Chapter 4

How God Thinks About You

Learning to think about yourself the way your Father does

We have spent the first three chapters of this book uncovering a quiet problem.

We have looked at the prison of the old mindset, the power of the thoughts that run our inner lives, and the deep crisis of identity that almost every human being walks around with, whether they know it or not. The cracker man on the great ship. The Israelites who saw themselves as grasshoppers. The script written by other people’s voices that we have been speaking to ourselves for years.

By now, if I have done my job, you can name the problem more clearly than you could when you first picked up this book. You have been thinking about yourself in a way that does not match the truth, and that mismatch has been quietly costing you for years.

Good. That is the first work.

But before we go any further — before we talk about how the brain can be renewed, how perspective can be reframed, how strongholds can be pulled down, how the mind can learn to process life differently — there is something I want you to know.

Something that is, in fact, the most important truth in this entire book.

You cannot renew your mind into the truth if you do not first know what the truth is.

It is not enough to think differently. The renewing of the mind, in its biblical fullness, is learning to think the way God thinks. Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus (Philippians 2:5). The destination of the renewed mind is not a tidier version of your own thinking. The destination is His thinking. And the most fundamental, life-altering, identity-rewriting thing about His thinking is how He thinks about you.

So this chapter is about that.

Before we teach you the neuroplasticity. Before we walk you through the renewal path. Before we hand you the habits and the weapons and the practices. We have to take you, gently and carefully, to the place where God Himself speaks over you what He actually believes about you.

Because here is the truth, and I want to say it as plainly as I can.

Most of the lies you have been listening to about yourself are not the lies of your own invention. They are echoes of what other people said. Or what you assumed God thought. Or what your own woundedness whispered in the absence of better information.

And if you can replace those lies with what God Himself actually says about you, the rest of the renewing of the mind becomes almost natural.

You stop fighting from defeat and start fighting from love.

You stop trying to prove your worth and start living from it.

You stop building your identity from below and start receiving it from above.

That is the doorway into everything else this book is going to teach you.

So let me walk you through what God actually thinks about you. Not what you hope He thinks. Not what you’ve heard people say He thinks. What He has actually said, in the Bible, about you.

*

Where most people start

Before we get to what God thinks, let me name where most of us start. Because this is important.

Most human beings — Christians very much included — walk around with a quiet, almost invisible background opinion of themselves that runs underneath every conscious thought they have. It is the assumption their inner life is operating on, even when they are not paying attention to it.

For some of us, the background opinion is I am not enough. We have to keep proving ourselves. We have to keep performing. The moment we stop running, we’ll be exposed.

For others of us, it is I am too much. Too loud, too needy, too sensitive, too intense. The world has been telling us to dial ourselves down since we were children, and we have absorbed it.

For others, it is I am broken. Damaged by what was done to us, or by what we did, or by both. Whatever value we might have had is now compromised beyond repair.

For others still, it is I am unwanted. People always leave. Love eventually withdraws. If they really knew me, they would not have stayed.

You know which voice has been running in the background of your life. You can hear it now if you listen. It speaks with such confidence. It speaks with such familiarity. It sounds so much like you that you assume it must be telling the truth.

But here is the thing.

God thinks something else.

He has been thinking something else about you from before you were born. He has not been silent about it. He has, in fact, put it down in writing, in many places, with great care, so that you would not be left guessing what He actually feels.

Let me show you what He says.

*

“For I know the thoughts that I think toward you…”

The most direct sentence in the entire Bible about how God thinks about you is in Jeremiah 29:11.

“For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.”

This is, I think, one of the most under-read verses in modern Christianity. We tend to use it on greeting cards. We pull it out at the start of a new year. We treat it as a kind of motivational poster. And in doing so, we miss what it is actually saying.

God is saying: I have thoughts toward you. They are constant. They are deliberate. They are not vague. They are specific. They are not occasional. I think them toward you.

Read the verse again, slowly, and you will hear it.

I know the thoughts that I think toward you.

He doesn’t have one thought. He has thoughts — plural, ongoing, present-tense. He is not thinking about you in the abstract, the way a CEO thinks about a customer base. He is thinking toward you. Personally. Specifically. With your name in His mind. With your face in His view. With your whole story — the parts you are proud of, the parts you would rather no-one ever found out, the chapters that have not yet been written — all of it open before Him.

And the content of those thoughts is named.

Thoughts of peace, and not of evil.

The Hebrew word translated peace there is shalom, which is one of the largest words in the Old Testament. It does not just mean the absence of conflict. It means wholeness. Flourishing. Completeness. Everything being as it should be. When God says His thoughts toward you are thoughts of shalom, He is saying His thinking about you is aimed at your flourishing. He wants you whole. He wants you free. He wants you complete.

And not of evil. Notice that. He has to say it. Because most of us, when we are honest, suspect that God is, at the very least, mildly disappointed with us. We assume that if He thinks about us at all, He thinks with a sigh. He notices, mostly, what we got wrong. He keeps a tally somewhere.

He doesn’t.

Thoughts of peace, and not of evil. He is not running a quiet inventory of your failures. He is thinking, deliberately, toward your good.

Now I want you to do something with this.

I want you to ask yourself, honestly, how often the thoughts you think toward yourself match the thoughts God thinks toward you. Because that question is, in many ways, the entire renewing of the mind in one sentence.

Most of us are walking around thinking thoughts toward ourselves that are nothing like the thoughts God is thinking toward us. He is thinking shalom. We are thinking failure. He is thinking flourishing. We are thinking not enough. He is thinking an expected end — a future and a hope. We are thinking if only I could get past this week.

The renewing of the mind, at its deepest level, is learning to agree with God about you.

*

A love that does not move

If you want to understand how God thinks about you, you have to start with the one thing about Him that never shifts. God is love (1 John 4:8). Not God has love, as if it were one item on a list of His attributes. God islove. It is the very substance of who He is. And the particular kind of love the Bible attributes to Him is not the flickering, conditional, mood-dependent thing we so often mean by the word.

The English Bible, particularly in the Old Testament, uses a phrase over and over again that most of us have read without really stopping to absorb it. The phrase is steadfast love. It comes from the Hebrew word chesed(חֶסֶד), and it appears in some form roughly two hundred and fifty times in the Old Testament. Two hundred and fifty. That is not a casual word. That is a word God has gone out of His way to repeat.

The key thing about chesed is that it does not move. That is the whole point of the word steadfast. It carries the sense of loyal love. Covenant love. Love that will not let go. Love that has been promised and is now being kept, no matter what. Some translators render it as lovingkindness. Others render it as mercy, or unfailing love. The flavour of the word is that of a binding commitment that does not lapse.

This is the foundation of everything else this chapter is going to say. Before we talk about delight, before we talk about joy, before we talk about dancing and singing, we have to plant our feet on this one immovable fact: the love of God for you does not move. It is not having a good day or a bad day. It is not higher on the Sundays you behaved and lower on the Tuesdays you didn’t. It is steadfast. It stays.

The most concentrated dose of this word in the Bible is in the book of Lamentations — a book written, of all things, in the middle of one of the worst seasons in Israel’s national history. Jerusalem has fallen. The temple is destroyed. The people are in exile. By every external measure, the situation is hopeless. And in the middle of this collapse, the writer says this:

“It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:22–23).

I want you to notice the words fail not. They do not mean occasionally come through. They mean never run out. The mercies of God do not have a limit. There is no point at which He looks at your file and says, I think we’ve reached the cap for this one. There is no moment in your life when His chesed runs dry.

And they are new every morning.

Think about that. Every morning, before you have done anything to deserve it, before you have prayed, before you have repented, before you have got anything right, the mercies of God toward you arrive fresh. Yesterday’s were enough for yesterday. Today’s are already here. Tomorrow’s will be there when you need them.

This is the love that God thinks toward you.

Not love that depends on your performance. Not love that is reluctantly extended because He has to. Not love that has been growing tired. Steadfast love. Loyal love. Love that will not let go. Love that is new every single morning.

When the voice in your head tells you that you have used up His patience, that you have made too many mistakes, that He must be tired of you by now — the voice is lying.

His mercies fail not.

They are new every morning.

Great is His faithfulness.

*

While we were yet sinners

Now we have to add the part of this that, frankly, is the heart of the gospel.

Because the most extraordinary thing about how God thinks toward you is not that He thinks lovingly about you when you have got everything right.

It is that He thought lovingly toward you before you had got anything right at all.

Paul writes it like this in Romans 5:

“But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us… For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life” (Romans 5:8, 10).

Look at the timeline of that sentence.

While we were yet sinners — that is when Christ died for us. Not after we had cleaned up. Not after we had earned it. Not after we had made ourselves worthy of love. While we were yet sinners. Christ died for us in the worst version of ourselves, not the best.

And Paul’s logic in the next verse is one of the most beautiful arguments in the entire New Testament. If God did the harder thing while we were His enemies, how much more will He do the easier thing now that we are His children?

Pause on that.

If God loved you enough to send His Son to die for you when you were running away from Him, much morewill He love and care for and provide for and walk with you now that you are walking toward Him?

If the cross was the proof of God’s love for you in the worst version of yourself, what could possibly stop His love for you in the redeemed version?

Most of us think God loves us in spite of who we are.

The Bible says God loved us while we were exactly who we were, and went after us anyway.

This is the love that thinks toward you.

It is not conditional on your performance. It was already extended before your performance was anywhere close to acceptable. It is not waiting for you to clean up. It came after you in the mess. It is not negotiable. It is not contingent. It is not provisional. It is steadfast, covenant, unbreakable love.

That is what God thinks about you.

*

And if you are in Christ…

There is one more layer I have to add, because it changes everything else.

If you have given your life to Jesus — if you have stepped through the doorway we will talk about in detail toward the end of this book — then everything we have just said has been amplified by an extraordinary degree. Because in Christ, you are not just loved by God. You are something even greater than that.

You are placed in His Son.

Paul opens his letter to the Ephesians with a single sentence that runs, in the Greek, for over two hundred words. It is the longest sentence in the New Testament. And he writes it because what he is about to say is so dense, so layered, so glorious, that he cannot stop to take a breath.

He says — and I am condensing — that in Christ, you have been:

Blessed with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places.

Chosen in Him before the foundation of the world.

Predestinated unto the adoption of children.

Accepted in the beloved.

Redeemed through His blood.

Forgiven of your sins, according to the riches of His grace.

Sealed with that holy Spirit of promise.

(Ephesians 1:3–14, abbreviated.)

Read that list. Read it twice. Read it three times.

That is who you are, in Christ.

That is not poetic exaggeration. That is the legal, theological, spiritual fact of your identity if you belong to Him. You are not just a person who has been forgiven. You are a person who has been adopted. You are not just a person who has been helped. You are a person who has been placed in the family. You are not just a person who has been given a second chance. You are a person who has been given a new name.

This is who God says you are.

And when He looks at you, this is what He sees.

Not the cracker man. Not the grasshopper. Not the disappointment. Not the failure. Not the broken one. Not the unwanted one. A child. Adopted. Beloved. Accepted. Sealed. His.

If you can begin to think this about yourself, even slowly, even imperfectly, even with the old voices still arguing in the background — you will begin to live differently. Because identity always shapes behaviour. Always. Without exception. And the identity God has given you is the most stable foundation any human being could ever stand on.

*

And here is the wonder of it

Now I want to show you something about the heart of God that I think most Christians have never let themselves believe. But before I do, I have to be careful, and honest, because this truth can be misheard.

What I am about to describe — the delight, the joy, the singing of God over His people — is not God shrugging at how we live. It is not divine indifference to sin. The same Bible that tells us God loves us with a steadfast love also tells us, plainly, that God is holy, that sin is real, and that He loves us far too much to leave us the way He found us. The love we have been describing is not a love that says stay as you are. It is a love that says come home, and be changed. A person who is deliberately building their life against everything God has said should not read this chapter as God happily dancing over that rebellion. That would be to take the comfort of the gospel while refusing the call of the gospel.

But — and this is the point — for the one who has come to Christ, who has turned, who is walking, however imperfectly, in the direction of home, there is a delight in the heart of God that is almost too much to take in. The delight I am about to describe is the delight of a Father over a child He is restoring. It is the joy of heaven over the sinner who repents (Luke 15:7) — not the sinner who stays put. Read what follows, then, as a child of God. Because if you are His, this is how He feels about you.

And what He feels is not mere tolerance.

There is a verse in the prophet Zephaniah, near the end of the Old Testament, that I think is one of the most extraordinary sentences in the entire Bible. Most of us have read it. Almost none of us have really stopped tofeel it. So let me slow it down for you.

“The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing” (Zephaniah 3:17).

I want you to read that again. Out loud, if you can.

Did you catch what God is doing in that verse?

He is rejoicing over you. He is singing over you. The word translated rejoice over thee with joy in the Hebrew is the word gîl (גִּיל). And gîl does not mean a quiet, polite, contented smile. Gîl carries the sense of spinning around in joy. It is almost — and I am not exaggerating here — the word for dancing. The Hebrew poets used it for the kind of unrestrained, exuberant joy that bursts out of a person when they cannot contain it any longer.

And the word translated singing later in the verse is the Hebrew rinnah, which means a loud, ringing, jubilant shout. Not a hummed lullaby. A cry of joy.

Put it together. The God of all the universe, the maker of every star, the One who holds the planets in their orbits — when He looks at His redeemed child, He spins around in joy and cries out with singing.

Take that in.

I do not think most of us have any idea that God feels this way about us. We have been told, in plenty of churches, that God loves us — usually in a serious, almost clinical tone, as if love were a legal obligation He is fulfilling. We have heard that He is patient with us, which sounds suspiciously like putting up with us. We have absorbed, somewhere along the way, the picture of a God who tolerates us at best.

But Zephaniah 3:17 is not the language of toleration.

It is the language of delight.

It is the picture of a Father at the school gates, looking down the road, watching for the moment his child comes around the corner — and when she does, breaking out into a smile that could light a city. It is the picture of a wedding photographer trying to capture the moment the groom first sees the bride. It is the picture of a parent dancing around the kitchen because their teenager has just come home safe.

That is what is going on in the heart of God when He thinks about His child.

He is not putting up with you.

He is delighting in you.

I want this to land, because I think it changes everything.

If God is not merely tolerating you but actively delighting in you — if He is, in some real and mysterious way, dancing over you and singing over you — then the lies you have been believing about yourself are not just slightly inaccurate. They are not just a bit off. They are the opposite of what is actually true.

When you wake up tomorrow morning and the voice in your head says I’m not enough, the truth in the room is that the God of the universe is, at that very moment, singing over you.

When you sit at your desk on Tuesday afternoon and the voice says nobody really cares, the truth in the room is that the One who made you is, at that very moment, spinning with joy at the fact that you are His.

When you lie in bed at three in the morning and the voice says I’ve made too many mistakes for God to use me now, the truth in the room is that the God who has been watching you your whole life is, in that moment, rejoicing over you with a love that has already dealt with your mistakes at the cross.

You have to start hearing the real soundtrack of your life.

The renewing of the mind, in many ways, is simply turning down the lies and turning up the actual music.

*

The renewed mind, then, is this

Let me bring this back to where the book began.

The renewing of the mind is not, primarily, learning to think positively.

It is learning to think like God thinks. About yourself. About your circumstances. About your future. About your past. About the people around you. About the One who made you.

And the foundation of all of that — the bedrock on which the entire renewing process is built — is learning, slowly and prayerfully, to think about yourself the way your Father does.

That is what every chapter that follows this one is going to assume.

When we talk, in the next chapter, about the brain’s capacity to be renewed, what we are talking about is the brain’s capacity to be brought into alignment with what God says. When we talk, later, about strongholds and lies and the battle in the mind, what we are talking about is the work of replacing what is not God’s thoughtwith what is. When we talk about meditation, it is the slow saturation of your inner life with God’s words about you. When we talk about the path of renewal, it is the path that leads you, step by step, into thinking the thoughts He has been thinking toward you all along.

This chapter is the foundation.

So before you turn the page and walk into the rest of the book, let me invite you to do one thing.

Sit with this for a moment. Not for a sentence. For a real moment. Put the book down if you have to. Let the truth land.

God thinks toward you.

His thoughts are thoughts of peace, not of evil.

His love for you is steadfast, and does not move.

His mercies toward you are new every morning.

He died for you while you were yet a sinner.

If you are in Christ, you are chosen, adopted, accepted, sealed, and His forever.

And over His redeemed child, He rejoices, delights, and sings.

If even one of those sentences begins to sink down into the deeper parts of you — past the voices, past the old script, past the years of believing something else — then the work of renewal has already begun. Because what just shifted in you was not a feeling. It was a thought. A thought of God’s. Now becoming a thought of yours.

That is the renewed mind taking its first breath.

The rest of the book is, in a sense, simply about how to keep breathing.

*

Personal reflection

•       What is the background opinion of yourself that has been quietly running under your inner life — not enough, too much, broken, unwanted, something else?

•       When you imagine God looking at you right now, what expression do you imagine on His face? Where did that picture come from?

•       Which of the truths in this chapter most needs to land in you — His thoughts of peace toward you, His steadfast love, His love while you were yet a sinner, your identity in Christ, or His delight over you?

•       What single verse from this chapter would you most want to memorise this week, to speak back to your soul when the old voices return?

•       If you genuinely lived, for the next thirty days, as if these things were true about you — what would change?

Declaration

God thinks toward me with thoughts of peace, not of evil. His love for me is steadfast, and it does not move. While I was yet a sinner, Christ died for me — and now, in Him, I am chosen, adopted, accepted, and sealed. And over me, His redeemed child, He rejoices and sings. The thoughts He thinks toward me will become the thoughts I think toward myself. By His grace, I will learn to see what He sees.