The Mind...
Truth has top priority! Do we think about what we are thinking about? Is our thinking and the way we’re thinking aligned with the way God’s word is expressed? Are we willing to submit to the active work of the Holy Spirit in
transforming our mind according to the Word of God? With the mind we are to reason with much effort to overcome evil by the exercise of strengthening thought. Thought is real! We are aware that many thoughts flash into the
conscious mind unbidden and sometimes even undesired. Thoughts may be presented to us through the senses, or thoughts may be thrown up from the great store of memory. We cannot prevent this fleeting presentation even of evil thoughts, but we are perfectly conscious that we are able to make our
selection of which thoughts to encourage and which to reject. Thought in one sense is reality. It precedes and causes action, and it remains after the action is over. We may indulge an evil thought, supposing that it is only a thought, and of no importance. It may be only a thought, but in the final matter, the
thought is us. We must pray and meditate that peace may follow. We are to keep studying and being “renewed in knowledge” and exercise the mind in spiritual things. The first thought may come in unawares, but the next thought is under our jurisdiction... whether carnal or spiritual. Strive to enter in the way of the sanctuary. Here we will find spiritual progress. Here we enter into
the divine privilege of the mind of Christ.
Here we seek his attribute...not my will but thine be done. Here we bring into captivity every thought unto obedience to Christ. Here the mind is vigilant of the difficulties that are
possible. Vigilant of the things we hear.
The mind is to always examine what we hear against what we know and what we believe. We examine what we have read against what we know or believe and compare them to the Word of God. Without that last and most
crucial stage of the process we would be lost in our own understanding or misunderstanding. Here’s a beautiful thing about the mind...it is not flesh.
Sinful flesh? Yet with the mind we can cease to sin, in thought and in the flesh. This is that “inner being” we know to be Christ in us. Having the mind of Christ is the returning to the image in which the first man and woman were brought forth. We were created by God to be choice empowered individuals.
God will not force us to follow Him. He will however give us the consequences of not following His way. Nothing distracted Jesus from the word of God. We must consciously choose between God and the world. In
order for us to make a conscious decision, we must know what God’s word says. God’s word provides not only a source of information, but also transformation. As we study God’s word, we must do so not just to obtain knowledge, but to seek God’s transforming power in our lives by pondering and meditating on His word. We must be willing to let go of any pre-conceived thoughts and allow God’s word to transform us to our original design. God
began this work in the first pair, and He will complete what He has begun.
What were Jesus’ thoughts? What were his concerns? Doing the will of his Father. Studying the word helps us develop the understanding needed to develop an ordered mind that is in harmony and unity with the purpose of God. How far short we are of such a criterion — our mournful experience can
testify. The eyes of our understanding being enlightened is the riches of the inheritance that is in Christ Jesus. To the truth, the word does not say we may have the riches, it says we may know the riches. These riches are in the spirit of wisdom and revelation graced upon the mind. Brothers, sisters, we
already have it...we just may not know what we have. Wisdom, which is a spirit gives us light. And that light is the life in Christ. Wisdom gives us life! Wisdom is a spirit, it is not just an understanding, it’s an attitude and a life that we possess. Christ is made unto us wisdom. Therefore we are not to function with human wisdom but with that wisdom that comes from God.
We are counseled to seek the ultimate exchange of mind. We are to come
to a mind relationship with God through Jesus Christ. This brings us into communion and community by experiencing God, moment by moment. This is life that is anchored in Christ, centered in God’s Word, guided by God’s Spirit and conformed to God’s will. The result of such a life would be authentic witness in the world holding out the word of truth. With this mind we will never
forget the word of God. Think of the word hidden in the heart. As we are told to incline the ear, we hear the word and it is filtered through the mind. The mind of Christ is a grace provision from God. And we are joined to the Lord in one spirit...our mind is brought in subjection to the born again spirit. When
one is born again we begin to wash our mind in the water of the word. One with Christ in spirit, influences the mind with spirit inspired thoughts. The mind of Christ is a spiritual mind. The spirit through the mind is to have
preeminence over the body, the soul. The mind of Christ is the unveiling of the word. Revelation is not bringing in a new truth. It is the unveiling of God’s secret truth. When the word of God is revealed to us, it is unveiled. Spiritual knowledge, understanding, and wisdom removes the veil. The spirit of the
Lord gives the revelation and the understanding.
God reveals his wisdom and thoughts to us through the Holy Spirit in us. When we are open to his Spirit and listen daily to what the Spirit is saying, our mind becomes like that of Christ. We speak Spirit revealed truth with
Spirit revealed words and are able to carefully evaluate and know what to do in the most difficult moments of our life. There will be those who live on an entirely human level who will not understand and will in fact reject this truth.
But others will listen and seek us out for counsel.
They will seek us out because they see someone who rejects intolerance and embraces diversity.
Someone who says no to division and seeks unity.
Someone who is blind to self-interest and is willing to sacrifice.
Someone who refuses to retaliate.
Someone who does not judge.
And someone who refuses to give in to hate
and loves unconditionally.
God chooses a purposed people to speak and do extraordinary things. There is a wisdom that we continually speak of when
we are among the spiritually mature. It’s wisdom that didn’t originate in this present age, nor did it come from the rulers of this age who are in the process of being dethroned. Instead, we continually speak of this wonderful wisdom that comes from God. The touchstone of God’s wisdom, isn’t so much knowledge as it is love - love for God, love for neighbor, love for self. With the mind of Christ we’re able to hear, and begin to comprehend more clearly, what the Spirit is speaking to us: through scripture, through nature, through people, through books, through our circumstances, through prayer.
With the mind of Christ and ears that hear, we can increasingly discern and distinguish the right season and the right time. When to act, when to wait.
When to be led, when to lead. When to speak, when to remain silent. The Spirit gives us the spiritual smarts to wisely consider and appraise our decisions and actions. With our minds illumined and our will empowered, we
can be of one mind - the mind of Christ. We put others’ needs before our own. We die to our comfortable certitudes. We follow our conscience while bearing with others who think differently. With the mind of Christ, we can mind our differences. We can keep talking together - earnestly and sometimes passionately, forgiving and figuring out together how to follow Christ together in community. With the mind of Christ, God is the source of our spirituality and has our full participation in His every purpose. This gift of
godly wisdom isn’t earned, discovered, or created by human beings. Only God can reveal God. Without the Spirit, God’s wisdom is inaccessible and impenetrable. So, if God gives us His Spirit, if Christ spiritually and
transcendentally establishes his mind in our mind, we have a whole ‘nother story. God’s Spirit dives deep into the depths of God. The Spirit helps us to know and appreciate the wonderful things God has freely given us. This
divine and mysterious wisdom can’t be found in books. We can only learn it directly and firsthand from God through our Jesus. We learn and communicate the things of God from God. This is amazing. Something we
could never have conceived or imagined ourselves. And it has been God’s plan from the very beginning. We’re described as a peculiar people in the Scriptures, meaning we belong to a different order. We have a different way of doing things, a different set of priorities than the rest of the world. And the
Spirit not only gives us wisdom, but the Spirit teaches us how to apply it, appropriately and wisely to our lives and with others. God gifts us with spiritual sensitivity, spiritual awareness. But God’s wisdom is like an eternity. We can never come to the end of it. We hone and mature our faith by becoming like a child, being reborn by the Spirit. It is only by believing in the crucified and risen Christ that we can really begin to understand what Godly wisdom is. Another word for God’s wisdom is “the mind of Christ”. In our faith, with all truth, because of God’s love we’ve been given a new mindset, a new
attitude, a new way of seeing and thinking and being, a new way of living and relating to God and to others. This of course doesn’t mean that we know everything about God. But we can know more of who we are called by purpose to be.
Human wisdom resists God. God’s wisdom is rooted in the crucified Christ. We look to God for guidance. God’s wisdom gives us the spiritual wherewithal to be humble and serving and loving like the crucified Christ,
even when it’s not easy. We act with maturity, completeness, wholeness, and soundness. This aligns us with Christ in our speaking, our thinking, our acting. We are now the body of Christ with the mind of Christ. We bear
witness to every new truth learned. We see better how God gives the gospel. By it we apprehend what we cannot see. It is given us above all, to call up the scenes and facts in which we are commanded to believe, and be present, as if in the body, at every recorded event of the history of the Redeemer.
Whatever we find in Christ of spiritual habit or principle must find place in us.
It will not avail us to think on the work and character of the Savior if we do not come to Him and experience His saving power. His mind must be our mind. Every truth we learn was truth before. We just did not know it. It is
God's love that is the fountain and continuous support of our love. Our love does not create the love of God. It is the love of God that creates our love.
His love is the power of our loving. That which is true of God's love is true, also, of His truth. It is that truth which lays hold upon us, rather than we upon it. We do not make truth by believing it. God's truth is there irrespective of
us, and our seizing it is simply the opening of our life to its seizure and sway.
We do not make the truths of our faith true for us by believing them. We simply enable ourselves to see what is true - true whether we see it or not. It is the grasp of the truth upon us that we are willing to die for. And the truth comes of Christ, who is the truth, and by God’s grace we may have the mind of Christ. And the mind of Christ starts with the revelation of God and His relationship with His creation. With this mind God expects to see us at last conformed to the image of His Son. If God has such a hope for us, we ought
to awake to this hope for ourselves. The one thing which is to be most clear and emphatic in our minds is the fact that any hope we may cherish must rest on the foundation of our faith in Christ. We are to have no complacency
in the record of our lives. From this present standpoint, we should see more clearly than ever before the absolute need of a vicarious salvation. Even if we have to hide ourselves alone in the chamber for a time. God is calling us by His Son who, when we were sinners, came forth after us; not in vain, so let us assure Him, and not in vain.
Two kinds of salvation are proposed to us today; salvation by character and salvation to character. God has called a people who are the most humble and self-distrustful, least willing to set themselves up as of any worth
because of any accomplishment of theirs in the production of character. The essence of salvation is a victory over sin, which no man ever won or can win, in his own strength, and its truest mark is a beauty of humbleness which repudiates all regard for self. With the mind of Christ, being found in Christ, our salvation is reasonable. We can be released from the clutch...when I would do good, evil is present with me. The momentum of habit, the
waywardness of desire, the gravitation of the brute in us, give to sin a fearful grip upon the mind and will. We want this broken. Where is the strong deliverer who will shatter it for us We look for Jesus. He is not yet in our
character. That is where the very forces are found which need to be rent asunder and overmastered for us. And even with this power of evil broken, we are still undone. The strength of sin shattered, we are still a weak people. The will of God must be done, not merely suffered. How can we do it? There
is work to be finished before the night comes.
We need a fellowship richer, more penetrative, more understanding, than
any human friendship or relationship can supply. We want God in Christ. God has a purpose to conclusively provide this for His circumcised election. There is in us the principle of a living power producing in us, by the humbling and creative might of God, a new character. What we cannot do, we can have.
We cannot make a character, but God will make one in us. Our very inability
is God's favorable moment. If God were not involved, it would be otherwise; we could then work out our own salvation. Only in that case there would be no salvation worth speaking of; the end of it all would be gone. The very ideal of it would dry out and decay. But introduce God, and at once salvation
becomes the restoration of the soul to Him and the only power of salvation becomes His power, who will do for us what we can only attempt to do for ourselves. God in Christ and Christ in us can annul for us the bondage of the past. Too many believe they cannot be forgiven. And this prevents them from
coming to Christ. They are where we were. We must speak the everlasting gospel. If only they could feel sure that they would be forgiven, multitudes who are now distant from the kingdom would pour into it. We are in the hour of God. He has waited for us in this mood. Here is He as He is shown to us
in His word... Father, we have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight. We are no more worthy to be called thy son. But while we were yet afar off, our father saw us and was moved with compassion and ran and fell on our neck and kissed us. God can annul the effects of the past. Thank God for repentance which can undo the consequence of it. Here is how we were purposed ever before we did any good or evil. All that is in the effect must
have been in the cause. But not all that is in any cause needs to come out in the effects. God in Christ can frustrate, divert, overpower streams which pour down out of the past. Some of them can be turned back, some stopped, some directed to far nobler ends than those for which they set out. For the
effects of all wrongdoing we can, in Christ, make restitution, and - what is far
more significant - we can let Christ reach back to the wrongdoing, and thwart it by bending its further consequences to good. Here is the cause and effect of the mind of Christ in us. God will enrich tomorrow to atone for the lost opportunities of the past. He will restore the years which the locust has eaten.
We can never be again what we were, but we can be now what we never were. God makes the right use of the past, namely, to get a future out of it. And, lastly, God will restore the child heart and its joys. It is the loss of the
child heart which is the chief penalty for a wrong past. And the recovery of that heart is life's great longing as we go on.
The torment of sin is that we cannot forget. And its punishment is God's remembrance. And His remembrance will be judgment for the uncircumcised. But God remembers His covenant. We find it intriguing that in that covenant, He actually promises that there is something He will forget. It is the loving forgetfulness of God that makes the new heaven and earth in which the redeemed of the Lord walk and are at peace...and the former things shall not be remembered, nor come into mind. It is with the mind of
Christ that our strength is renewed. And the mind is weaned from all things, except as may be enjoyed in the divine will of God. It is led by the spirit of truth. This must be our law. Doing right because it is right, and for the sake of the God of right alone. Our Lord did only what was right, and He showed
Himself to be the Son of God by the way He infallibly discovered and unfailingly did that which was perfectly right. What are we to consider with the mind of Christ? The word is right.
What does it mean to have the mind of Christ? It is to reflect the character of
Jesus. To praise him. And real praise is much more than mere verbal commendation. It is moral imitation. And if we sin, there is failure to imitation Jesus. Sin is any want of conformity unto or any transgression of the law of God. And the law of God is the way of God — the law of God embodied in His character. God's law is the way God Himself acts. His law of truth or purity is simply the description of His own method of action. Sin on our part is any deviation from this. It is any failure to imitate and resemble God. This
is not a call to be like God. It is on the ground of our sonship as God’s dear children. That is a thought that takes away all the irreverence and absurdity of the conception of imitating God. If we are God's dear children, with His
nature in us, made in His likeness, nothing can be more natural and right than that we should be like our Father. It is as sons that we are to seek to resemble God in moral right doing. With the mind of Christ the word is nigh
us, nearer even than our hearts. God is nearer than our thought of Him. And we are simply to be like Him. Only Christ opens up a way of such access to God as makes us reverently familiar with God, as children with their father.
And Christ has done more than this. He has shown God to us in His own being as truth and love and life. It is no longer we that live, but Christ lives in us. Has any one who has not seen God in this dark world, and who is looking for Him, been able to see in us any trait of His character, imitated and
reproduced in Christ in us? We confess Christ to men, and we become new men in Christ. The leap of faith in utterance confirms the vision of faith in the soul. Being like Christ, and having His spirit, mean first of all the love of the truth, the search for the truth, the openness of soul to the truth, the spiritual
vision which He possessed.
There is to be this spiritual growth of mind as our perception of truth is heaven sourced. Our human conceptions involve the relations of time and space, but there will be no time in eternity, and no space in infinity. Yet all our language in which we must speak and think of heaven is made out of metaphors of
time and space. God cannot speak to us of the eternal and infinite life except in the language of time that is not eternity, and space that is not infinity. What He has said, accordingly, we cannot always understand. All our earthly experience of God in Christ will be transcended in heaven. There will be nothing that lack in the new creation. The inward moral apprehension gives us confidence of this. Yet there is this wonder we know to be...in our commonness we shall keep with those we loved on earth in the greatness of
His love. We should for every eternity be together in the house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.
We must contribute more to our witness while here. Being connected with Christ we will depart from iniquity. Our growth in grace, our joy in service, our usefulness in the cause of God, all depend on our union with Christ, and the degree of faith we exercise in Him. Surely God would have us seek for
perfection of love and humility of soul, and cultivate those excellencies of character that will fit us for the society of the pure and holy. And if the Bible nowhere explicitly states that we shall know one another and preserve our
own personalities in the heavenly life, it is only because its writers never thought of anything else. We continue to be ourselves in the heavenly life, but with personality and characters formed by the mind of Christ. The eternal existence of the great heroes and heroines of the faith and their long and
vigilant interest in what we do for them is urged by the writer of the Hebrews
as a motive for single-eyed devotion to Christ and to patient and uncompromising loyalty to His call. Indeed, this writer declares that these
souls are waiting for us, God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect. Then we shall know ourselves and one another and God even as we are known. We shall not be lost in the other world in a promiscuous mist of souls. We shall know our selves and
other souls. There we shall discover that our loves were eternal, because love is of God. God cannot at this time tell us all that is prepared for us. We could not understand if He did. But one thing He has taught us by the
indisputable convictions of our hearts and by the clear implication of His word...we shall be like Christ!
Within the Word of God, there is the ability of God to perform His will. By conveying His thought to us through the Word of God, in the mind of Christ, God can will and work His own good pleasure in and through us. Our minds
must transcend. We live in a new kingdom so we must fill our minds with the knowledge of the laws and privileges that we are to abide by in this new realm. We cannot live in this new kingdom and then go on thinking of the
memory and the limitations that the old has taught us. We have been completely reversed from the old; it no longer exists as far as God is concerned. This new kingdom is appropriated by faith only. We live in Christ.
The world has no dominion over us. The mind of Christ is one of self-surrender to the will of God and to the needs of others. The mind of Christ possesses unity. The mind of Christ pursues the humility modeled by the Lord. The mind of Christ makes certain the accomplishing of the gospel message; the greatest need in our life today is not the mind of Christ but the life of Christ. It is the response to the prayer of Christ.
Wisdom is necessary for God’s people to mature in faith. There are many who profess Christ as Savior today, and yet are not mature in the faith. But as believers we can’t always tell what the Lord is doing in another believer’s life. God may be working in someone in a way that looks totally strange to
another, but God is most likely weaving a different tapestry with their life than He is with the other’s. To have the mind of Christ means we have God’s thoughts and are Holy Spirited minded for spiritual discernment.
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