BELIEVE - Get Your Mind Right 2

Audio on demand from Vision Christian Media. A positive attitude makes you more than just likeable. It can make you stronger in times of crisis and help move you forward with God's plan for your future. Today on Turning Point, Dr David Jeremiah takes a closer look at the optimism demonstrated by the Apostle Paul and how it fuels a stronger Christian walk. Here's David to introduce the conclusion of his message, Believe, Get Your Mind Right. Well, we mentioned yesterday at the end of our program the passage of Scripture that says, As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.

What we think determines how we live, what we do, what we are. And we're learning a very interesting lesson for a lot of Christians that you and I both know, and that is that it's possible to be a Christian and be positive. That doesn't mean you ignore a sin or that you scrub your theology of everything negative, of course not.

But it does mean that there's a lot in the Word of God that makes us want to stand up and shout and be grateful. And Paul, who was more besieged for his faith, and I used to tell everybody when Paul went to a city he either ended up in the synagogue or in the jail, and most of the time he got into both places because he was always under fire. And those passages like 2 Corinthians 11 that list all the things that he went through, oh my goodness, you'd say, how could he ever be positive? But he was the most positive person, and you study his life. He was more than a conqueror.

He was strong in his faith, and he lived a positive life. And I believe that's the way God wants us to live, and that's the focus of this chapter. We started yesterday. We'll get back to it in just a moment. But first, we are so grateful for the privilege we have of sharing these messages with you.

Believe with all of my heart this is the Word from God that so many of us need right now as we try to sort our way out of these last challenging weeks. Let's don't get stuck. Let's go forward. As I mentioned earlier on in the series, life needs to be viewed through the window in the front of the car, not through the rearview mirror. Let's go forward. We need the information that comes to us from our past, but we can't live there.

We have to live forward. Let's finish up our discussion about believing and getting our mind right. What does it mean to be positive in your conversations? Number one, speak positively to yourself. Sometimes we have no one to encourage us at the break of day, so we have to speak to ourselves. We have to say something like Psalm 118, verse 24, this is the day the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it.

Try saying that over and over throughout the day. This is the day the Lord has made, and I will rejoice and be glad in it. Outside of praying, your most important words are the words that you say to yourself. These words are silent, but they're significant. Pop psychologists call this positive self-talk, but I'm going to skip the trends and go straight to the scripture. My thesis, remember, involves Paul's example to us. So did Paul ever talk to himself? He said he strove to take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. He said, for in my inner being, I delight in God's love and in his law. He said, I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and I am persuaded that he's able to keep what I've committed to him against that day. And as we've observed and learned, he also said, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. I recall preaching a sermon years ago on how to handle negative thoughts.

I still remember my outline. Here's what you do with negative thoughts. Don't curse them, don't nurse them, don't rehearse them, but disperse them.

That's still a pretty good formula. Push out your negative thoughts, worry and anxiety, fear and pessimism by filling up your mind with God's scripture, especially his promises, and then preach those promises to yourself. Psalm 42, the psalmist said to himself, why are you cast down, oh my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?

Hope in God, for I shall yet praise him, the help of my countenance and my God. What was David doing? He was preaching to himself. He was saying to himself, what's wrong with you, David? Why are you cast down, and why are you disquieted?

What's wrong with you? And then he said, I'm going to hope in God, and he gave himself a little sermon. We don't know the author of Psalm 42, but we're pretty sure it was King David, because he knew how to preach to himself whenever he needed to do it. As a younger man, he went through a lot of debilitating experiences while he was waiting to be the king, and he had a lot of things happen to him. One time, he ran into a disastrous problem in a little village called Ziklag. His family and the families of his men, his soldiers, had been kidnapped, and even his own men were turning on him. He was their leader, and they were talking about stoning him to death. So what did David do? He preached to himself. The Bible says in 1 Samuel 30, verse 6, that David, watch this, strengthened himself in the Lord. Why did he have to strengthen himself? Because there was nobody around to help strengthen him. He didn't have any men strengthen him. His buddies had all turned against him. The enemies were out to kill him, but David knew something that we all need to know.

When everyone else forsakes you, God never will, and you can strengthen yourself in the Lord. In that strength, David rose up to tackle his problems, and he had a positive spirit that came from his belief in God and God's care for his life. We're constantly processing thoughts, wrote Dr. Norman Wright. Depending how active your mind is, you may produce more than 45,000 thoughts a day. It might be compared to a flock of birds flying in and out of your mind. To complicate our minds more, Dr. Wright wrote, not all these are conscious thoughts. Sometimes they go past us so fast we barely notice them.

But listen to what he says next. Every time you have a thought, it triggers an electrochemical reaction in your body. Each thought sets off a biological process, about 400 billion of them at once. Because of that thought, chemicals surge through your body, producing electromagnetic waves, and these set off emotions which affect how we behave.

Science simply confirms what Scripture has been saying all along. We are shaped in much of our lives by our thoughts. So speak positively to yourself. That's a strange thing to say to many modern Christians because it sounds like heresy or something that shouldn't even be included in a biblical sermon.

But I only give it to you because it's in the Scripture. Not only speak positively to yourself, speak positively to others. Learn to talk to yourself instead of listening to yourself. Learn to preach to yourself. Learn to encourage yourself in the Lord. It will change the way you speak to others. That's one of the keys. If once you start to talk to yourself right, then you can start to talk to others right.

Your mood and message will be different even when things are going badly. This was another of Paul's secrets. Once he was caught in a vicious storm with a terrified crew on a sinking ship. The typhoon threatened to rip the ship into matchsticks, and even the captain gave up hope of survival. But Paul rallied their spirits.

In the midst of that tragedy, he stood up and he said, Keep up your courage, men, for I have faith in God. The storm grew worse. It was the deadliest storm these sailors had ever seen. And there were 276 people on board. Two weeks of unbearable strain had drained this crew to their last drops of hope. And none of them could eat or rest because the nights would just captivate them. They couldn't sleep.

In Acts chapter 27, here's what we read. Just before dawn, Paul urged them all to eat. For the last 14 days, he said, you have been in constant suspense and have gone without food. You haven't eaten anything. Now I urge you to take up some food. You need it to survive.

Not one of you will lose a single hair from your head. After this, he said, he took some bread and he gave thanks to God in front of them all, and he broke it, and they began to eat, and they were all encouraged. Do you know anybody in your life who, in the midst of what you're going through, can impart positive things like that to you?

You know what we mostly do? I was talking to my friend Ken Nichols today, and he was talking about the way people talk to one another when they're trying to encourage them. Sometimes the very things they say which they think are going to encourage them are the worst things they could ever come up with. I remember when I was going through cancer years ago, the things people would say to me would just be unbelievable. They knew what kind of cancer I had. They would tell me their uncle had that cancer and he died. That was supposed to encourage me?

I finally got to the place where I would say, if I saw them starting down that road, look, hey, wait a minute. If this story doesn't have a happy ending, I don't want to hear it. I don't need that. I need people to encourage me and help me and take care of me. The power of an attitude that is absolutely biblical and biblically positive. As London recovered from World War II, a prominent minister wrote a book to help his British congregation recover from the trauma of the war. He warned his people to avoid talking all the time about what was wrong with them. We all need a very few close friends, of course, to whom we can unburden our hearts and share our troubles, he said. But telling everyone we meet about our troubles gives our woes persisting power. It's tempting to share our difficulties because we crave sympathy.

But we must realize that every recital of our woes and every brooding hour etches on our minds the picture of the weaker, not the stronger self. Do we need that now? I mean, we're in the midst of a terrible pandemic and if we're not careful, that's all we watch on television. That's all we talk about to our friends. That's all we discuss in our small groups.

That's all we read about. And before we know it, we're just overwhelmed, like there's no positive news out there, but I tell you there is. Sometimes I think we need to just shut it all off, put it all away, and just say, I'm going to just walk with God today and get rid of all of this negativity that's everywhere. You see, the more we talk about our troubles, the more we rehearse and reinforce them, the more we spread the pessimism that's endemic to our culture. So instead, focus on others. Spread optimism. Help those around you take courage. Help them believe.

Ephesians 4 29 says, let everything you say be good and helpful so that your words will be an encouragement to those who hear them. It was a cold day back in 1990, a Boeing 707 with 159 passengers crashed on a remote wooded hillside in Long Island. The plane actually broke into two sections, and the nose of the aircraft rested on the deck of a terrified elderly couple's home.

The scene was indescribable. Debris was everywhere, oxygen masks hanging on trees, people screaming, babies crying, and fear that the aircraft could burst into flames at any time. Emergency workers, nearby neighbors, local volunteers rushed to the scene, and they began trying to rescue survivors. Ordinary citizens worked alongside the police officers, and physicians came to pull people from the aircraft, separate the living from the dead, and save the lives of the injured.

One of the rescuers was Joan Imhoff, who later described the strain of the scene that unfolded hour after hour. Joan remembered a strange strengthening camaraderie that instantly united the workers. People would pass each other, she said, and reach out and take a hand for a moment, or they would look at each other, make a brief comment, and then move on.

Sometimes they would embrace or nod, then continue applying bandages or moving bodies to a makeshift morgue. People needed that brief but meaningful contact to continue working with determination, just to touch others and see others, and know they cared what was going on was rejuvenating. I want to say to you, men and women, our world is wrecked. And as we work together to accomplish what God wants us to do, the last thing we need are endless critics. Instead, we need the camaraderie of Christ-centered people who say what is good and helpful so our words will be an encouragement to so many.

We need people who believe and who inspire belief. So be positive in your convictions. Be positive in your conversations. Be positive in your crises. Only after you've learned to be positive in your conviction and your conversation can you learn to be positive even during things that are hard. During times of conflict and crisis, optimism shines like the sun piercing the clouds. That was true for our hero, the apostle Paul.

Listen again to what he said. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, shall distress, persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? As it is written, for your sake we are killed all day long. We are counted as sheep for the slaughter, yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. Let me take just a moment and unpack that passage.

The apostle Paul lists seven persecutions he had constantly experienced. It felt like being killed all day long and then he said this. But in all of this he said, I am more than a conqueror. The phrase more than a conqueror is the translation of a Greek word that reads like this, hypernickelman. The word N-I-K is in the middle of the word. It's the word Nike, believe it or not.

Nike is the Greek word for victory, which is why that shoe company uses it. It means overcomer. And look at the first part of the word, hyper. You know the term hyper when you talk about your kid being hyper. He's over the top.

He's somebody that you work with. They're hyper. They're out of control. So Paul said in the midst of all these problems, these seven things that come to me, I am hyper victorious. I am not just a conqueror. I am more than a conqueror. He didn't just overcome his difficulties.

No, he was more than a conqueror. Back in the early 90s when I was just getting started in the ministry, someone gave me a book by a guy named Martin Seligman, and the title of the book was Learned Optimism. Over the years, I've read that book more than a few times because believe it or not, sometimes the things that happen in churches and ministries can really get you headed in a negative direction, and you need help to get back. So often I've pulled that book down off the shelf and just read portions of it. It's underlined with notes in almost every margin. I love that book.

It's not a Christian book, but it's a good book. Dr. Seligman said this about being positive. He said, the optimists and the pessimists, I've been studying them for 25 years. The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe bad events will last for a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe defeat is just a temporary setback, and its causes are confined to this one case, and such people are unfazed by defeat, confronted by a bad situation.

They look at it as a challenge, and they try harder. In other words, he said, if you want to know if you're an optimist or a pessimist, trouble and difficulty will help you sort it out. I want you to know on the authority of the Scripture and because of the love of Jesus Christ that you can be an overcomer. You can believe in him.

You can trust him. You can be positive in your convictions. You can be positive in your conversations. You can be positive in your crisis.

Finally, here's the best one of all. You can be positive in your countenance, in your face. Your mood is always reflected in your countenance.

Did you know that? When optimism is in your heart, a joyful countenance is on your face. Someone said, what's down in the well comes up in the pail. Unfortunately, I don't have a photograph of the apostle Paul, so I can't prove his face was radiant, but who can doubt it? His smile and positive attitude infiltrated his writings.

For example, he told the Corinthians one time this. He said, and we all who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory which comes from the Lord who is the Spirit. I want to tell you something that is really interesting to me, something you may or may not know, but according to the Association for Psychological Science, a University of Kansas study found an incredible link between smiling and the ability to recover from difficult things in your life. Did you know there are two kinds of smiles? There are standard smiles which use the muscles of your mouth, and there are genuine or Duchenne smiles which engage the muscles around both your mouth and your eyes, and the real key is your eyes.

Now, I have to tell you how special this is at this particular time. Everybody's wearing a mask, so you can't see their mouth, but if you know what I'm just telling you, you can tell whether people are smiling or not. I was in the store the other day checking out with my wife some groceries, and that girl was in there.

She was packing everything. She had on a mask, and I just stopped her, and I said, you have the most incredible smile. She says, how do you know that?

I said, it's in your eyes. You have a Duchenne smile. She had no clue what that was, but she felt so much better, and you know what? When you smile because of what God is doing in your life, it takes over all of the features of your face. You smile with your mouth, and you smile with your eyes. In the study, participants who learned how to smile were subjected to stressful tasks like they would submerge their hands in frigid water.

Some were told to smile, and others were given chopsticks to hold in their teeth so they couldn't smile. The results showed that those who were told to smile, and especially those who smiled with their eyes, had a lower physical response to the stress, a higher degree of happiness, and a quicker rate of recovery. Well, long before psychologists studied Duchenne smiles, here's what the psalmist said.

He said they looked at him and were radiant, and their faces were not ashamed. Ecclesiastes 8.1 says, A person's wisdom brightens their face and changes its hard appearance. That inner wisdom comes from believing. It's not believing in positive thinking or the power of a positive attitude.

It isn't even believing in ourselves. True optimism, men and women, comes from biblical convictions about the nature of God. It comes from knowing that he loves you, that he has an exciting plan that is uniquely yours. It comes from quoting Scripture to yourself, reminding yourself and others of his goodness and of the incredible future he has for those who trust him. A firm belief in the God of Scripture will bear you through the crisis of life, put joy on your face.

Your faith makes you radiant. You know, one of the things I've always loved about my friend, who's my trainer, he asked me one day how I would describe him, and I said, Todd, here's what you do. You train us from the inside out. In other words, we start out inwardly getting our minds right, getting our heart right, getting positive, and then that takes everything that we do under control. So I just want to tell you, men and women, that you can be positive. It's right to be positive. Good Christians are positive. We need positive Christian optimists.

We need people who walk around looking like Jesus really is everything that they say he is and that he's making a difference in their lives. Believing and getting your mind right requires you to stay positive in your convictions, even amid your crisis. The same is true if you want to move forward. So anchor yourself in the hope of Jesus Christ. Cling to the promises of the Bible, determined by God's grace that you're going to keep your mind buoyant and whole, unsinkable, even in the storms. I don't know where we're going in all of the things we've been experiencing, men and women. I don't know how long this is going to last.

I don't know if it's going to come back, but what I know is I can't control that. I can't control what's happening out there, but there is a little space I do have some control of, and it's the space of my heart and mind, and the Bible tells me that if I fill my heart and my mind with God's truth, that gives me the greatest advantage to come through whatever stress I'm going through and stay positive with my hands up high. That's my prayer for all of us, that we won't let the storm we're in right now bury us under its debris, but we will stand up in the power of Jesus Christ and say with Paul, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Amen. Amen. Well, tomorrow we're going to talk about outliving your life.

How to live your life in such a way that it lives on after you stop living. That's really interesting because it's possible, and we'll explain how to do that when we gather tomorrow for the next edition of Forward, Discovering God's Presence and Purpose in Your Tomorrow. Please be sure to join us tomorrow on this good station as we continue our discussion of momentum, moving forward in life, getting unstuck as we go into the future that God has planned for all of us.

I'll see you then. This is David Jeremiah. Our message today came to you from Shadow Mountain Community Church where Dr. David Jeremiah serves as Senior Pastor.

How is Turning Point enriching your faith? Please write and tell us at Turning Point Post Office Box 3838 San Diego, CA 92163 or visit our website at davidjeremiah.org forward slash radio. Ask for your copy of David's powerful new book, Forward, Discovering God's Presence and Purpose in Your Tomorrow. It's yours for a gift of any amount.

You can also purchase the Jeremiah Study Bible in the English Standard Version, the New International Version and the New King James Version, all available in a variety of handsome cover options. Visit davidjeremiah.org forward slash radio for details. I'm Gary Hooke Fleet. Join us tomorrow as we continue the series, Forward. That's here on Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah. Thanks for taking time to listen to this audio on demand from Vision Christian Media. To find out more about us, go to vision.org.au