Renewing Your Mind

At salvation our spirit was created 100% righteous and holy, in the image of Christ. The last part of Eph 4 talks about our behaviour towards other people and v24 says that just as our inner man (which is of course the born again spirit)  has already been created according to the very image of Jesus, we should now also let our actions reflect this change that’s occurred inside us. [Eph 4:24 and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness].
There is nothing we can add to this perfect work which God accomplished in us. He did however tell us one way to transform ourselves:
[Rom 12:2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God].
This is also why we are told to set our minds on the things above [Col 3:2 Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth], because the more we think God’s thoughts, the faster our minds will be transformed. When we still had an old sinful nature on the inside, we followed after its desires and trained our mind to think according to its lusts. But now that we have Christ living inside us, we need to re-train our mind to think according to the new nature. As our old sinful thought patterns then begin to starve, our mind will come more and more into agreement with our born again spirit.

Now you may be asking: “Isn’t it blasphemy to say we want to think God’s thoughts?” No, definitely not. I am not saying that we should become God; I’m saying we begin to think like Him.
“And how do we do that?” Well I’m glad you asked that question. Before anybody speaks, the words they say had to have been thoughts in their mind first, which they then speak or write down, thereby giving life to those thoughts and making them known to others. And since we have God’s thoughts written in His Word and available to us, then by reading the Word we can know what God’s thoughts are. Many people are waiting for God to speak to them when He has already written them a letter. So if you want to begin to think God’s thoughts, read and meditate on His Word – simple as that! Begin to understand how He sees you, familiarise yourself with the New Covenant, the New Creation, the atonement, your authority as a believer, how to hear God’s voice and much more! If we truly want our faith to become effective, we should reach a place in our life where our first thought is always what the Word of God says, and not “What does God’s Word say?”

Don’t be condemned by the following statement, but read the following words through the lenses of the New Covenant, and remember that the Holy Spirit is living inside you and that you can do all things through Christ who strengthens you. Here we go: It’s not just knowing scripture that serves as proof that our minds have been renewed. [James 1:22 But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves]. The amount of Word that we actually begin to put into practice in our lives is a measure of the degree to which our minds have been renewed. If we’re not doing it, it means we don’t believe it. People will know what we believe by the fruit we bear, by the things we do. Actions speak louder than words.

There are generally 2 groups of Christians: Firstly there is the group that grew up under the Law. They always expected God to punish them if they made a mistake, and their minds were trained to think legalistically: Do good – get good. Do bad – get bad. So they trained themselves to always try and do more, live better and be more holy. Secondly there is the group that grew up outside of church, who lived with a disregard for any moral code, running blindly after the desires of their sinful nature. This group trained their minds to think in terms of self preservation and self gratification. Depending on what age you were when you got saved, generally most people have lived according to one of the above ways for the better part of about 20 years of their life.
Both these groups now have to come to terms with Grace and begin to retrain their minds to relate to God according to the way of the New Covenant. And there are two ways of doing this:
They can either choose to spend another 20 years attending church Sunday by Sunday and hope that their pastor is doing a decent job, and have him/her renew their minds for them on Sunday mornings. Then during the week they would go back to their normal life and live as though God didn’t exist and then finally, after about 20 years they would maybe begin to understand the revelation of Grace.
Or they can make a decision to get stuck in the Word of God, learn discipline, listen to sermons, worship God extravagantly, go to conferences and seminars and have their minds renewed in a couple of months or years. They can then spend the rest of their remaining life reaping the fruit of this season of their life, a season where they purposely dedicated themselves to re-training their mind to think according to the truth of God’s Word.
Nobody said it would be easy initially, but we can be assured of this: Once we dive head first into the ocean of God’s realm, of His Spirit and His Life, a passion for Him will begin to overtake us and we will find it becoming easier and easier to renew our mind.

Why do we need to renew our minds? Let’s read the second part of Rom 12:2 again: [Rom 12:2b ... that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God]. The world is tired of clever arguments and philosophies about the existence of God. [1 Cor 2:4 And my speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5 that your faith should not be in the wisdom of men but in the power of God]. We prove God’s will to the world by demonstrating His kingdom in power by healing the sick, freeing the oppressed, setting the captives free.

[Acts 10:38 how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, who went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him]. Since Jesus is perfect theology and He healed ALL, then it is God’s will for ALL to be healed. We also know that it’s God’s will that ALL be saved: [1 Tim 2:3 For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, 4 who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth].
In the Lord’s Prayer Jesus prayed the following: [Matt 6:10b ... Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven]. The very fact that He prayed these words serves to prove that not everything that happens on the earth is God’s will, or else He would not have prayed “let Your will be done on earth”. So from these words spoken by Jesus, we see it is God’s will for everything that is happening in heaven to also be manifested here on earth and to have the will of the Father done in the earth. Because we know in heaven there is no sickness, no poverty, no corruption, no death, no suffering, etc. So by simply looking around us we can easily see where God’s will is NOT being manifested, and in that situation we can be the hands and feet of Jesus, making known to the world that it is in fact God’s will for them to be healed, to be saved and to be delivered from bondage. This is how we prove the will of God to the world; the good, acceptable and perfect will of God. Hallelujah!

In Grace
Andre van der Merwe

This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 6:56 pm and is filed under Previous Messages. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.