Part II

The Principle: Renewing the Mind

Chapter 5

The Mind Can Change

One of the most damaging beliefs a human being can carry around is also one of the quietest.

“I can’t change.”

It rarely arrives as a declaration. It usually arrives as a sigh. A shrug. A half-laugh at the end of a sentence. That’s just the way I am. I’ve always been like this. Too late to teach an old dog new tricks. You can’t change a leopard’s spots. The clichés are everywhere because the belief is everywhere.

But left unchallenged, that belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you decide you cannot change, you will not try. If you do not try, you will not change. And six months from now, you will quote yourself back to yourself as proof that you were right all along.

It is, I think, one of the most effective lies the enemy of your soul ever whispers. It does not feel like a lie. It feels like honesty. It wears the clothes of realism — I’m just being honest about who I am — when in fact it is something much sadder. It is surrender, dressed up as self-knowledge.

The good news, and it is genuinely good news, is that the lie collapses the moment you actually examine it. Because both Scripture and science say the opposite.

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A small word about what follows

Before we go any further, I want to say something honestly.

This is the chapter where I start to get a little bit more scientific. So let me be upfront with you. I am not a scientist. I do not have letters after my name in neurology or cognitive psychology, and I would not want anyone to read this section thinking that I do. I am a pastor, a man, a thinker, a reader. I do not have a deep knowledge of this field. What I can tell you is that I have read a few books on it over the years that I have genuinely enjoyed, and that have helped me — and I will mention some of them as we go. I would encourage you, genuinely, to do your own reading too. Don’t take my word for any of it. Go and check.

But here is what I have found, and what I want to put to you as gently and as confidently as I can.

The more we look into this, the more we discover that science is quietly confirming what God said first.

Not contradicting it. Not replacing it. Confirming it. The instruments have caught up with the Author. What ancient prophets and apostles wrote thousands of years ago about the human mind — what it can do, how it can be renewed, what it is capable of becoming — is now being measured in laboratories with brain scanners and MRI machines and longitudinal studies, and the findings are agreeing with the text. That should not surprise us, since the One who wrote the verses also designed the brain. But it should reassure us. Faith and reason are not, it turns out, on opposite sides of the room. They are looking at the same thing from two slightly different angles.

So we are going to step into the science. We are going to do it carefully, and I am going to point you to better-qualified writers than me at every turn. But I want you to know, before we begin, where this chapter is heading.

It is heading here: you do not have to accept the way you are today. There is an availability — built into your brain, breathed into you by your Maker — for genuine, lasting, observable change.

You are not stuck.

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You’re not stuck: the brain is not fixed

For most of the twentieth century, the scientific consensus was that the adult brain was essentially finished.

You got the brain you were born with, the wiring was largely done by your mid-twenties, and after that you were managing a slow decline. New skills got harder, new habits got stickier, new ways of seeing the world were the preserve of the young. The textbooks said it. The teachers repeated it. The cliché about old dogs and new tricks was treated as biology.

It turned out to be wrong.

Beginning in earnest in the late 1990s, neuroscientists started producing evidence that the adult brain is remarkably changeable. The technical term they settled on was neuroplasticity — neuro meaning the brain, plasticity meaning the capacity to be shaped. The brain, it turns out, is not a machine that comes off the production line and is then maintained. It is more like a garden that keeps growing. New pathways form. Old ones quietly fall away. Connections are made, strengthened, weakened and rerouted, in response to what we keep thinking about, what we keep practising, and what we keep paying attention to.

The evidence has now become so overwhelming that it is genuinely difficult to find a serious neuroscientist who disagrees with it.

People recovering from strokes have learned to reassign lost functions to undamaged regions of the brain — speech, movement, memory, all coming back through nothing more dramatic than focused effort and repetition. Musicians who practise an instrument show measurable thickening in the regions of the brain that govern the relevant fingers. London taxi drivers, who memorise the entire street layout of central London in a notoriously difficult exam known as The Knowledge, have been shown to develop visibly enlarged hippocampi — the part of the brain that handles spatial memory. They are physically reshaping their brains by thinking. They walk around the city, they study the maps, they rehearse the routes, and the organ inside their skulls changes to accommodate what they have asked of it.

In a book called The Brain That Changes Itself, the Canadian psychiatrist Dr Norman Doidge tells story after story of people whose lives were rebuilt at the level of thought. Stroke survivors regaining speech. Trauma survivors retraining their fear responses. Children once written off as developmentally hopeless going on to read, to write, to flourish.

Closer to home, for the Christian reader, Dr Caroline Leaf — a cognitive neuroscientist and a committed believer — has spent her career drawing out the connection between what Scripture says about the mind and what the laboratories are now showing us. One line of hers, which opens her book Switch on Your Brain, captures the whole shift better than any I have read:

“You are not a victim of your biology.”

Take that in slowly.

You are not a victim of your biology. You are a victor over it.

What we used to read in Romans 12 as a spiritual command, we now also see in brain scans as a biological reality. The Apostle Paul wrote be transformed by the renewing of your mind two thousand years before there was a word for neuroplasticity. The instruments have caught up with the apostle. And that is what I mean when I say the more we look into this, the more science aligns with what God said first.

He didn’t ask you to do something He hadn’t already equipped your skull to do.

Change is not only possible.

It is part of the design.

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God’s blueprint: the meaning of renew

Romans 12:2 is the foundational verse of this entire book.

“Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

We’ve sat with the word transformed already — metamorphoō, the language of caterpillar to butterfly, of Jesus shining on the mountain. But there is another word in that verse that deserves its own attention. The word translated renewing is the Greek anakainōsis (ἀνακαίνωσις), and once you understand what it actually means, the whole verse opens up.

Break the word in half and you see something beautiful.

Ana — meaning again, back, or up. It carries the sense of repetition, restoration, and movement to a higher place.

Kainos — meaning new in kind. Not just new in time, the way a newborn baby is new. New in quality. Fresh. Of a higher order. Unprecedented. Better than what was there before.

So anakainōsis is not the same as starting over. It is not factory-reset. It is not wiping the slate clean and beginning again at zero. The word is richer and more hopeful than that.

It means to be renewed upwards. To be restored and elevated. To take what was worn, weathered, fractured, dented by life — and to make it not merely usable again, but better than it was before.

When God invites you to renew your mind, He is not offering a surface fix. He is not handing you a few coping mechanisms to get you through Tuesday. He is inviting you into a deep internal renovation that will leave the finished version of you operating at a higher level than the original ever did.

This is not therapy only. This is not self-improvement only. This is God’s design for the human being He made in His own image.

And there is something quietly important to notice here. If God commands us to do this, it must be possible. He is not in the business of asking His people to do things their brains, their hearts and their wills cannot do. If God says renew your mind, then your mind can be renewed.

The only real question is whether you will let it happen.

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Restoration, not just recovery

In the modern world we talk a great deal about starting over. New job, new city, new partner, new gym membership, new year, new me. There is something hopeful in the language, and I don’t want to dismiss it. But biblical renewal is far deeper than pressing the reset button.

Let me give you a picture.

Imagine someone takes an old classic car — a beautiful machine in its day, but now sitting under a tarpaulin in a barn somewhere, rust on the wheel arches, leather cracking on the seats, the engine seized from years of neglect. The owner decides to restore it.

A careful restorer doesn’t merely return the car to its factory state. A good restoration goes further. There is even a name for it among car enthusiasts — a restomod — where a classic body is kept, but the car is rebuilt to be better than it ever was when it was new. There used to be a television programme built entirely around this idea: people would bring in tired, rusting old vehicles, and the team would send them back out transformed — not just repaired, but upgraded, upcycled, better than the day they rolled off the production line. The bodywork is stripped, repaired and repainted to a finish better than the original showroom. The engine is rebuilt with modern tolerances. The brakes are upgraded. The wiring is replaced. Some restorers will quietly install modern air conditioning, modern fuel injection, modern safety glass — all concealed beneath the period-correct exterior. The car looks like itself. But under the bonnet, it runs better, smoother, longer and safer than it ever did the day it left the factory in 1962.

That is anakainōsis.

You are not being asked to become someone else. You are being invited to become who you were always meant to be. Same person, same fingerprint, same God-given personality, same humour, same gifts — but renovated underneath. Not just back to functional, but flourishing. Not just back to normal, but stronger, wiser, clearer, calmer, more useful to God and to the people around you than the original you ever managed.

So when somebody says I can’t change, what they really mean is one of two things. Either I haven’t tried, or I don’t believe I can. Both of those are addressable. Neither of them is a final verdict. The Bible says you can. Science now says you can. If your Creator has told you that you can be made new in your thinking, then the only sensible response is, Lord, then help me do it.

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Fixed mindset, growth mindset

This connects directly to one of the most influential pieces of psychological research of the last twenty years, which I want to mention here because it confirms, once again, what we have been saying.

In her landmark book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck identified two fundamentally different ways human beings approach themselves and the world.

The first she calls the fixed mindset. A person with a fixed mindset believes that their abilities, their intelligence, their personality and their potential are essentially set in stone. You either have it or you don’t. You’re either clever or you’re not. You’re either a “people person” or you’re not. You’re either good at maths, or sport, or relationships, or you’re not. Failure, to the fixed-mindset person, isn’t information. It’s identity. I failed, therefore I am a failure. Therefore I should stop trying, because trying further only proves the point.

The second she calls the growth mindset. A person with a growth mindset believes that their abilities and qualities can be developed through effort, learning, feedback and time. Failure isn’t a verdict; it is data. I failed — that’s interesting, what can I learn? What do I need to change? Difficulty isn’t a sign that you should quit. It is a sign that you are doing something new. Effort isn’t humiliating evidence that you weren’t naturally gifted. It is the very mechanism by which gifts are built.

Dweck’s research, conducted across decades and across thousands of subjects, is unambiguous. People with a growth mindset outperform those with a fixed mindset over time, in every measurable domain — academic, athletic, professional, relational. Not because they were naturally more capable. Because they kept changing.

I want you to notice something. The fixed mindset is, at its heart, a theological problem before it is a psychological one. It is the belief that I am what I am, and that is the end of the matter. It is, if we are honest, a quiet denial of the gospel. Because the entire message of the New Testament is that nothing about you is fixed. “If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Corinthians 5:17). A Christian with a fixed mindset is, frankly, a contradiction in terms.

This is the catalyst for change. Not gritted-teeth willpower. Not a six-week programme. A shift in how you believe change works — that you are not what you were, that you are being made new, that the brain in your head and the spirit in your chest were both designed to grow.

The moment a person genuinely believes change is possible, change becomes possible.

That is not circular reasoning. That is the doorway.

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A pastor’s two mindset shifts

Let me share something personal, because the principles in this chapter aren’t abstract to me. They are autobiography.

In my early twenties I had been through a series of relationships that hadn’t worked out. Each one left its mark. On top of that, I couldn’t see much direction in my career. I felt discouraged. Life felt stagnant. My mindset, though I would not have admitted it at the time, had quietly begun to lean towards defeat.

And then I had a small moment of clarity. I remember choosing — and it was a choice, not a feeling — not to complain, not to wallow, not to keep replaying the highlight reel of everything that had gone wrong. Instead I made myself focus on what was still good. I had my health. I had a roof. I had a God who had already done a great deal for me, and a future He hadn’t shown me yet. I reminded myself, almost grudgingly at first, that things could be much worse, and that I was still standing.

That single shift in thinking produced something I did not expect. Peace came. Joy came. Energy came. Nothing around me had changed. The relationships were still over. The career was still uncertain. But my mind had changed, and because of that, I changed. And within months, life around me began to change too.

I have come back to that moment many times in the years since.

A second mindset shift came many years later, and it had to do with the way we look through filters. Because we never really see a situation as it plainly is. We see it through a lens. And the lens we choose changes everything about what we then do.

I have watched this play out, more painfully than anywhere else, in marriages.

I have sat with couples whose problems, on paper, were small. A few irritating habits. Some clumsy communication. The ordinary friction of two people sharing a life. And yet they were miserable — genuinely miserable — because they were looking at one another through a critical lens. Every fault was magnified. Every shortcoming was filed away as evidence. Every small failing was read as proof of a larger verdict that had already been reached. The problems were minor, but the filter was critical, and so the problems felt enormous. The lens amplified everything it touched.

And then I have sat with other couples whose problems were, by any honest measure, devastating. Betrayal. Financial ruin. Breakdowns of trust so severe that, on paper, you would not have given the marriage a chance. And yet they made it — not because their problems were smaller, but because they had chosen to look at one another, and at the marriage itself, through a lens of potential. They could still see what the relationship could become. They refused to let the worst thing define the whole thing. And from that lens, they found their way back to something the first couple, with far less to forgive, never reached.

Same institution. Same vows. Same God. But two completely different lenses — and the lens, more than the circumstances, decided the outcome.

Once you see this, you start to notice it everywhere.

As a church, we can look at our own congregation through the lens of problems — who didn’t show up, what isn’t growing fast enough, the paint peeling in the foyer — or through the lens of potential, and give thanks for the faithful few, the slow steady growth, the quiet faithfulness that does not announce itself. As parents, we can look at our children through the lens of everything they are getting wrong, or through the lens of who they are becoming. As business people, we can look at the market and at our own business through the lens of threat and scarcity, or through the lens of opportunity and possibility. The market does not change. The child does not change. The congregation does not change. The lens changes — and from there, remarkably often, the circumstance begins to follow.

That is what renewing the mind does. It doesn’t always change the circumstance. Sometimes, more importantly, it changes the eyes that see it. And from there, the circumstance often catches up.

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A biblical example: Peter learns to change

In Acts chapter 10, the apostle Peter has one of the most life-altering mind-shifts in the entire New Testament — and the way it is described is wonderfully practical.

Peter is up on a rooftop in Joppa, praying around lunchtime, when he falls into a trance and sees a vision. A great sheet is being lowered from heaven, full of animals — animals that any observant Jew would have known to be unclean under the Mosaic law. Pigs, reptiles, birds of prey. The whole forbidden list, laid out on a sheet.

And a voice from heaven says, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.”

Peter, to his credit, protests. “Surely not, Lord! I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.”

And the voice replies, with a line that should be tattooed somewhere on every believer’s heart: “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”

This happens three times.

Now here’s why the vision matters, and it isn’t really about lunch. While Peter is still on the roof trying to work out what on earth he’s just seen, a group of men arrive at the gate. They are Gentiles, sent by a Roman centurion named Cornelius, asking Peter to come and preach in their household. And the entire history of Peter’s culture — every assumption about who was clean and who wasn’t, who was in and who was out, who could receive the gospel and who couldn’t — is being asked to change in the next five minutes.

This is not a question about animals. It is a question about people.

Peter could have refused. He could have said, that’s not how I was raised. That’s not what I’ve believed all my life. That’s not what my fathers believed. He had every cultural permission to dig in. Instead, he goes downstairs, opens the door to the men, and the next day he walks into a Gentile home — something a Jewish rabbi would simply not do — and preaches Jesus. And as he is still preaching, the Holy Spirit falls on the whole Gentile household, and Peter has to admit, on the spot, that God is doing something his old mindset would never have allowed him to see.

The gospel reaches the nations because one man let his mind be renewed.

I want you to notice how it happened. Peter didn’t change his mind by sheer force of will. He didn’t sit in a study and reason his way out of three thousand years of tradition. God showed him a new picture — three times, just to be sure — and Peter was humble enough to receive it. He didn’t dig his heels in. He didn’t say this is how I’ve always thought. He let God’s perspective interrupt his own, and he acted on the interruption.

That is the whole pattern of renewal in three verses.

If Peter, with all his certainty, could change — so can you.

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What this means for you on Monday morning

Let me bring this down to where you actually live.

There are areas in your life right now where renewal is genuinely possible — if you will choose it. Choose, not feel. Renewal almost never arrives on a wave of emotion. It usually arrives on the back of a decision you make on an ordinary Tuesday.

Maybe you’ve looked at a situation the same way for years. Maybe your mindset is locked in frustration, bitterness, fear or regret. Maybe you’ve decided, somewhere along the way, that this is just how things are going to be. A marriage you’ve stopped expecting much of. A workplace you’ve quietly given up on. A child you’ve given up praying for. A version of yourself you’ve assumed you’re stuck with.

What if you are one thought away from peace?

What if you are one renewed lens away from seeing the situation the way God sees it?

Here are four simple ways the renewing of the mind can begin, this week, in the small print of your normal life.

First, pause and observe your thinking. Most people never do this. The thoughts run, the moods follow, the day is poisoned, and nobody stops to ask why. Sit down with a notebook for ten minutes and write the thoughts that are on repeat in your head this week. Are they hopeful or hopeless? Are they rooted in truth, or rooted in mood? Are they yours, or did somebody hand them to you twenty years ago?

Second, interrupt the negative pattern when you catch it. When you feel the spiral starting — the catastrophising, the self-attack, the script — speak. Out loud if you have to. Pray a single sentence. Remind yourself: I don’t have to think like this. There is another way to see this. The way I have been thinking is not the way I was made to think. You will feel ridiculous the first few times. Do it anyway. You are physically rewiring a pathway in your brain, and the awkwardness is part of the building.

Third, feed your mind with God’s Word. This is the irreplaceable centre of mind-renewal. You cannot think like God if you are never listening to God. The Bible is not a religious book to be respected from a distance. It is, among other things, the most effective neuroplastic intervention in human history. Read it slowly. Let it argue with you. Let it talk back. Soak in a single psalm for an entire week if you need to.

Fourth, surround yourself with people who speak life. Community shapes mindset more than almost any other force we underestimate. If everyone in your circle is bitter, cynical, complaining, mocking, gossiping — you will become bitter, cynical, complaining, mocking and gossiping, and you will not even notice it happening. Choose, deliberately, the voices that call you upward. Spend more time with the people who make you want to think bigger about God, about yourself and about your future.

The mind can change.

Your mind can change.

And when it does, your life will begin to rise with it.

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Personal reflection

•       Where have I been believing the lie that I cannot change?

•       What old thoughts or patterns am I quietly aware need to be rewired, but have been avoiding doing the work on?

•       Where am I operating with a fixed mindset that the gospel should already have replaced with a growth one?

•       Where in my life have I been looking at something through the lens of problems when God is asking me to look at it through the lens of potential?

•       What would my life look like six months from now if I genuinely trusted God to give me a new mind in this area, and acted on it?

Declaration

I am not bound by old thoughts, old patterns or old labels. My brain was designed to change. My spirit was made to grow. By the power of God and the renewing of my mind, I will be restored, elevated and made into something greater than I have ever been.