Live in Peace

Do you ever wish you could just turn off your emotions? Let go of the stress? Stop being mad at that person who drives you crazy? Be content even when everything’s going wrong?

The truth is, you can’t turn off your emotions–but you can learn how to let go of them.

Romans 12:2 tells us we’re transformed by the renewing of the mind. This works for anything in life we want to change, including letting go of our negative emotions. An emotions renewing of the mind project is rewarding to work on because you often see growth quickly. Here’s the basic (but not easy) process if you want to work on your emotions:

Set a manageable goal (see below).
Renew your mind every time you experience the emotion in that situation.
Accept what you need to accept (see below).
Move on.

Manageable Goals

The first thing you need to do is choose a manageable goal. Here’s an example:

Let’s say you have a tendency to worry about everything and anything under the sun. Rather than renewing your mind every time you’re worried, start with one situation. Make a commitment to renew your mind every time that particular worry comes up.

Accept What You Need to Accept

Renewing your mind will help you get rid of the lies that are fueling your emotions, but it won’t solve all your problems. That’s why it’s so important to accept what you need to accept to move on in life.

Here’s an example: let’s say you’re worried about the future of your country. You can replace lies with truth, which will help, and you can also get involved in politics and try to make a difference.

But in the end you’ll still have to face the fact that you have no control over what happens to the country.

If you want to break completely free from worry, you’ll have to accept the fact that yes, something terrible might happen, and if it does, you won’t be able to do a thing about it.

What???

I know, that sounds unacceptable, but it’s true: we can’t control everything in life. Sometimes bad things happen, and there’s nothing we can do about it. In those situations, we have two choices:

Accept it with a good attitude.
Accept it with a bad attitude.

It’s a lot easier to accept bad things with a good attitude if life is about God. Renewing my mind always helps me remember that life is about God. And that makes it easier to accept the unacceptable.

More Help for Emotions

If you’d like to work on breaking free from your negative emotions, here are a few resources:

The Renewing of the Mind Project: This book explains more about how to start an emotions project, plus it contains 250+ Bible verses and 48 sets of questions to help you renew your mind for habits and for specific emotions such as anger, discontentment, envy, greed/lust, pride, judgment, worry, and stress.
Freedom from Emotional Eating: Even though the focus of this Bible study is weight loss, most of the book is directed towards breaking free from negative emotions.
Blog posts on emotions
Blog posts on the renewing of the mind