the renewed mind
There’s a fight to the death going on inside you right now and there’s no option of retirement! But who’s fighting, and for what?
The battle started the minute you put your trust in Christ and will not stop until death, or the Lord’s Return, when the victory will be finally won – by our glorious Lord Himself. The battle is for your mind!
Philosophers and many others have been pondering for millennia as to what ‘the mind’ really is. Does the mind control the brain or is it just a function of the brain? How does it interact with the personality and emotions? Is it synonymous with what the Bible calls ‘the heart’? Is it just the chemical interactions in the stuff we call ‘grey matter’ – the result of aeons of evolution favouring those whose brains developed the ability to think?
For the believer, the Scriptures must be the source of answers to questions like those, and God has not left us ‘in the dark’– although we do realise that the secret things belong to the Lord our God (Deut.29:29) and that, this side of heaven, we do ‘see through a glass darkly’’and long for that day ‘when we shall know as we are known’ (1. Cor.13:12). For now, to quote Moses again, we must accept that what is revealed is revealed ‘to us and our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.’
Hearts and minds …
The Bible distinguishes between the heart and the mind (and also the soul – another philosophical minefield!). Jesus tells us that: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart … soul … mind (Matt.22:37). When the Lord addresses Solomon in 1 Chron.28:9, He says: And you, Solomon my son, know the God of your father and serve him with a whole heart and with a willing mind. (ESV)
Readers are encouraged to use a concordance to look up the Hebrew and Greek words used for heart and mind in the above verses to see the range of meanings that attach to each of them – that study is well beyond the scope of this article! But the general ‘flavour’ we will detect is that the heart is used to describe the centre of the personality, what drives us, our will as well as our emotions, whereas the mindis where the decisions are made as to how those ‘drives’ are worked out in practical life. I realise that that is a huge simplification, but the introductory point I want to make is that the mind is not autonomous but is something which is subject to internal and external influences.
The New Testament describes our minds, outside of Christ, as ‘futile’ (Eph.4:17) and ‘darkened’ (Eph.4:18).Our minds are also ‘blinded by the god of this world before we are saved’ (2 Cor.4:4), and even after we are saved, are susceptible to deception by the enemy – see (2 Cor.11:2). Paul also says that ‘we were enemies in our mind’ (Col.1:21) before we were reconciled to God
through the Lord Jesus Christ.
But we can be encouraged that, having believed in Christ, God promises to put His laws into our hearts and write them on our minds (Heb.8:10) and (10:16 quoting Jer. 31:33) and that the eyes of our understanding are ‘enlightened by the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ’ (Eph.1:17-18).That ‘understanding’ is ‘given to us by the Son of God’ (1 John 5:20) ‘so that we may know Him who is true’,but we need to ‘prepare our minds for action’(1 Pet.1:13 ESV )and stir them up (2 Pet.3:1).
Renewing of minds
Finally, we note that Paul talks about us being ‘renewed in the spirit of your mind’ (Eph.4:23) and being ‘transformed by the renewing of your mind’(Rom.12:2),and encourages us that, through prayer and thanksgiving, ‘the peace of God, which surpasses our understanding, will set a garrison around our minds through Christ Jesus’ (Phil.4:7 literal translation).
So the question we want to explore is “To what extent is the renewal of our minds our responsibility or is it something which is ‘done to us’”? And these are serious issues.‘For the mind of the flesh is death, but the mind of the Spirit is life and peace’ (Rom.8:6).‘I the LORD search the heart and test the mind’ (Jer.17:10). ‘All things are naked and exposed to His sight’ (Heb.4:13).
Firstly, let’s note that in Eph.4:23 and Rom.12:2 quoted above, the verb is passive tense – that is, the renewing is something that is done to us rather than by us. The Bible is insistent that this is something the Lord does to us, through His Spirit. As we saw above, He promises to write His law on our minds, as part of His covenanted grace to those who trust in Christ. Paul says in 1 Cor.1:30 that it is ‘in Christ Jesus who of God is made unto us wisdom’ – wisdom being the application of knowledge to the heart and in the mind.
The world in its wisdom ‘crucified the Lord of glory’(1 Cor.2:8) and Paul makes it clear in that passage, that the Cross makes a mockery of men’s wisdom and ways of thinking. Our minds are all part of the ‘old self’ that was crucified with Christ, and the recognition of that is a fundamental key to the renewing of our minds, if we are ‘to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness’ (Eph.4:24).
Let battle commence!
Secondly, having seen that the mind is subject to internaland external influences, then we can say that the process of spiritual renewal is the mind responding to spiritual influences. However, some influences (the world, the flesh and the devil) can stall the process of renewal and even reverse it!
It is rather like the process of digestion. The body is programmed to digest food in a certain way – breaking down food into amino acids for absorption into the blood stream, from which our cells take the amino acids and build the proteins of which we are made. Similarly, the mind takes the inputs we give it and is programmed to process those inputs in order to shape our thinking, opinions and, ultimately, behaviour.
While you can’t change the way your body processes food, you cancontrol the ‘raw material’ that you give it, i.e. what you eat! If you give it healthy food, it will tend towards a healthy body, growing normally; poor or small amounts of food tend towards sickness and limited growth. So, if we give our minds spiritual inputs, it will tend towards spiritual thinking and behaving, and growing ‘in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’ (2 Pet.3:18).So the challenge is, what sort of raw materials are we allowing into our minds?
It’s a joint effort!
Finally, for now, we must recognise that this is a spiritual process – not the result of an Aristotelian elevation of the mind to the highest level of the soul where it controls desires and passions – that can cause spiritual pride. We must also avoid the opposite extreme – despising the mind and intellect in a false humility. I’ve had a foot in both camps at different times and know how damaging those attitudes can be, both to self and to others! ‘
Renewing the mind’ is a process where the Spirit of God takes the things of God (i.e. the Scriptures) and reveals them to the soul, as this glorious passage from 1 Corinthians 2 confirms:
‘But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit:for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. … Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual … For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.’(1 Cor.2:9-16)
Who can have a higher aim or privilege than to have the mind of Christ? And this is our spiritual heritage and is the goal, for which we have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit! Spurgeon tells of visiting an elderly lady living in a hovel with a beautifully framed piece of paper on the wall above her bed, where she was confined due to sickness. He commented on it and she said that she didn’t know what was on it as she couldn’t read. He read it, and it was a bequest of great riches to her, and she was living in poverty because she didn’t know enough to claim her heritage!
Oh Beloved! Let’s claim our heritage – a renewed mind, ‘That ye may with one mind and one mouth glorify God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’ (Rom.15:6).
But does that mean we just sit back, ‘let go and let God’? By no means!! We are active participants in the battle, whether we know it or not! We are to ‘let this mind be in you’ and to ‘take captive every thought’. How? In the next article, we’ll explore this further.