Think Again: Relief from the Burden of Introspection

Evaluating yourself—being mindful of who you are and what you are doing—is necessary and can lead to positive change. But what about the dark side of introspection? Do you ever feel weighed down and exhausted by your own self-analysis? Perhaps you made a mistake, said a careless word, or even messed up big time. Your self-examination spirals into a full-blown cross-examination. You keep revisiting what happened. Your mind circles around the event, fruitlessly trying to somehow make the outcome different so you don’t feel the embarrassment, shame, and regret.

The modern self-esteem movement has left us empty and self-focused. We exhaust our healthy introspection and pervert it into constant self-evaluation, wrong views of ourselves, self-accusation, and false guilt. Introspection was never meant to bear such weight.

Think Again offers real relief from the burden of introspection that so many of us carry each day. Pastor Jared Mellinger, who tends to overdose on self-analysis himself, shows us how the hope of the gospel can rescue us from the bad fruit of unsound introspection. Mellinger’s short, story-filled chapters help readers identify and turn away from unhealthy introspection.

There is an outward-focused God who delights to rescue an inward-focused people and lead them into a better way to live. When we truly understand it, we’ll see that the gospel actually sets us free from thinking about ourselves too much.We can seek after and pray for the peace and joy—the sanity—that comes from thinking about ourselves less often. Think Again includes practical instructions for self-examination, fighting false guilt, breaking free from hyper-introspection, and more. Ultimately, Think Again demonstrates that the solution to thinking too much about ourselves is to look to Christ, and it gives readers the tools to begin to turn from the mirror.

“Martin Luther believed man’s problem is that he is incurvatus in se—turned in on himself. In Think Again Jared Mellinger tackles one devastating effect of this in an astute, pastorally sensitive, and deeply searching but healing way. Here is analysis, diagnosis and remedy all in one. Plus it’s readable. The best books work on us while we are reading them and help effect the very transformation they describe. This is one of them.”

--- Sinclair Ferguson, Author of The Christian Life and Devoted to God

“Think Again is a great little book. It navigates us through the maze of introspection in a biblical, practical, straight-forward manner. Read it for yourself; give it to a friend—for it shows how Christ can set us free from our own thoughts. I believe that for many people this will be a truly liberating book.”

--- Tim Chester, Faculty member of Crosslands; author of over thirty books, including You Can Change

View an excerpt here.