How to Change Your Mind

I was at a food safety seminar recently, and the subject of how to get people to practice better sanitation standards came up. The remark was made that in many cases people know what good sanitation standards are and can easily pass quizzes on the most important points, and yet so many food-handlers don’t practice them. The speaker remarked that indeed we all do this sometimes – we know that we should wash our hands after going to the restroom, but sometimes we just don’t. Why is that, and what does it have to do with God?

The speaker went on to address new ways that they were testing to try to get more people to actually wash their hands when they are supposed to. The key thing that they realized is that it is not sufficient for you to know how many people die from food-borne disease every year – you have to care in order to actually see a permanent change in your behavior. Knowing what you should do doesn’t make you do it. So how did they suggest getting more people to wash their hands? Instead of giving them the stats and risks, they appealed to them through personal stories - particularly tragic personal stories where the person involved is a healthy, normal person that you can identify with. Through this technique, they actually saw an increase in the use of proper hand-washing standards.

When we feel personally connected, it causes us to wash our hands out of concern for others rather than just for protocol. Similarly, even when we know what God requires of us and that it is for our benefit, we simply won’t follow His law unless we are motivated from the heart. By appealing to the heart, these food-safety marketers were able to increase the percentage of people who wash their hands when they are supposed to. How much more then will God, who sees and knows the hearts of men, transform our lives by the Holy Spirit?

Romans 12:1-2

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God – this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – His good, pleasing and perfect will.

This is the power that God gives us when we answer His calling: that we can receive the Holy Spirit, by which we can truly begin to put to death the deeds of the body by no longer fulfilling our sinful desires, making our own flesh into a living sacrifice to God. From the time that God made the covenant at Sinai and throughout the prophets, He revealed this great plan:

Deuteronomy 5:28

Oh, that they had such a heart in them that they would fear Me and always keep all My commandments, that it might be well with them and with their children forever!

While food safety marketers have just now found that it takes a change of heart to stir people to action, our God has always known this. And not only has He known, but He has always planned to change our hearts through His Spirit:

Ezekiel 11:19-20

I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh. Then they will follow My decrees and be careful to keep My laws. They will be My people, and I will be their God.

Marketers of all kinds try to appeal to our hearts with varying success, but the day is coming when God will appeal to everyone's heart in the Day of the LORD:

Joel 2:28

And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh.

And finally, while marketers appeal to the heart for their own profit, God appeals to our hearts out of love for us: "not wishing that anyone should perish, but that all should come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9) and "bringing many sons to glory" (Hebrews 2:10). It's all about the heart.