It’s rotten through and through. Get rid of it! And then take on an entirely new way of life—a God-fashioned life, a life renewed from the inside and working itself into your conduct as God accurately reproduces his character in you.”

Your old self was conformed to the world’s way of doing things but God wants you to abandon your old lifestyle. We are called to be in this world but not of it. We’re told to be either hot or cold but definitely NOT lukewarm. He didn’t create us to be cold btw – He created us to commune with Him, ‘to converse or talk together, usually with profound intensity, intimacy, etc.; interchange thoughts or feelings’, that’s the definition in the dictionary – pretty gobsmackingly obvious what He wants from our relationship with Him. When you give your life over to Him (become a “believer”, a “Christian”, “get saved”), the old self is supposed to pass away and all things become like new. Are you helping that along or getting in the way? We need to take responsibility for our lives. We’re living in a generation where it is always someone elses fault. “The devil made me do it!” “I am like this because…..” you fill in the blanks. “If I had just had a better….” Let me tell you a little secret…. YOU are responsible for the words that come our of YOUR mouth, the thoughts in YOUR head and the actions YOU take. YOU! You have a choice of how your life will go.

I finished off the night with another question for the ladies to think about for the next week, “Are there things in your life that you are tolerating that shouldn’t be there?” Search your heart and then make a decision – what will you do with it?

Always remember that we are…

ACTION FIGURES WITH SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED!!!