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WINNING WITH THE WORD “Winning with the Word” is a weekly blog that will help you to be a winner in life by applying God’s principles for living the abundant life as found in the Bible, God’s manual for life. AN INVITATION TO YOU: To follow this blog, click here.  If this blog has blessed you, please encourage your family and friends to subscribe as well. Thank you! Be sure to check out our Featured Book of the Week at the end of this post. ______________________________________ Do you prefer listening instead of reading? Then click below to listen to today's blog post on podcast. https://media.blubrry.com/winning_with_the_word/content.blubrry.com/winning_with_the_word/WWW_02_08_21_How_to_Control_Your_Thinking.mp3 ______________________________________ Hello and Happy Day! This is Dr. MaryAnn Diorio, novelist and life coach, welcoming you to another episode of Winning with the Word. Today is February 8, 2021, and this is Episode #2 of Series 2021. In my last blog post and podcast, I talked about how to think like a winner. We explored certain principles from the Bible that, if applied, will help us to win in life. If you did not listen to that podcast, I encourage you to go back and listen to it. Today, we're going to discuss  strategies for thinking in a way that will ensure that our thoughts will lead us to success. By success, I do not mean only financial success. More importantly, I mean peace of mind, good health, and joy in living. The strategies I will discuss always work if we work them, because they originate in God's Holy Word, the Bible. And the Bible is Truth in written form. So, let's begin. Principle #1: Our life is shaped by our thoughts. This is a law established by God, a law that we cannot change, just as we cannot change the law of gravity.  Because this law cannot change, we can either adapt to it or rebel against it. If we are wise, we will adapt to the law and allow it to work in our favor.  Several Scripture verses teach this principle that our thoughts shape our lives. For instance, in my last podcast, we unpacked Proverbs 23: 7: “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.” We saw that the way we think in our hearts will determine the way our lives turn out. We also learned what the Bible means by the heart. The second principle in controlling our thinking is found in Romans 12: 2 NKJV: "And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God." In this verse, we learn that in order to prove--or experience--God's perfect will, we need to be transformed. In order to be transformed, we must renew our minds. Renewing our minds means training them to think in a new way, a way different from the way we have been thinking up until now. But the key here is that the new way of thinking we must choose is God's way of thinking as found in the Bible. Any other way of thinking will not give us the desired result of a successful life. So, Principle #2 can be summarized as follows: We experience God's perfect will for our lives by changing the way we think and aligning our thinking with the Bible. So many of us have believed lies all of our lives. We have embraced these lies as truth. Consequently, we have experienced the negative effects of those lies. For example, we may have been told as children that we would never amount to much or that we were clumsy or stupid or fat. We may have been told that we were unwanted or an accident or a mistake. Whatever the case may be, we accepted those lies as truth, and those lies have controlled us all of our lives. Yet, we may not even be aware that we are being controlled by lies. Instead, we suffer silently the emotional pain of broken relationships, damaged careers, and other failures, totally unaware that all of this suffering is caused by the lies we believe. But I have great news for you!