THE RENEWING OF THE MIND
The will of God for His children is that we be "Christlike." As we have
seen, Paul declares that the purpose of all of the ministries and the provisions of
God is to bring us "unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the
fulness of Christ" (Eph. 4:13). In order to help the Romans understand how this
transformation of life is accomplished, Paul wrote:
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of
God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice,
holy acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable
service. And be not conformed to this world: but be
ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye
may prove what is that good, acceptable, and per-
fect, will of God (Rom. 12:1-2).
When God created man, He gave him the ability to think and the privilege of
choosing what he thinks about. Adam was created a spiritual being capable of
having fellowship with God, and God gave him dominion over all the works of His
hands. Adam was to subdue the earth and have dominion over it. In order to
communicate with God and to fulfill God's directive, Adam must have possessed
great spiritual and intellectual powers. After Adam's fall, man lost his spiritual
awareness, and his mind was no longer dominated by his spirit, but by his senses;
he became "carnally minded." This has been the condition of man ever since. As
a sinner coming to the Lord Jesus Christ, I bring to him a mind controlled by the
senses and filled with all of the ideas, biases, opinions, prejudices, hurts, fears,
and experiences of my lifetime apart from God. When I receive the Lord Jesus
Christ, I become a new creation:
Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new crea-
ture: old things are passed away; and behold, all
things are become new (II Cor. 5:17).
When I was born the first time, I more or less had a "tabula rasa"--a blank
tablet for a mind. From the time of my birth until the present, all kinds of ideas
and impressions have been imprinted on my mind. When I was born again,
converted, God for Christ's sake forgave my sins and imparted a new life to me. I
was a new creation in Christ Jesus, old things pass away and all things become
new. However, there was one thing that God did not do: He did not blot out my
mind. The morning after I was converted, I awoke with the same head full of stuff
that I had the night before I was converted, except I had a consciousness that I
was a child of God. Instead of blotting out my memory and making my
mind a blank, God made provision for the renewing of my mind by the power of
the Holy Spirit. This is the reason Jesus told His disciples:
Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth is come, he will
guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of
himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he
speak: and he will shew you things to come. He
shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine and shall
shew it unto you. All things that the Father hath are
mine: therefore said I, that he shall take of mine, and
shall shew it unto you (John 16:13-15).
Therefore, instead of blotting out our minds, God gives us the Holy Spirit to
lead us into all truth, to create the "mind of Christ" within us, and to enable us to
become that which God has made us in Christ Jesus.
Paul sets forth this concept so eloquently in his letter to the Corinthians:
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. For what man knoweth the things of a man,
save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the
things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit 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 teache-
th; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the
natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of
God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can
he know them, because they are spiritually dis-
cerned. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet
he himself is judged of no man. For who hath known
the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But
we have the mind of Christ (I Cor. 2:9-16).
The wonderful things which God has prepared for us are not all in the
future, but they are in the NOW, and the Holy Spirit is the one who reveals them
to us and empowers us to receive them. Because we are part of the human
family, partakers of human nature, we understand the intellectual and emotional
and physical needs of people. But as children of God, we begin to understand
spiritual things--those things related to the will and purposes of God--because we
are partakers of His divine nature. We now have the mind of Christ.
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