Revive Our Hearts

Dannah Gresh: Way back in the '80s, I first heard about the broken windows theory. It claimed that visible signs of disorder in a neighborhood or community, things like broken windows, graffiti, or litter, signal neglect in a community. And get this: these visible signs created a tendency to further neglect and more serious crime.

Think about it. When your bedroom is a mess, do you tend to just let it all pile up? Me too. On the other hand, right after I do my spring cleaning, when I take time to restore order and organize, renew if you will, my most private space, it makes me want to tend to that same room with great care. Today, I want to apply that concept to the most private space within you: your mind. Is it time for a little spring cleanup in there? Let's talk about renewing your mind.

Welcome to Revive Our Hearts Weekend. I'm Dannah Gresh. Renew. What's that mean? Well, it means to make new, to transform, to restore. Romans 12:2 says, "Do not be conformed to this age but be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God."

Reading this verse always gives me so much comfort and grace for all the spaces in my mind that, honestly, are just still a little bit cluttered. You see, when you understand and believe the gospel and God brings you into His family, you belong to Him. But you are not changed overnight to be more like Jesus. It's a process. As the Holy Spirit renews your mind, your heart, your actions. And every now and then, God takes me through a bit of spring cleaning to take this process a little deeper. Some call that sanctification.

So, what's this look like, this renewing the mind? Well, first of all, did you catch what I said? It's the Spirit who renews your mind. That's really important because if you misunderstand this, the Christian life starts to feel like a giant self-improvement project, like God hands you a checklist and says, "Good luck fixing yourself." But that's not how transformation works.

Renewal is God's work. The Holy Spirit is the one who comes in and starts restoring what's broken, reorganizing what's messy, clearing out what doesn't belong anymore. He's the master cleaner of the human heart. I'm becoming more and more convinced that we just need to say, "Lord, help," and He will. It's not about us; it's about Him. I mean, the very motivation to have a renewed mind starts with Him, not with us.

But even though He does the deep work, we still have a role. We place ourselves in His hands. We cooperate with what He's doing. And that's where Ephesians 4 helps us understand the invitation to relinquish to God's work in our minds. Here, let me read your invitation to renewal. Listen to this.

Ephesians 4:17-24 says, "Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity." Full stop. If any of that feels convicting, I'm not saying this to condemn you. But I am saying it might be time for a spring cleanup in your mind.

Let me keep reading in verse 20 to remind you of who you are. It reads, "That is not the way you learned Christ, assuming that you have heard about Him and were taught in Him, as the truth is in Christ, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness."

Did you notice the two assignments God gives us there? One: take off the old life. Two: put on the new self. So let's talk about taking off the things that are not fitting for the Christian life. You know, every spring when I clean out my closet, I end up with this big bag of clothes that just don't fit anymore. Some of them are worn out. Some of them are from a different season of life. Some of them just need to go. And off they go to Goodwill.

Spiritually speaking, the Holy Spirit starts showing us things that no longer fit the person we are becoming in Christ. Maybe it's old language that you used to use. Maybe it's a habit. Maybe it's a thought pattern. Maybe it's bitterness or jealousy or a secret sin that's been cluttering the room of your mind for just far too long. When Jesus lives in you, some things simply don't belong anymore.

So what do we do? Paul says we take them off. We haul them out of our mind. Now, sometimes that means making a decision like deleting an app, changing the music you listen to, confessing sin to God and probably a Christian sister for accountability, maybe setting a new boundary. But here's the beautiful part: the Christian life doesn't stop there. It isn't just about taking things away, taking things off. It's also about putting something better on.

Christianity can get misrepresented as a long list of thou shalt nots, but that's not the heart of it. God is not trying to shrink your life. He's inviting you to something better. So what do you need to put on to replace what doesn't fit anymore? Maybe you download a Bible reading app. Maybe you start listening to more worship music. You could set up a cozy chair in the corner of your house where your Bible and journal are just waiting for you every morning.

You start filling your mind with truth instead of noise because when the Spirit renews your mind, He doesn't just remove the clutter; He fills the space with something beautiful. Righteousness. That's one of the things He fills it with. That means it becomes easier to make godly choices. Holiness. That means you look, you sound, and you show up different, set apart. You're not like the rest of the world.

And slowly, sometimes quietly, sometimes dramatically, you begin to notice something changing. The room of your mind starts to feel different. It does. Lighter, cleaner, more peaceful. Not because you perfected yourself, but because the Spirit of God is doing His patient, faithful work of renewal inside of you.

You know that feeling you get when the closet looks so neat after a good spring cleaning? Well, it's even better than that, my friend. So when you recognize the areas of your mind that need to be cleaned up, don't be discouraged. Ask God's Spirit to help you. Start there. But then, as He directs you, take off what doesn't fit and put on more of Jesus.

Now, the things we put on, some of these are called spiritual disciplines. And they are important aspects of mind renewal. We don't have time to look at all of them, but I want to address a couple. First, meditation. Meditation on scripture. This is a recipe for mind renewal. Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth taught on this spiritual discipline, and she used Psalm 1. Psalm 1 gives us a really vibrant picture of renewal: a tree. Not a dry skeleton tree baking in a sunny field, but a lush, green one next to a river. It never even has a chance to dry up because it is constantly being renewed by the water at its roots. What's the equivalent for you and me? No doubt you're familiar with this passage. You know the answer to this, but let me read it to you. This is Psalm 1:1-3.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: "How happy is the one who does not walk in the advice of the wicked or stand in the pathway with sinners or sit in the company of mockers. Instead, his delight is in the Lord's instruction, and he meditates on it day and night. He is like a tree planted beside flowing streams that bears its fruit in its season and its leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers."

Listen as we do some self-examination. I read that phrase and I thought, wouldn't it be great never to wither? There are lots of days when I think I am just withering. I'm tired. I'm not feeling fruitful today. But scripture says as we meditate on the law of God day and night, we will be evergreen, never withering. In all that he does, he prospers.

Do you want to prosper in everything that you do? Do you want to be victorious over every area of temptation in your life? Do you want to be fruitful and evergreen in every situation and season of your life? Then ask yourself this question: where is my life planted? Am I planted in worldly counsel and wisdom, in the counsel of the ungodly, the way of sinners, or the seat of scoffers? Am I getting the input into my heart and mind from television, from books, from magazines, from the internet, from other people and sources that are not pointing me in godly directions?

Or is my life planted in the word of God? Where are my roots? I'm not saying do you ever read God's word. I assume that most of you wouldn't be sitting here today if you didn't have some interest in the word of God. And I assume most of our listeners wouldn't be listening to Revive Our Hearts if they didn't have some interest in the word of God. But I'm saying, where are the roots of your life placed? Where do you get most of your intake? The input that comes into what you think about and what goes into your mind and your heart, where is that input coming from? Is it coming from the world or is it coming from the word of God?

I want to focus on the importance and the practice of personal meditation, meditation on the word of God. Now, in the Old Testament, there are two Hebrew words that are primarily used for meditation. One of them we've just read about in Psalm 1. It's a word that means to murmur, to mutter, to sigh, or to whisper. One commentator says the word describes a low moaning sound like that of a dove.

It's interesting as I've been working on this series, there has been outside my window what I've not been able to see but I've been able to hear. What sounds to me like, I believe it to be, a mourning dove. And it's got that low, mourning, moaning sound of a mourning dove. I had never noticed it before, but it's been outside my study window in the patio for several days now as I've been studying this passage.

Every time I hear that sound, I think of this muttering. It's murmuring, sighing, whispering. It's keeping the word on your tongue. It's mulling it over. There's another word that's used in the Psalms for meditation. It's a similar word. It means to ponder, to muse, to converse aloud or even with oneself. It's okay to talk to yourself if you're murmuring, muttering, meditating on the word of God.

It's a word that means to consider, to think upon something. It conveys the idea of going over a matter in one's mind, rehearsing it, whether inwardly or outwardly. I'm quoting from a reference book that defines some of these Old Testament Hebrew words for us. So to meditate, Psalm 119, the Psalmist says, "I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways. Oh, how I love your law. It is my meditation all the day." Something I'm always thinking about, always pondering, always musing over, always considering, talking about it to myself and to others.

The picture we get in the New Testament of someone meditating is in Luke 2, where we read that Mary of Nazareth treasured up all these things that she had been seeing and hearing. She treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart. You know, we're a generation that has so much coming at us so quickly that I find that a lot of information just goes in and out as quickly as it came in. We're deluged with input and information, particularly those of us who use the internet a lot.

I do a lot of research on the internet. I can read something on the internet and forget what I read five minutes later because I'm taking so much in. The danger is that we would do that with the word of God, that it would be easy in and easy out. And what the scripture is talking about here is something that helps to keep the word of God in you, not going in one ear and out the other, but stopping and even as you're moving throughout the day, to ponder, to meditate, to consider it, to review it, to treasure it in your heart.

Now, we're not talking about the kind of meditation you will hear about sometimes with Eastern religions. The concept there is that you empty the mind, that you put it in neutral. That's not the biblical concept of meditation at all. We're talking in scriptural terms about consciously pondering, dwelling on, and filling our minds with the word of God. Not to vacate our minds, but to fill up our minds.

And let me say this: you can't be filling your mind with the word of God if you're always filling it with all kinds of other stuff. You'll go into overload. If we're going to be filling our minds with the word of God, that means there are some other things that we're not going to have time to put into our minds.

So how do we meditate? Well, I don't want to give any formula, but let me just give you some thoughts that have been helpful to me. And I'd say the starting place is to read the scripture. Read the scripture. You say, well, that isn't very profound. You know, maybe not, but maybe it really is profound. There's no shortage of Bibles in our country. There are more different kinds of Bibles available now than ever, more different translations. We have versions that are geared toward every conceivable demographic.

Fancy covers, your Bible can now be a fashion statement. The key is not what does your cover of your Bible look like. The key is what's inside the cover and do you know it? Are you familiar with it? Are you reading it? Surveys show that more than 90% of Americans own at least one Bible. The average household has three. And most committed Christians own far more than that. I own scores of Bibles for sure, maybe even more than that. Yet, according to Gallup polls, 40% of Americans do not read the Bible even occasionally. We have Bibles, but we're not reading them.

David Jeremiah, I read recently, said, "The real issue is not whether you own a Bible or how many, but whether your Bible owns you." And that's what meditation does for us. It keeps us from just owning Bibles and gets us to the place where the Bible owns us. And what do you do as you read those scriptures? Well, you hold them up to the light, like you would a diamond or a gem of some sort.

You look at it carefully. You look at it closely. You look at it slowly from every conceivable angle. You take a verse or a passage of scripture, maybe a few verses, maybe a paragraph, maybe a whole chapter, but you look at it over and over and over again. You observe it. You ask questions about it. You ponder it. You concentrate on it. You look at it as a whole, and then you take it apart and look at the parts. One word at a time, one phrase at a time.

Something that helps me in scripture meditation is to memorize the scripture. Now, I'd like to say I memorize a lot more than I do, but I find that when I'm memorizing scripture by saying it over and over again, pondering it, it becomes more a part of my life. As you read it, ponder it, memorize it, pray through it, personalize it, internalize it, apply it to your own life, cross-reference it to other passages.

I did that at the beginning of this session. I read the passage from Joshua 1 about meditating on God's word day and night. As I was meditating on that passage, Psalm 1 came to my mind, which also talks about meditating on God's word day and night. So I made the connection between those two passages. That's meditating on God's word. Come back to the verses or the passage again and again and again. Not just reading it and then moving on.

And I'm a big one for reading through the scripture. I think there's a lot of value in that. But I think there's also a huge need for us to take smaller portions that we digest slowly and carefully and intentionally. Mull it over. Talk about it with others. I do that with my walking partners. We walk in the mornings. We talk sometimes about the scripture that we're meditating on.

Ask questions of yourself about the scripture. Ask questions of others about the passage. Work it into the warp and woof of your life till it becomes a part of you. One old-time commentator said meditation is to reading the word what digesting is to eating. Without the slow and lengthened process of digestion, food would not nourish the body. Without meditation, the word read will not nourish the soul. A lot of people who are reading the word of God aren't getting nourished by it because it's just going in and out again. That's why you need to meditate on it. That becomes like digestion, causes it to nourish your soul.

Dannah Gresh: What a good reminder of the importance of meditation as part of mind renewal. The way I do that is I walk most every day after I read my Bible because it kind of forces that. That was Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth teaching from Psalm 1.

Now, what other words come to mind when you hear the word renewal? Refreshing? Invigorating? How about restful? You know that sleep, rest, renews your physical and mental strength. And rest, both physical and spiritual, is another way to renew your mind. Now, I'm not talking about binge watching your favorite show. Although there might be a time and a place for that. I'm talking about intentional rest. The kind that makes you slow down to enjoy the beauty of creation, build relationships, and especially to spend time with Jesus. That kind of rest doesn't come easily to most of us. And Carrie Gaul had to learn how to practice it. She's here with some insight on what that looks like. Let's listen.

Carrie Gaul: We're committed followers of Jesus Christ, striving hard to get it done. But inwardly, we're exceedingly weighed down. We're tired. We're exhausted. We're discouraged. We're bowed down under a weight of shame and guilt because we can't have the perfect marriage, and the perfect children, and the perfect life.

And our hearts are often heavy. The creep of daily life somehow catches us off guard, and it begins to threaten to take us under. And with the Psalmist, we cry, "We're exceedingly afflicted." Have you been there? I hope not physically, but perhaps you've been there emotionally, mentally, spiritually. Where the creep of life, the creep of business begins to threaten to take you under.

In the reality of what you're living with, if you're exceedingly afflicted today, I want you to join me to spend the next few minutes sitting at the feet of the Savior, the one who is the living word. And the Psalmist said, "I am exceedingly afflicted, revive me, O Lord, according to your word." You see, my friends, it's at the feet of Jesus where our dry and thirsty hearts become saturated with Him. It's in His presence that our afflicted souls find peace and rest and satisfaction.

I think maybe the disciples had a sense of that in Mark 6:30 and 31. If you have your Bibles, go there with me. You'll remember the story. The disciples have just returned from an intense season of life and ministry. They've been out preaching the gospel of repentance, and they're seeing lives changed. Incredible miracles are happening.

And in Mark 6:31, the disciples have gathered literally around Jesus' feet. I imagine him sitting with them under the shade of an old olive tree. And Jesus is in the middle of them, and the 12 of them are gathered around. And they're just talking a mile a minute. They're telling stories. They're reliving what they've seen. They've got questions, and one will start a story and another will finish it. And Jesus is listening, and He's interacting with them as they're just sitting there sharing their hearts.

And then after a bit, Jesus stands up. And He quietly says to them, "Come away by yourselves to a secluded place and rest a while." And the very next verse in the New American Standard Bible, it's in parentheses, it says, "Because there were so many people coming and going that they did not have time to eat."

When I read that passage for the first time a few months ago, I thought, Jesus was in my house last week. And He was in yours, too. He knows the reality of what you're facing every day. That sometimes your days are so crazy, there's so many people coming and going, there's so much that you're doing, that you don't even have time to eat.

And that's where the disciples had found themselves, and that's where we so often find ourselves. Jesus knows the reality of what you're walking through, my friends. He knows. He knows the challenges that you faced in getting here today. And He knows the challenges that you will face when you return home. And they may be very different, but He knows. He knows what awaits you.

And in the midst of it all, Jesus says, "Come away by yourselves and rest a while." It's interesting, isn't it? I don't know how you might respond to that invitation. I know a number of you here today, and I know that you are far more gracious than I am. But I think to be honest, if I can just be real honest with you, when I hear Jesus' invitation to come away and rest a while, even when I may know that I desperately need to do that, I don't always respond with a real eagerness to do that.

In fact, sometimes the creep of life, the business of life that is weighing me down, it causes a bit of an attitude in my response to Jesus. And I hear Him through His word say, "Come away, Carrie, you just need to come away and you need to rest a while." And in my mind, when I hear Jesus' invitation to come away and rest a while, I have a bit of an attitude and I say, "Really, Jesus? Maybe you haven't seen this ball and chain that I'm carrying around in my life. Maybe you don't know, Jesus, the reality of what I'm living with on a daily basis.

Maybe you don't know, Jesus, that my husband left me last week and we're not sure how we're going to pay the bills. Maybe you don't know, Jesus, that my children, my teenagers are struggling. They're rebellious, and I don't know how to get them back. Maybe you don't know all of what's going on in our life. Do you not know I've been to the doctor last week? Have you not heard the pathology report? Do you not know the reality of what our church is going on? Come away and rest with this ball and chain?"

Romans 8:1 says, "Therefore, those who are in Christ," you have to go back to Romans 6 and 7, "For those who are in Christ, therefore, there is no condemnation." There's no condemnation. That is not the voice of Jesus in your mind. Jesus doesn't say that to the disciples, and He's not saying it to you.

Jesus said to them, "Come away by yourselves to a secluded place and rest a while." Tenderly, compassionately, He invited them to come and to allow Him to restore their souls, to restore their joy, to do what we talked about in Psalm 119: revive my heart according to your word, O Lord. Jesus invited them to that.

I don't know today what you're walking through. I don't know what the ball and chains in your life are, but I know we have them. And I know we're often masters at disguising them before other people in our own lives, aren't we? We try to keep them hidden, but we're wearing them, these balls and chains. The doubts and disillusionments that you're working hard to disguise, Jesus knows.

He knows it all. He knew not only what the disciples were saying as they gathered around him that day, but he knew what was in their minds and what they didn't have the courage to voice. And he knows what's in your mind today as well. Every detail, every disappointment, every disillusionment, every sin, Jesus knows. And today, my friends, with His hands extended to you in grace, He says, "Come away and rest in my love."

Dannah Gresh: Are you feeling weary, burdened? Maybe spiritually dry or tired. Come away and rest in Jesus' love. Rest physically too. You'll be renewed and refreshed and strengthened in your journey to becoming like Christ.

Maybe you feel more than just weary and burdened. Maybe you're so discouraged, so anxious that you feel like you can hardly breathe, let alone truly rest. Perhaps this whole program has shed off of you like rain off a roof. Can I just encourage you not to discount it? God and His word are more powerful than you can imagine. Ask Him to renew your mind. But also, don't stop there. If you haven't yet, talk to someone who can encourage you and help you think through things biblically.

I want to tell you about a book that you may find helpful. It's called Made to Tremble by Blair Lin. And the subtitle is How Anxiety Became the Best Thing That Ever Happened to My Faith. Blair experienced serious anxiety and panic attacks and learned that she couldn't rely on easy platitudes to get her out of those emotions. She had to learn how to truly lean on God.

Right now, we want to send you that book when you make a gift of any amount to support the ministry of Revive Our Hearts. You can do that at ReviveOurHearts.com/donate. Now, none of the things we talked about today will have much meaning if you don't really understand the gospel and how it affects your life. That's what we're talking about next week, so be sure to join us for that. Thanks for listening today. I'm Dannah Gresh. We'll see you next time for Revive Our Hearts Weekend.