It can be hard to remain positive at times. Television, newspapers and social media can create such a climate of fear and depression, it clogs up your ability to say \u2018yes\u2019 to things that are uplifting. Yet when we treasure the ways of God, and decide to become firmly grounded in Him, we have to prepare ourselves to say \u2018no\u2019 to those things in life that don\u2019t match up to His Word and His ways. In today\u2019s world, that can be so difficult.<\/p>\n
The Bible says: \u2018Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.\u2019<\/i> (Romans\u00a012:2\u00a0NIV) This \u2018renewing of your mind\u2019<\/i> is a process that only God can bring about in us. It is a work that enables us to \u2018have a sane estimate\u2019 of our capabilities. If we surrender to Him, God will replace the \u2018exaggerated ideas\u2019<\/i> we have about ourselves\u2014whether they are overestimations or underestimations\u2014with realistic and reasonable understandings of our own strengths and weaknesses. He provides us with the tools of freedom so we can be liberated from pride about ourselves and also from hypercriticism about ourselves.<\/p>\n
God wants to use us to make a real difference in the world. But it\u2019s important to learn to \u2018take captive\u2019<\/i> (2\u00a0Corinthians\u00a010:5\u00a0NIV) those thoughts that would say otherwise. This will never mean we should end up being full of ourselves. No. Knowing who we are in God will mean we\u2019re full of Him; not full of ourselves. We should be ready to point others His way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It can be hard to remain positive at times. Television, newspapers and social media can create such a climate of fear and depression, it clogs up your ability to say \u2018yes\u2019 to things that are uplifting. Yet when we treasure the ways of God, and decide to become firmly grounded in Him, we have to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1862"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1862"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1862\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}