Diminishing stress from our lives is always
an inside job. We are in the process of learning how to put off our old nature
and put on the new nature of Jesus.
The old nature is a product of our
environment and upbringing, contact with a worldly system of values, and our
learned behaviors. We take on board negative experiences and traumatic
occasions and treat them as though they are the truth about us for all of time.
The old self, until it is replaced in our
experience, carries some weight in our personality. It supplies the head-noise,
the background tape that runs on a loop incessantly in our thinking. All stress
is already on that tape. When situations arise that are difficult for us, the
button gets pressed and the old messages about ourselves get played. Stress is
the result.
The new nature is a product of Heaven, not
of your doing.
It is the way that God thinks about us in
Christ. He has nothing but appr4oval for us because that’s why He put us into
Christ in the first place—so that we could always be accepted in the Beloved
(Ephesians 1:6).
The Lord has a way of thinking about us
that builds us up, empowers us to grow, and causes us to be constantly renewed
in the Spirit. We need never lose heart because our outer man (old self ) is
being killed off, when our inner man
(our true self in Jesus) is being renewed day by day (2 Corinthians 4:16).
Each day, in Christ, we are practicing the
joyful discipline of being renewed in the spirit of our mind (Ephesians 4:23).
That means we are enabling our thinking to come from a source that is full of
love for us and wants to see become more of who Jesus is for us.
The new man hears a heart voice, not old
head-noise.
We have put on a new self which is renewed
in a true knowledge according to the image of the One who created him
(Colossians 3:10). The true knowledge is that our head-noise belongs to the old
man, crucified in Christ, and our new inner voice is made in the image of
Jesus. We can only ever be fully transformed by the renewing of our mind
(Romans 12:2).
- Graham Cooke
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