Change The Way We Act|Dr.Haisui Daime

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             “Don’t fight, just refocus”

The key to overcoming any temptation in your life is not to push back. It’s to change your focus. Because whatever gets your attention gets you. The battle for sin always starts in the mind. That’s why the Bible says in Psalm 119:6, “Thinking about your commands will keep me from doing some foolish thing.” Why? Because if you’re thinking about God’s truth, you’re not thinking about the less important stuff. It’s true in every single area of life — good or bad. Whatever you focus on gets your attention. Whatever gets your attention is going to get you.

The key is to just change your mind. Temptation always follows a predictable pattern: attention, arousal, and action. Your mind gets hooked, your mind kicks in, and then you act on it. So you don’t fight a temptation; you just turn your mind to something else. You can’t always control your circumstances, and you can’t even always control the way you feel. But you can control what you think about. That’s always your choice. And if you change the way you think, it changes the way you feel, and that will change the way you act.

You can’t change on your own; because lasting change requires an honest and authentic community. You need people in your life who will tell you the truth in love. You may be so embarrassed by certain issues in your life that you won’t talk about them with anyone. But how well has that strategy worked for you? If you could change your life on your own, you would have already done it. But you can’t.

Stop lying to yourself and others if you want to change. And you need a person with whom you can be completely open and honest. You don’t have to open up to everyone, but you need to open up to someone because God made you need other people. The Bible says, “So stop telling lies. Let us tell our neighbors the truth, for we are all parts of the same body” (Ephesians 4:25). If you’re a believer, you belong to the Body of Christ. You belong to other believers. You were not made to live the Christian life alone. You can’t do it.

Not everything that happens in this world is God’s will. But God says He will work good out of the bad things in life if you will trust Him. He will return peace for your pieces. He gives you peace in your heart that comes from knowing that even if you don’t understand the hurt in your life; you can still forgive, knowing that God will use that pain for good. You don’t have to forget the wrong thing that someone did to you. You can’t do it even if you tried! God says you don’t have to forget it. You just have to forgive and then see how He will bring good out of it.

If you’re serious about changing the deepest, darkest defects in your life, you have to overcome the fear of being honest. We waste an enormous amount of energy trying to cover up our sins, our hurts, our hang-ups, and our defects. If you spent as much time being honest about what’s not right in your life as you do covering it up, you’d have a lot more energy for what is right in your life. Want to make a change in your life? Open up and be honest about your failures. Because "Jesus cares" (1Peter 5:7).

Dr. Haisui Daime. Pastor, Zeme Church Delhi

This article first appeared in NagaDao, an annual publication of the Naga Students' Union, Delhi (2019).