Have you ever spent too much time thinking about what somebody has done to you?

When that happens, it’s hard to get around that person and treat them right, isn’t it? Even if you can manage to keep your mouth shut, they’re still going to see something in your body language or the expression on your face that just isn’t right. That’s why we need to learn how to forgive, and forgive quickly―and it all begins with the way we think.

The Bible says, “Letting your sinful nature control your mind leads to death. But letting the Spirit control your mind leads to life and peace” (Romans 8:6 NLT).

I’ll say it this way: If you let your flesh control your mind on a regular basis, you’re going to experience a fair amount of misery and pain. But if you set your mind on God’s Word, you’ll enjoy a lot of peace and happiness instead.

Here are two scriptures that often help me redirect my thoughts:

Mark 12:30-31 (NIV): “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength,” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

John 13:34-35 (NIV): “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

Church, we are called to love and forgive, and in order to do that, we need to start thinking about what we’re thinking about!

In Genesis 3, Eve thought that eating the fruit of the forbidden tree would make her wise. Verse 6 says, “She took of its fruit and ate; and she gave some also to her husband, and he ate.”

Now, Adam could have done what God told him to do and refused it, but instead, he took the fruit and ate it. And then when God showed up, all kinds of finger pointing started.

Adam says in verse 12, “The woman whom You gave to be with me―she gave me [fruit] from the tree, and I ate.” Now let’s look at verse 13: “God said to the woman, What is this you have done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled (cheated, outwitted, and deceived) me, and I ate.”

Neither one of them was willing to take responsibility for their actions.

All That God Expects from Me and You

Frankly, I like it when people own up to their mistakes. Don’t you? I mean, it actually makes it a lot easier to forgive them and move on.

Well, it’s the same with God. When we make mistakes, all He wants us to do is take responsibility and be honest. The first person we have to be honest with is ourselves.

Part of my time with God is meeting with me―taking an inventory of my thoughts and attitudes because I want to be free. I don’t want to carry around those heavy burdens anymore. We need to ask ourselves questions like, “How easily do I get offended?” “How much time do I really spend in the Word?” “How much of my time do I spend trying to make other people happy?”

Changing my attitude has made my life so much better and it’s opened the door for God to bless me in a lot of ways. And I want to encourage you to apply God’s Word to your life because it will bless you too.

If you find yourself in a bad temper, God doesn’t want you to try to hide it from Him or act like it doesn’t exist. And He won’t be impressed if you put the blame on somebody else. Just face the truth, ask God to help you…and move on.

Dave and I have an eight-year-old granddaughter who’s just like me. I mean, she has a mouth. And so it’s an issue her parents are helping her work out. Well, my daughter is always sending me texts about how her kids are doing, and one morning when she was having a hard time with her daughter at home, she told her, “You need to stop being disrespectful.” And my granddaughter said, “Well, you need to stop making me mad.”

The funny thing is, when she came home from school that day, she’d had some sort of lesson about self-control and she told my daughter, “Do you know what everybody’s problem is? It’s their mouth.” But it didn’t even occur to her that she needed help in that area herself.

Now, it’s easy to laugh about stuff like that when you’re talking about an eight-year-old. But if you and I will be honest with ourselves, there are some behavioral issues we have to work out too.

Taking an Inventory of Your Attitude

I think one of the smartest things you can do is take a regular inventory of your attitude. For example, what kind of attitude do you have when you don’t get your way? Or when someone else gets what you want? Or when somebody tries to correct you?

The Bible says that our trials bring out endurance, steadfastness and patience in us (see James 1:2-3). But the first things they generally bring out are impatience, jealousy and anger. Thankfully, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we have everything we need to live above our emotions.

You see, when we’re born again, God gives us all the fruit of the Spirit, including love, peace, patience and self-control. We just need to learn how to use them.

I love my daily walk with God. I love being led by Him. If you’re going to follow the leadership of the Holy Spirit, every day will be an adventure because you never know what He’s going to come up with on any given day. And I believe it takes a real closeness with God to just get up every day and follow Him.

It simply works like this: I spend a lot of time with God, reading His Word and praying so that when I wake up each morning and go about my day, His plans are already on my heart. Yes, I still make mistakes, but when I do, I don’t have to be condemned because I know that I want to do what’s right and I’m trusting God to keep working with me on the issues in my life.

The good news is, as long as you’re continually seeking God and making progress in your walk with Him, He counts it as if you’ve already arrived.

The greater One who lives in you really is greater than he who is in the world. He’s given you His heart and He’s put His Spirit in you—and because of that, you’re able to do all kinds of wonderful things that will bless other people.

So when you wake up each morning, my challenge for you is to simply ask God: What can I do to bless You today? And when He tells you, don’t resist the temptation to obey.

When you think of the word “temptation,” what comes to mind? A bunch of stuff you know you shouldn’t do, right? But the truth is we’re also tempted to do right things.

See, God and the devil are constantly at war over our souls because they both want to work through us to reach other people. God wants us to love people and bless them, and Satan wants us to use people and hurt them. Unfortunately, many of us are better at resisting God’s “temptations” rather than the devil’s.

The question we need to ask ourselves each day is: Who am I going to give in to? In other words, which temptation am I going to take?

What I Learned from a Watch and a Bracelet

I remember this watch I used to wear. It wasn’t worth much—I think I paid about $20 for it. Well, one day someone told me how much they liked it and right away, God tempted me to give it to them. I must admit I successfully resisted that temptation.

It might have blessed them greatly, but all I could think of at that moment was how much I liked the watch and how I didn’t want to give it away.

Another day, I was wearing a bracelet and a man complimented me about it saying, “My wife would really like a bracelet like that.” Again, God tempted me to give something away. That day I was strong in the spirit and I slipped it right off my wrist and gave it to him. My flesh didn’t like it. But I knew in my heart I did the right thing.

You see, when we give in to God’s temptations, our flesh may be in momentary pain, but it’s a pain we can live with and ultimately be happy about. On the other hand, when we refuse God’s temptations, all we end up with is regret.

Dr. Mintle: Right Joyce Meyer.  It’s kind of a fine line between not elevating yourself or being prideful and yet staying humble, but so much of that is if you don’t feel good about who you are, then it can be a stumbling block to you doing the things that you’re supposed to be doing for god. If you’re constantly obsessing, worrying about how you look, thinking about how you look, wishing you look differently, then you’re not settled and you don’t have that peace and contentment that the bible talks about that we all can have as Christians.

Joyce Meyer: This morning in Joyce Meyer ministries, I sent a scripture to someone that I’m trying to encourage — Philippians 3:3:  put no confidence in the flesh and on outward appearance and physical advantages, but our confidence has to be in Christ. God still has to remind me of that.  When I go out, many times I’ll just say, “do you have a word for me today or something you want me to do?” and he just says, “go out confidently.” I don’t think confidence necessarily has to be a certain way that we feel about ourselves. I think it’s a decision that we make. – Joyce Meyer online.

Dr. Mintle: And we have it in the right place in the Lord. It’s interesting, Joyce Meyer, because you talked about how you came through that journey and that struggle through the shame and the things that had been done to you in childhood that violated your body — those kinds of things.  But I didn’t have that kind of background and I still struggled, and I was a Christian. I had been a Christian for most of my life and I still struggled with liking who I was. Even though I had the word of God, I wasn’t really focusing on the word of God; I wasn’t meditating on the word of God and letting it get into my spirit.  I was allowing the larger think of the culture to pretty much define who I was, and consequently I struggled with liking my body for years and years and years.

Joyce Meyer: We recently took our cameras out and asked women what they would think if they were looking at themselves in a full-length mirror wearing a bathing suit, and here are some of their reactions.

Woman: I was born in the age of the hippies, and now i’m just hippy.  (laughing)

Woman laughing: Oh, sorry.

Woman: ahhhh!

Woman: ahhhh!  (laughing)

Woman: oh my.  Um, well…

Woman: am I allowed to laugh profusely?

Woman: I need to lose weight and I need to work out.

Woman: my hips are too big. My stomach’s too big.

Woman: I see a lot of areas that I wish could be yanked up and pulled over and thinned down and moved over.

Woman: My body image interferes with my life in that it holds me back from all of the things that I want to do in my life because there’s just a fear about what people will think and how i look and how I compare to other people. – Joyce Meyer ministries.

Woman: it’s not important to be perfect; it’s just something that I work at.

Interviewer: would you ever feel pretty in a bathing suit?

Woman: that’s a good question. I don’t know.

Woman: Recently what I’ve done was stand in the mirror every day and say, “you know what? I love me.  Carol, I like the way you look.”  and I know that if I keep telling myself that over and over and over again, eventually I’m going to believe that. – Joyce Meyer online.

Woman: I’ve always had insecurities about my body, about just the way I look. I was teased in middle school a lot.  I’m learning to appreciate curves now because of my husband.

Woman: I’ve always kind of liked my waist line, you know. After having four kids and you still have a little bit of a waist line, that’s something to be very proud of!

Woman: it doesn’t matter to me anymore!  I’m 50.  I’ll just put on a suit and go for it! (laughing)

Joyce Meyer: Well, it’s pretty obvious how most people feel about themselves, isn’t it?

Dr. Mintle: yes, it’s not good news, is it?

Joyce: Of course, the bathing suit thing is a little bit of a stretch.

Dr. Mintle: maybe go with jeans the next time!  See if you can get a little better…

Joyce Meyer: I’ve got here on my notes that I’m to ask you about your rubber band exercise. What’s that?

Dr. Mintle: this is something that I do.  It’s an old therapy trick and I actually do this a lot with women at conferences, and even men at conferences. Take a hair band, some kind of hair band like for a ponytail or something, put it on your wrist and every time you have a thought about your body that’s negative — “I hate my thighs,” or “I need to lose three pounds,” or whatever it is that you’re thinking — Joyce Meyer said, you snap the band and then you snap it and it’s like “snap out of it.” I thought of the idea from an old movie called “moonstruck” that cher was in. Nicholas cage’s character comes in and he says to cher, “I really love you.  Don’t marry my brother; I love you.”

And she looks at him and she’s shocked and she slaps him and says, “snap out of it!” so I thought snap out of it is kind of what we need to do. So if you literally snap yourself… And then I give people in the conference permission to go around snapping each other, so if you hear somebody saying something negative about their body, they not only have to stop and change the thought, but Joyce Meyer ministries tells us that they have to say something that’s true based on what god has to say about who they are, or a much more positive statement about the way they’re supposed to think about their body.

Joyce: I teach a lot also about how you feel about yourself because, frankly, I think that that’s pretty much the root of everything.  I mean, you can’t give away something you don’t have, so how can I make you feel good about yourself if I don’t feel good about myself? How can i make you feel loved if I don’t love myself? Even forgiveness — Joyce Meyer online mentioned that if you won’t forgive yourself, it’s difficult to forgive others. If you’re too hard on yourself, you’ll be hard on other people, and so I learned the hard way that I could never have right relationships with other people until I got things straightened out with myself.

Joyce Meyer speaks to us. So, I teach on this a lot also, but I find when I first start talking about how you feel about yourself, I think most people don’t even know how they feel about themselves. It’s been there so long and it comes… It’s all these vague thoughts or this self-talk that you do.  So I think first of all we have to get people before they can even snap themselves, I think we have to get them to a point of what are you thinking and how do you feel about yourself? Even like our viewers today, there are probably millions of people watching who never even thought about how they feel about themselves. (Dr. Mintle) it comes out sometimes in the things they say, but that’s because they have beliefs and they’re not thinking about what those beliefs are.

Joyce Meyer: How does Jesus feel about it if we’re insulting to ourselves?

Dr. Mintle: God designed our bodies and he’s constantly talking to us about taking care of our body, so there’s a fine line when we talk about this, Joyce, because we’ve got these record rates of obesity and I’m always concerned that we’re dealing with an epidemic on the health end, but we also have this other side where we’re not liking what we see and we’re obsessing and we’re doing terrible things to our body in order to get it, so god says, “take care of your temple.” he’s not saying, “don’t pay attention to it.” but according to Joyce Meyer ministries, if Jesus is saying to us that what’s important is what’s on the inside and that your heart reflects what is also on the outside… Have you ever met somebody and you didn’t think they looked too great and then you get to know them and they’ve got this wonderful spirit and smile and compassion and kindness and all the things that we want to be evidenced in our life as fruit of our life, as fruit of god living inside of us, you start to see somebody as more attractive. So I think what god is telling us is he’s given us the way to do it; if you take care of internally, if you value the things that i value, if you work on the things that I tell you to work on, it’s going to reflect on your body as well. So you’ve got to give your body as a living sacrifice, scripture says — it’s got to be something that is a sacrifice to me.  So, take care of it; don’t obsess on it, but take care of it and then it will reflect the glory of who I am. So when you diss your body, you’re kind of saying, “hey, God, were you having an a.d.d. moment when you made me?” god’s saying, “no, this is the way I designed you, and it wasn’t a mistake. It was right.” – Joyce Meyer online.

Joyce: I asked you to come and talk with me today about the power that’s in the word of God because I know that you really believe in the word of god and you have experienced the power of God’s word in your own life. So, I’d just like to start by reading this scripture. It says: (Josh 1:8) the book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, that you may observe and do according to all that is written in it. For then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall deal wisely and have good success. So, why is it that meditating on the word of God can cause us to be successful?

Pastor Bob: well, it’s kind of like power drinks. It’s like power food; whatever you take into your body, it becomes part of your body. The word of God not only contains power, it is power. In fact, God said that the gospel is the power of God onto salvation. So when you begin to meditate on it, it actually becomes a part of your inward man. It becomes a part of your spirit being and brings you spiritual strength. We’re always looking for physical strength and trying to increase our bodies here on this earth, but God has a way that you can increase your spiritual life and that’s done by the word of God.  Really, Joshua hit it on the head when he talked about meditating on the word of God. This concept is found throughout the word of god that when you take it and think about it all day long, it just keeps bringing strength to you and strength to you and strength to you.

Joyce: my life was quite a mess when I got into a really serious relationship with God. I always use that word “serious” because actually I was a Christian a long time before I got serious about it. At that time I really began to study the word of god. It was through studying the word of god that my mind was renewed, I learned how to think differently, and then the problems that I had in my life one-by-one began to change. The bible teaches us that as we stay in the word of god, we are transformed into his image from glory to glory to glory. What about the renewing of the mind? Why is it so important that we learn how to think right?