Altogether New!
The Mind of Christ (2)
By T. M. Moore|Published Date: October 09, 2012
Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart…But that is not the way you learned Christ! Ephesians 4:17, 18, 20
There’s the old joke about how you can tell if a computer belongs to an Irishman. All the White-out on the screen. During my early years of using a computer I was that Irishman. Oh, I didn’t daub White-out on my screen, but I kept using the computer in many ways like a typewriter. If I wanted to add to a manuscript I was working on, I’d simply type the dumb thing over again, because I didn’t know about “insert” or “cut-and-paste” for some time. Nor did I understand about saving manuscripts (I still don’t get that completely) and so, as you can imagine, there was a good deal of re-keying, not to mention losing of documents.
I had this powerful new machine but I was treating it like the old machines I’d used for years; as a result, I wasn’t getting the benefit I expected. In fact, I recall at one point wondering aloud what all the fuss was about computers. I just didn’t see the advantage, except for the colorful green block letters on the screen. It seemed to be more trouble than it was worth – but this was just a measure of my being embedded in old ways and ignorant of the new capabilities I possessed.
Believers in Jesus Christ have the mind of the Lord. And whereas, in their old minds, which they had before believing in Him, they may have lived in the darkness of unbelief, without understanding the revelation and will of God, and without believing what God could do in and through their lives, now they have no excuse for continuing in ignorance of the many new and exciting truths God wants to teach them.
The mind we have now in Jesus Christ is completely new. It is free from the selfish and wicked ways of sin; open to the deep truths of God’s Word; capable of gaining insight into the glory of God in the world around us; and able to “think God’s thoughts after Him” in ways that allow us to live totally new lives from what we’ve ever known before.
Now we have access to new resources to guide our thinking, shape our outlook, and direct our lives. The world is a whole new place when we look at it with the mind of Christ. Rather than being distant and fearful, something from which we are alienated through ignorance, the world becomes the cosmos for which Christ died, a place of infinite wonder and glorious displays of the majesty and mystery of God, a world that God is renewing in Jesus Christ through the everyday lives and works of people like you and me.
The same is true with the people in our lives; now, with the mind of Christ, we see them as men and women made in the image of God, loved by the Savior, and capable of knowing Him and living in His Truth. As we use our new minds to engage the world and the people around us, we begin to think like Jesus, and to desire, as Jesus does, to see all of life and all the people we love reconciled to God and turned rightside-up in Him.
Looking at the world with the mind of Christ opens all kinds of possibilities for how God might use us in loving Him and our neighbors. The
possibilities are endless, but the challenge of learning to think with the mind of Christ is huge one, to be sure.
