Have you ever watched in Awe at the spectacular display of a summer lightning storm?  Deep booming thunder fills the whole sky.  Lightning shatters the pitch darkness and illuminates everything for a flash, enough to dazzle your eyes unlike anything else you ever saw.

If you’ve ever witnessed a thunderstorm, you can relate to the deafening CRACK that splits your hearing as a lightning bolt strikes with no time lag and you gasp, thinking that was a little close for comfort.  I’ve seen memorable storms in the daytime. I’ve been riveted in wonder, watching night-time storms, more exciting than almost anything else I can remember.

I’ve been in the middle of daily afternoon thunderstorms in the Rocky Mountains when I worked on a forestry crew in Yellowstone Park. I actually witnessed a continuous, hour-long midnight display of lightning, cracking open illuminated clouds on a grand scale, at 30,000 feet, glued to my window, during a cross-country flight in a Boeing 737. Living on wide-open prairie farmland of Saskatchewan, Canada, I’ll never forget watching a late-night lightning storm overhead that you would imagine to be the most fiery and loud declaration of heavenly power imaginable… at the time, I almost wondered if God was expressing He was really angry about something.

And if you’ve never had a ring-side seat during a Texas downpour, punctuated by the thundering cracks and rolling rumbles of lightning storms for half the night, you’re in for a sight that will make you think twice about why the Israelites gave up on Moses, when his hike into the smoke-filled mountain top became a 40-day fast to receive the plans for the Tabernacle. They should have been praying for their leader instead of making the golden calf.   

Sometimes dramatic events, even witnessing terrifying natural disasters or their aftermath, can leave a transformational mark on us that deeply changes the way we look at life… and even everything that transpires in the world around us.

Think of the Apostle Paul. He wrote the book of Romans in A.D. 57. Paul was a man who knew what it was like to have his life shaped by a highly controlled cultural religious system from his childhood. He was enthusiastically devoted to the Second Temple Judaism… the Jewish traditions of the Pharisee sect. But then, in about A.D. 34 or 35, Paul’s journey was dramatically interrupted by the risen Messiah.  Five or six years had passed since the resurrection. Paul was on his way to Damascus, commissioned by the High Priest to arrest Christians.  It was as if a bolt of lightning had struck him blind.  And the thunderous voice from the Messiah himself was so undeniable, that it didn’t just radically change what he believed. It changed the very core purpose of his life. A personal encounter with Jesus transformed how he processed everything in his life. It was like resetting the operating system of his personal hard drive.

Over 20 years had passed since that transformative confrontation by Jesus, when Paul wrote his letter to the Christ-followers in Rome. After writing much detail regarding the mysteries of the rejection of Messiah by Paul’s natural Jewish countrymen, Paul writes what we now know as the opening comments of chapter 12.

“I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service…”

And then he delivers a charge, to which he can relate in terms that are as profound as anyone could possibly imagine. That’s because of his own personal encounter with the Savior himself. And he spent seven years after that in virtual isolation from all the connections that had programmed his hard drive for his entire life. Here’s what he wrote to his Roman readers, whom he had never met, but had, by then, developed a good understanding of the challenges they now faced.

“And do not be conformed to this world (this age of worldly society in which we exist), but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”

We’ve all been exposed to experiences in our past that have affected us negatively in ways that are contrary to the biblical teachings of Christ Jesus and His kingdom. For most of us who have no choice about our exposure to our workplace and the neighborhoods of where we live, it’s easy to see why we need daily cleansing of the pollution that wants to cling to our souls. The ideas and fears, the anxious thoughts and challenges, the temptations and our own appetites… they all compete with whatever desire is in us to serve God honestly, humbly, and obediently.

So, when our conscious minds sit still long enough to really examine our own hearts about this verse in Romans 12, we can sometimes wonder why it’s so hard for us to stay focused on the outcome that all of us, ideally, truly want… “to prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”  The struggle in the deepest reaches of our inner soul can understandably be frustrated by the tension between our honest reading in Scripture about how we should be pleasing to our Lord… and… all the behavior patterns that we know, deep down, are inconsistent with those ideals in our Bible.

We can’t miss the polar opposites of two forces at work in every single human when we read the first part of verse two.  “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed…”

The word Paul uses for transformed is the Greek word “metamorphoo.” Hearing that, you probably recognize the word “metamorphosis.”  It’s the same word we use to describe the process when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. It’s also the same word used in the gospel accounts of Matthew and Mark to describe when Jesus was transfigured on the mountain. His very appearance changed in the sight of His disciples. Metamorpho is not just any old word. It’s laser focused… very specific.  Profound.  It doesn’t mean ‘to improve.’ When it says “be metamorphooed” – ‘be transformed’ – It doesn’t mean try harder. It means a fundamental change in form has to happen. It’s not a behavior change. It’s a state of being change. But how do you achieve that?

Think about what actually happens inside a chrysalis. A caterpillar doesn’t become a butterfly by will power or mind-over-matter effort. It doesn’t discipline itself into making wings. Something happens inside it – in the dark, in the hidden place – away from (separate from) all the world around it. And when it breaks out of its chrysalis, it’s a completely different creature. The change was interior before it was visible. Think how profound the Creator of butterflies integrated this natural phenomenon with our understanding of something so deeply connected to our own human condition.

Now look at the contrast Paul describes here in Romans 12:2. Do not conform but be transformed. The word for conform – syschematizo (soos-kay-mah-tee-zo) – describes the action of being pressed into a mold the way a malleable metal can be shaped by a form surrounding it. You don’t choose to be pressed.

The mold just does its work …passively …constantly. That’s what the world does. Every scroll on your cell phone, every headline you read, every conversation you hear that subtly tells you what to want, what to fear, who to be …the social media world all around us is a mold. If you’re not actively being transformed from the inside, the mold is doing its work on you, whether you feel it or not. Here’s where this verse goes much, much deeper than most teachers take it. 

Paul says, “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” And when most people hear, “Renew your mind,” they think about the surface level. Replace the negative thought with a positive one. Speak scripture verses over your anxiety. Change what you’re consciously telling yourself. And none of that is wrong. That all matters. But, in a way, it’s just half the house, because your mind is not just one thing. Your mind has two parts. The conscious mind is the part you know about. It’s the main floor of what gets all the attention. It’s all about what you’re actively thinking right now. The words forming as you read, the opinion you’re forming about what I’m saying. That’s your conscious mind – the main floor. But underneath that, there’s a deeper floor, the basement buried in the foundation under the main floor. That’s the subconscious mind. This is where everything lives that you’re not actively thinking about. Your habits, your automatic responses, your deep assumptions about yourself, about money, about what you deserve, about what’s possible for your life… about God, His nature, His will for your life…  It’s all down there …running constantly without you watching it.  Let’s look at a good example that really makes this idea click into our reality.  

Think of the first time you learned to drive. Every movement was conscious and deliberate. You had to actively think about lots of new things. Check the mirrors. Make your left fingers press the turn signal lever. Press your right foot on the accelerator oh so slowly. Don’t ride the brake pedal with your left foot. Turn the wheel very slightly.  Dozens of new things kept your conscious mind working overtime. But after years of driving, you can navigate through traffic quite naturally while focusing your mind on other things.  You’re no doubt considering the various places you’ll stop during your drive around town. You might be thinking about having all the ingredients you need for dinner. Your hands, your feet and even your eyes know what to do without you reminding yourself constantly of all the various details of driving. That’s the subconscious at work. It took over. It runs the program in the background.

Now, apply that to how you were raised. Every environment you grew up in was teaching you something. Not in a classroom, not with textbooks. In the daily details. How you thought about obeying your parents… Your relationship with God and your self-worth.  …The way you watched others treat one another… How you saw conflict handled or avoided… how you saw displays of anger without correction… the meaning of hard work… honesty… admitting your own transgressions… your sense of personal value… what it means to be successful and how to handle it with humility or arrogance. All the things that gave you a sense of moral conviction or lack of it… How you share your things or selfishly hold on to them, constantly fearing you’ll lose them. Your values and priorities… all of them… became ‘programmed’ into your subconscious mind. 

In our western world of affluence and constant exposure to competition and achievement, our subconscious mindset about money and stewardship becomes a big part of the automatic way we think and react to all of life in general. Envy and coveting things possessed by others we see around us becomes a way of life. Self-sacrifice and going the extra mile to honestly show kindness to others is not natural in a world that disregards any concept of personal accountability to an eternal heavenly justice. How does Christ’s idea of an abundant life jive with Christ’s teaching of the golden rule?

We’ve all heard and seen what often seemed to be conflicting concepts about how to have a satisfying life. Many of us lacked a clear and consistent ‘model’ of what we could call godly wisdom, godly character, and godly motivation or priorities.  And though there are many in our society who are surrounded by very dark and evil home lives, for most of us raised in a relatively safe community, we can’t avoid that the disciplines or lack of disciplines that surrounded our formative years tends to generate automatic patterns of behavior that clash with what we’re trying to embrace as followers of Jesus.

With good intentions, you can quote Scriptures and make ‘confessions’ of who you are in Christ and how you behave in godly ways, and still say things and do things that are inconsistent with your best hopes… Why? It all goes back to the way you were repeatedly programmed to think about those things. And until the program changes, the surface behavior will keep reflecting those long-held patterns.  That’s because verbal confession only registers in the conscious mind, while the subconscious continues running according to the same old programming code that has always dictated your outward behavior.

This is why Paul’s instruction in Romans 12:2 is so magnificently precise. He doesn’t say renew your thoughts. He says renew your mind… the controlling center of your whole being… not just the main floor, but the control panels in the basement… the foundation of your whole ‘house.’  And this is what makes this contrast between conforming and transforming so serious.

The world’s ways that have rubbed off on you from the time you were little, weren’t necessarily what you thought about and decided to embrace. Maybe they were, but regardless, those ways are more deeply embedded in your subconscious than you probably ever thought about. They were written for you, by the people who raised you, who were taught by the people who raised them… generation to generation… not to mention by all the mind-controlling influences of the commercial advertising world that have been overtly putting ideas in your mind that were often met with little to no resistance. That’s because most of us were not deliberately taught to question authority and examine everything with careful scrutiny. 

And here’s the painful part. None of those people meant to harm you. Your parents didn’t sit down and say, “Let me teach this child to believe they’ll never be successful or have what it takes to provide a decent living and righteous lifestyle to guide their family.” But if they lived expressing constantly conflicting values… if that was the atmosphere in your house… you breathed that confusion in every day until it felt like this is normal… it’s just the way life is.

This is what Paul means when he says, “Do not allow yourself to be conformed to the behavior pattern of this world (this age).” We can see that the world’s pattern isn’t just out there in culture and media. It was also in your home. It was in how failure and disappointment were discussed. It was in how dreams and inner thoughts were or weren’t encouraged, in what was possible for you or for anybody. Those patterns got pressed into you. Syschematizo (soos-kay-mah-tee-zo)… pressed into the mold …before you were old enough to choose. And now, unless something changes at the root, those same patterns will repeat themselves in your own children. It’s not because you’re bad, because the program keeps running unless somebody stops it. That somebody could be you. But only if the renewal goes all the way down to the control room – the subconscious. So, how does that happen?

So, how do you actually renew the mind? Both floors, not just the main floor. Paul gives us a second scripture that unlocks this. 2 Corinthians 10:5, “Casting down imaginations and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.” Notice what he says first. Casting down… not covering up… not managing… not tolerating… casting down. The renewal of the mind is not just addition. It’s also subtraction, which typically has to happen first. You have to identify the false thing, the imagination, the wrong assumption, the inherited lie… and actively pull it down from its governing authority in your life. Evict it. Make room.

Proverbs 23:7 says, “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.” And Proverbs 23:23 says this, “Buy the truth and sell it not; also, wisdom and instruction and understanding.” Buy the truth. That word buy is telling you something important.

You don’t get truth for free. That’s not because God is charging you for it. It’s because of a fundamental fact of life. And there are often two parts to it.  Buying the truth requires to invest your time into obtaining it. That also may cost you energy and resources to do what you need to do to access the source of it.  Buy a book… a Bible. Attend a meeting. Take a trustworthy advisor out to lunch. But your personal buying of truth… receiving truth… will often require you to give something up. You exchange the lie for the truth. You hand over the false belief, the one you’ve carried for years, the one that feels like identity, and you receive what’s actually real in its place. That’s the transaction. That’s renewal.

It’s like updating software on a computer. You don’t just write new code on top of corrupted code. You find the corrupted file. You delete it. And then you install the correct version. The sequence matters. Identify, cast down, replace with truth. Most people only do the third step. They try to install truth on top of a corrupted foundation and then they wonder… why does the system keeps crashing? Casting down imaginations means getting really honest about what you actually believe. You can say whatever you want about what you believe in church. But what do you actually believe when things don’t go your way? What do you believe about yourself at 2:00 a.m? How do you automatically react when the pressure hits… when the tense situation arises? What do you do when your behavior is challenged by a true friend who really cares for you? That’s the program. And until you name it, you cannot cast it down.  It’s the exact opposite of what degenerate rebels to God do, as described in Romans chapter One.  “They exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator.” (Romans 1:25).

Here’s the harder truth for anyone struggling to overcome their carnal nature. You can know this intellectually and still not change. Psychologists understand the subconscious mind. They have frameworks for it… terminology for it… all sorts of theories, therapies and drugs to try to regulate it. But understanding a prison doesn’t unlock the door. What Paul is describing is not a self-help technique. It’s a spiritual renovation. The renewing of one’s mind requires the supernatural power of the Word of God, working from the inside. It’s not just information. It’s transformation. There’s a specific power in the word of God that does something to the subconscious that no therapy alone can reach. Hebrews 4:12 calls it “living and active, sharper than a two-edged sword.” It goes deep… all the way down to where the old programs live… in your subconscious soul… the obscure inner man that you sometime struggle to comprehend and govern the way you would like.

Before I go further, pause here with me for a second. What I just described – that moment of recognizing a program running in you that you didn’t choose – if you felt something shift when I said that, why not pause this recording if you’re listening on the podcast. Think what’s one belief about yourself you’ve been carrying that you’re starting to realize isn’t actually yours. Write it down. Set aside whatever time is necessary to talk with God about it.  And if you’re otherwise hearing this and you can’t pause to think privately about it right now, just go to Reclaim Your Legacy dot com and type in the search bar “Transformed by the Renewing of Your Mind.” Don’t use Google… you likely won’t find it there. Type in your top search engine bar “ReclaimYourLegacy.com.”  Once you get to my website, that’s where you can type in some of the words in the title you’re looking for. Then you can rewind this recording and pause wherever you see fit. You’ll be glad you actually took the time to talk to God about this. I’m absolutely convinced that anytime you seriously mean business with God, He is faithful to hear your heart’s cry and meet you in ways you probably never expected.

Now… Look at the end of Romans 12:2 again. “That you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” This is the part almost nobody around us ever talks about. The result of a renewed mind isn’t just better behavior. It’s clarity. The ability to test, discern, and recognize what is actually good for us in light of God’s purpose for our lives while we’re still on this earth. This is why so many believers, even sincere, faithful ones, still feel confused about their lives, confused about decisions, about direction, about what God actually wants them to do. They keep asking, “What is God’s will for my life?” And Paul says, “The answer isn’t hidden from you. You can’t see it yet because the lens you’re trying to look through is still dirty in the sense that it has yet to be transformed.

Your mind is your lens. When your mind is shaped by the world’s patterns, by fear, by intimidation, by the inherited programs of failure and limitation, everything you see is distorted. But when the mind is being renewed, genuinely renewed – both floors – something changes. You start to recognize goodness where before you only saw threat, you start to see open doors where before you only noticed walls. You start to know with a clarity that surprises even you about what is right, what is next, what is God’s will. The discernment was always available. The renewed mind is just a condition that lets you access it.

So, let’s be precise. What does this idea of renewing your mind – both floors – actually look like day-to-day? To start with, it looks like protecting the first input of your morning.  That means you cherish God’s thoughts as priority before whatever else tries to crowd into your conscious mind. If you pray… if you ever talk to God during your day…  why wait until you’re in some kind of a crisis?   Before you check your phone… before you turn on the news… before others start pressing you for attention… why not just say to God a simple prayer like “direct my thoughts today, Lord?” ..or.. “Lord, please help me discover your best course of how to order my day today.” It doesn’t need to be a fancy prayer or a particular prayer from the Bible. Just acknowledging God in your waking moment will set a God-honoring tone for all the rest of the moments in your day. And if you dare to deliberately focus for even a few minutes on a selected portion of the Bible, all the better.

What goes into your mind in those first 10 or 20 minutes after you wake, sets the framework for everything ahead of you. That’s not some kind of success-driven, motivational culture. That’s how your awesomely created brain actually works. When you deliberately set a new discipline… a new habit that you expect will be a benefit to you… it looks like you’re being ruthlessly honest about your content diet. It’s not just about whether the content is acceptable or not, but it’s building your mind to be capable of divine discernment because your old and misguided subconscious is no longer being allowed to filter it out. Everything that goes in gets filed. It looks like slow repeated engagements with God’s word. You’re not skimming it to avoid thinking deeply. You’re now being deliberate… sitting with the Holy Spirit’s insight long enough to challenge your assumptions as it reaches your basement floor to rearrange the hard wiring.

Now, you’re asking yourself hard questions. Where did this belief come from? Who taught me this about myself? Is this the voice of God or the voice of a person who misdirected, or even hurt me 20 years ago? Is this divine wisdom or just a man-made program I’ve never questioned? And your new habit looks a lot like persistence… that’s because renewing your mind is not just a series of singular events. It’s a direction. Slow, consistent, unglamorous, but compounding. Every truth you receive in exchange for a lie changes the architecture of your thinking. Every imagination you cast down makes more room for clarity. Every time the word goes in, something adjusts. Something gets repaired down deep where the real change happens.

When we started today, if you ever gave a thought to Romans 12:2, you may have been trying to apply it in the same way that most people apply it… main floor level… just getting your conscious mind to think about better or wiser thoughts and words of Scripture. You may have tried exchanging surface thoughts, confessing positive things, and ending up with the feeling that the verse isn’t working for you. Hopefully now, you’re able to be honest with yourself and realize the verse is working when you focus on refreshing your subconscious mind with deliberate intentionality. You’ve got to give it some time of applying regular edifying habits. Before now, you just might not have gone deep enough.  You’ve been trying to rearrange the living room furniture while the hidden content in your foundational ground floor has old and ineffective code running the structure of your life. The transformation you’re looking for isn’t on the surface. It’s down there in the ground floor in the inherited programs, in the lies you’ve been buying as truth that need to be exchanged for what’s actually real in the kingdom of God. You don’t change your life by trying harder. You change it by allowing the word of God to go all the way down to the places you didn’t even know needed changing… to the programs you didn’t choose but have been running your whole life. That’s what Paul means by transformation… it’s truly a divine plan of redemptive metamorphosis. And it absolutely requires your consistent, life-long commitment to a process that God is completely willing and able to complete.

That’s the renewing of the mind, both floors. And here’s the mercy in all of it. Paul doesn’t write this as a threat. He writes it in view of God’s mercy. This isn’t another standard to fail. It’s an explanation of a process that’s available to you right now, today. Not after you have it all together, nor after the destructive, disturbing thoughts stop coming back. Right now, the door to real transformation isn’t locked. It never was. You just needed to know where it leads… and then decide to go there and continue letting the Holy Spirit accomplish the transformative process that sets you apart from those who are satisfied taking the easy road that’s willing to compromise with the alluring, feel-good temptations of the spirit of the age.

When King Solomon operated in the anointing of God’s Holy Spirit, his words in the book of Proverbs will always be a kind of plumb-line to keep us from drifting off the narrow path, that assures our victorious and God-honoring long life. These are passages in which every honest follower of Jesus, will find not only God’s wisdom, but His peace and reassurance that protects the obedient soul from the Destroyer in the world. Hear some of what he wrote…

My son, do not forget my law, ​​But let your heart keep my commands; ​​For length of days and long life ​​And peace they will add to you. (3:1-2)

My son, if you receive my words, ​​And treasure my commands within you, ​​So that you incline your ear to wisdom, ​​And apply your heart to understanding; ​​Yes, if you cry out for discernment, ​​And lift up your voice for understanding, ​​If you seek her as silver, ​​And search for her as for hidden treasures; ​​Then you will understand the fear of the LORD, ​​And find the knowledge of God. (2:1-5)

When wisdom enters your heart, ​​And knowledge is pleasant to your soul, ​Discretion will preserve you; ​​Understanding will keep you, ​​To deliver you from the way of evil, ​​From the man who speaks perverse things, ​​From those who leave the paths of uprightness ​​To walk in the ways of darkness; ​​To deliver you from the immoral woman, ​​From the seductress who flatters with her words, ​​Who forsakes the companion of her youth, ​​And forgets the covenant of her God. ​​For her house leads down to death, ​​And her paths to the dead; ​​None who go to her return, ​​Nor do they regain the paths of life— ​​So you may walk in the way of goodness, ​​And keep to the paths of righteousness. ​​For the upright will dwell in the land, ​​And the blameless will remain in it; ​​But the wicked will be cut off from the earth, ​​And the unfaithful will be uprooted from it. (2:10-13; 16-22)