As I think further about this call to holiness that I believe we have been given by God, I recall these words of Paul to the Ephesians when he wrote that only Jesus can truly revolutionize our minds ‘in God’s way, in the goodness and holiness of the truth.” The call to holiness, I believe, is a call to revolutionize our minds – our attitudes and various ways of thinking. Why? Because the way that we think drives behaviors.

But I know that Jesus does not bulldoze His way into our minds, clearing out piles of feelings here and destroying structures built on foundations of false ideas there. His way is far more sensitive and respectful of the uniqueness and fragility of each human being. His way is far more constructive and far-sighted. His way of revolutionizing our minds is by revolutionizing one by one each event in our memories as well as all the contents of the other functions of our minds.

Our memories retain for us our experiences; they are the points of convergence for our thoughts, decisions and feelings. It is in our memories that many of our present-day feelings have their roots, that many of the thoughts that now rule our minds have their origins; that the decisions of the past continue to live and affect the present. Each of our experiences has been carefully recorded by our brains and is available for replay, consciously or unconsciously, at any time. Indeed our entire past is stored within us and greatly affects our present-day lives, whether we want it to or not. Sound psychological research has proven this fact.

All we need to do, then, to understand our need to allow Christ to enter our lives is to remember some of the times in which we have been hurt, confused, mistreated, overdisciplined, maligned, physically abused, underdisciplined, unloved, ignored or the   victim of other people’s sins. Similarly, we can also remember some of the times we have sinned against others and stop to see how those sins have distorted our personalities.