There is a path that leads to life.

Before you lay a great hill for tubing covered in a few feet of fresh powder snow. With a determined look, you hop on your tube, stomach down, slowly making your way down the hill without smashing your face into a tree through creating a new path in the snow.

You’re covered in snow, but smiling. Now, with each run on that new path, you will go faster and cleaner. Why? You packed and removed snow that brought resistance against the tube.

This is a wonderful picture of true Jesus life change. To defeat the thoughts causing resistance to change (anti-God “strongholds, arguments and pretensions”), you have to create new neural pathways in your brain to replace the old pathways that led to face planting into a tree.  

You’ll need to know two things to do this: 1) the lie(s) in your head that created the face smashing neural pathway; and 2) the truth from God’s word that sets you free from that lie to create a new smiling at bottom of the hill neural pathway.

Once the Spirit gives you this truth, it’s time to verbally and mentally rehearse that truth (“do not let it depart from your mouth”) throughout your waking hours (“mediate on it day and night”), which creates and reinforces that new neural pathway. This pathway then deepens with each choice to stay on it (“be careful to do everything written in it” and ”take every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ”).

Every time you rehearse and act on this truth, your brain is being rewired to take the new path. After a while, this will be your automatic choice because your old character will have been transformed into Christ’s character due to this deep neural pathway in your brain (“transformed by the renewing of your mind” Rom. 12:2).

True life change is not easy, but possible as we shift our focus from changing our behavior to changing the thinking behind our behavior (Josh. 1:8; 2 Cor. 10:3-5).   

Want the smiles and victories that come with becoming like Jesus? Ask the Spirit of Truth for the truth you need to rehearse throughout your waking hours to create a new neural pathway to victory in your brain.

And as you do, happy sledding!