S227P5 – Laid on the altar: our minds

Rom. 12:2

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

I remember the days before I knew Jesus, when spiritual conversations really looked more like intellectual ones.  I recall trying to reason through the things of the Spirit to weigh whether they made sense to me.  My approach to these arguments always rested on logic.  Many times my logic was bound by that which is physically evident or seemingly possible.  Of course, these conversations never ended anywhere near agreement.  One big problem was that I had such a different way of thinking from those who had tasted and who knew of the Spirit.  They were thinking with the mind of Christ while I was thinking with the mind of sinful man.  I had a mind submitted to myself while they had minds submitted to the Lord.

The mind is a battlefield; we all know that.  One of the greatest obstacles to our coming to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ is our natural way of thinking.  The things of the Spirit will not make sense to us when we try to process them with the mind of the flesh.  The way that God and his ways start to make sense to us is by the renewing of our minds, which requires submission and sacrifice.  We take our wrong and sinful way of thinking, and we lay it on the altar to be burned up. Then, God begins to fill us with his way of thinking to replace those flawed thoughts.  His knowledge, wisdom, reasoning, and logic start to sink in. Without relinquishing our minds, we cannot come to understand his.

I used to have a poster on my dorm room wall with a quotation attributed to Albert Einstein which read I want to know God’s thoughts; the rest are details.  I was as unsaved as one could get in those days, but something struck me about those words.  It made me think that perhaps there was so much more than what my limited mind could know or understand.  Those words made me consider that maybe my ideas and opinions, my way of thinking about life and that which lies beyond us, might be all wrong. That consideration had to become a confession for me to truly know God.  Father, help us to be humble and to confess that our thoughts cannot compare to yours and that the mind of Christ is the one we desire.