Operating With Heaven In Mind

The great object of our life is to be brought into a perfect union with Christ and that does not happen along a straight line.  It comes in fits and bursts as we allow God's Word to conform us to God Himself. The universal law is that we are stubborn brutes and we fight tooth and nail to maintain our independence of God.  It is painful to let Him have a reaction, an attitude or a desire.  All of our stretch is corrupted by sin and because it has such hold of us, it is like separating our blood and flesh...it comes at great cost.  We think we are so very good and ready to live holy lives and yet let God take just one small object of love from us and we are cracking with frustration and confusion.  "How can God love me if He ruined that plan?"  "How can He be here if He is not reasonable in this?"  We do not recognize the sin strangling our faith and love but can see it plainly in others.  The Cross of Christ redeems our totality and God will not cease in re-working us until it is just as finished as Calvary is finished.  Our sin corrupted interests and desires and hopes must be crucified as well if we are to have pure and undimmed fellowship with God and one another.  It was painful for Paul and Peter and John and Abraham and all the rest of the "heroes of the faith" to be crucified with Christ.  Why would we think it should be less so for us.  We read the account of Abraham taking his boy up to Mt. Moriah as if it is some sort of fairy tale.  Was it not psychologically as devastating for Abraham and then for Isaac and for Sarah as our own "misfortunes" are?  Did not Sarah weep with bitter sorrow at the sight of Abraham leaving with Isaac?  Should we think sin is less treacherous for us than it was for Abraham and Sarah?  Do we really believe that God must be less the surgeon with us than He was with His finest saints?  God's scalpel comes without warning but the sin that makes us limp believers will be cut out of us and the health of Heaven will make us as lively as the greatest Christians the world has ever seen!

Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered … Hebrews 5: 8 NIV

Association of Habits

Hebrews 10:25 NIV

Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another — and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

What Smell Do You Always Associate With God?

When I was in high school I joined the “Ecology Club”.  The care and protection of the earth was just beginning to be popular and although I did not have any deep thoughts about the preservation of the Rain Forrest, there were a few cute girls in the Ecology Club and the Ecology Club used to go on cool hikes and so I became an “Environmentalist”.  Our club sponsor was a shy, unassuming biology teacher who was not the most exciting of lecturers but had great ideas for hiking excursions.  One time we went to Point Reyes and one of my good friends went into the outhouse to take care of his business.  The biology teacher with all of us standing nearby snuck up to the outhouse and opened a little hatch, pointing to everyone to be quiet.  We all gathered about and he took one pebble, then another and dropped them down the hatch.  If you listened carefully, you could hear them make a splash.  Of course, the splash had a particular direction to it…right up the opening where the toilet seat rested.  Before long we heard my friend screaming…”stop it!”  “What are you doing?”  “Whoever is doing that, stop it now!”  We all were laughing so hard tears were streaming down our cheeks!  Another of our trips was to Sunol Regional Park where we, using shovels and picks, helped create part of the haystack trail.  The memory of those trips brought such warm feelings even after high school that when I bought a car while in college I used to drive up to the park with the top of my car down blaring out my latest 8-track, “Running on Empty” by Jackson Brown.  The result is that I cannot hear “Running on Empty” without immediately thinking of Sunol Park and the hikes through the hills with the ecology club.

Our mind is wonderfully designed to link associations together.  The brain connects good and bad memories with certain smells, sounds or tastes and whenever we taste certain tastes or smell certain smells, specific events almost always come to mind.  We all have certain associations etched in our mind.  I cannot hear the song “In-A Godda-Da-Vida” without thinking of typing class my sophomore year in high school and the smell of fresh bread cooking always reminds me of camping trips into the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  Do you have a certain memory associated with the sunset?  What comes to mind when you smell bacon cooking or bite into a ripe peach?  Does the smell of hot coffee brewing wring out of you a certain memory or bring to mind a particular person?  Perhaps the sound of a siren blaring or the screech of tires or the purring of a cat awakens a long lost memory for you.  Have you ever been jarred into the past by certain songs, foods and perfumes that are tied to key moments in your life?

Some associations are intentional, most are unplanned and sometimes even unwanted.  Many of us do not pay particular attention to the associations fixed in our minds but perhaps we should.  Maybe there are some connections that we would love taken out of our memory banks and some that are helpful to us.  What if we could create useful memory associations that could help us build better lives?  What if every time we smelled a certain smell, it led to us acting kindly or when we taste a certain food we became calm and full of joy?  Is it possible to organize the associations we have so that they help us become more godly and patient and full of love?  It seems clear that God’s people in the Bible often understood the value of being in control of associations they developed.  In 2 Kings 4 is the most interesting case study of Elisha and a Shunammite woman who was apparently barren or perhaps her husband was infertile.  The couple kindly built an upstairs bedroom for the prophet Elisha to stay whenever he came through town and it became a regular resting spot for him.  One day, as Elisha was relaxing on the bed in that upper room, he thought about how kind this couple had been to him so he asked his servant to go get the Shunammite woman and bring her upstairs.  While she stood in the doorway, Elisha announced to her that she and her husband would have a son within the next year.  This childless woman could not believe what he told her.  Was this God’s promise to her?  She feared it was too good to be true but it turned out just as the prophet said it would.  God gave the couple a son and he was the joy of her life.  Periodically Elisha would return to the upper room and stay there in that upper room and the bed where Elisha slept became for the Shunammite woman associated with God and his love and power.  When her precious son suddenly died, what did she do?  She placed his dead body on Elisha’s bed in the upper room.  She did not set him down anywhere else but on Elisha’s bed because it was in her mind connected with God and it was God she needed most.  And of course, God further cemented that association between the Lord’s grace and the upper room and Elisha’s bed when after getting the prophet to return with her to her home, God through Elisha raised the dead boy from the dead on that very bed.  Why of all places did the woman leave her son’s dead body on Elisha’s bed?  It is because there was a clear connection in the Shunammite woman’s mind between faith in God and that specific place in her house.

So too it was with the fisherman disciples, and we have evidence of it, that Jesus Christ formed a deeply etched association for them.  One of their earliest encounters with Him and perhaps it was the earliest, was at the shore of the Sea of Galilee where Jesus was teaching a small group of people.  It got to be too many crowding around him though so he picked one of the boats at the edge of the water and stood in it and gave the rest of His sermon.  When Jesus finished speaking, He told Peter, the owner of one of the boats, "Put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch."  (Luke 5:4 NIV)  Peter’s reply was much like ours might have been if we already had been trying to catch fish all night without success.  "Master, we've worked hard all night and haven't caught anything. But because you say so, I will let down the nets." (Luke 5:5 NIV)  What happened next forever became etched in the minds of all the fishermen gathered about Jesus.  They all did go out into the deep water, put down their nets and shockingly, the nets quickly filled with fish.  When they had done so, they caught such a large number of fish that their nets began to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them, and they came and filled both boats so full that they began to sink.  When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at Jesus' knees and said, "Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!"  For he and all his companions were astonished at the catch of fish they had taken… (Luke 5:6-9 NIV)

If we fast-forward three years to just after the resurrection, we find many of these same fisherman-disciples gathered once more at the Sea of Galilee and they were in some ways perplexed with Jesus since He had been raised from the dead.  Curiously, He wasn’t always recognizable to them even when in plain sight.  But then something would happen and they could see who He was.  They could never plan ahead when He would come to them and they didn’t know what to make of His several appearances.  Was He going to keep doing this the rest of their lives?  They didn’t know and it must have bothered them…this constant uncertainty about Jesus.  The men had been fishing all night to no avail and they were tired and frustrated and making their way back to shore when somebody at the water’s edge called out to them to throw their nets on the right side of the boat.  They took the recommendation seriously and when they did throw their net on the right side of the boat, there was such a large number of fish in the nets that they could not haul them into the boat.  It was then, when the association of the great number of fish and Jesus clicked in John’s mind that John immediately recognized the man on the shore.  It was Christ Himself.  The association that Jesus placed in him the day he met Christ the first time on the shore of Galilee had its effect.  Nets full of fish and Jesus Christ were connected in John’s mind; perhaps even for all of them there and the association was used by God to make Jesus recognizable.  Never again could the disciples see a net full of fish and not recall how great Jesus Christ was and how wonderful was His love for them.

Jesus used the law of association to remind us of God’s personal care for us by telling how little flowers of the desert rise up in the morning and then are gone the next day.  He said that they are beautifully clothed by God and it is obvious they are.  If God treats little flowers that lovingly, how much more does He care for you and me and give thought to our needs.  So why would we ever begin to worry about things.  God will take care of us regardless how our circumstances look.  "And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin.  Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.  If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? (Matthew 6: 28-30 NIV) Every time we see little flowers, we can and ought to associate them with the provision of God and remember never to worry. 

The psalmist applied the law of association and habit to prayer by building a practice of praying in the morning.  In the morning, O Lord, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait in expectation. (Psalm 5:3 NIV)  By putting into habit praying in the morning he began to associate the presence of God with the first breath of morning.  Every morning for at least that time when the sun was creeping up above the horizon, he thought about God, and trusted God and committed himself to holy living. More than that, the morning light reminded him to pray.

What if we did something like this…what if we forced associations into our habits so that we might become alert to God and what He is saying to us and what He is doing through us?  What if every time we brushed our teeth, we said the Lord’s Prayer?  We would begin to associate our toothbrush with God’s protection and love.  What if we read a bit of scripture before we turned the key to our ignition?  Our car would become a place we associate with God’s presence.  What if on our computer we put a verse that proclaims God’s wisdom about the day?  When we go to our internet sites, there will be an association linking our computer to the Lord’s holy direction.  Could we, whenever we first sit in our office chair whisper a word of praise for all the good God is going to do through us?  Soon we will see that chair as our meeting place with Jesus and it will come to mind that when we sit in that chair, we are on mission for God there.  What if we lit a scented candle in our house that smells of apple pie or strawberries and when we do so we pray for God’s peace to rest in our house?  Every time we smell that smell somewhere else it will bring us to God and His calmness will be restored to our chaotic day.  Perhaps every Thursday we could pour a glass of grape juice and pause a moment and think with a short burst of concentrated effort upon Christ’s blood poured out from His body on the Cross and how great His love is for us. Every time we see grape juice or taste it, we will be comforted to know God is merciful toward us and no matter what others think of us or how badly they criticize us, we are treasured and loved by Christ.  The common parts of our day can become switches that flip on for us in our minds God’s joy and peace and they can encourage us that if Jesus Christ is for us and really for us, what reason is there for us to worry about anything we face.  Our habits can become the most holy of habits that fill us with the joy of Jesus Christ during the common parts of our day.

Mind

Romans 12: 2 NIV

Do not conform any longer 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.

Are You Fully Utilizing Your Mind?

If you are like me, thinking comes in fits and starts.  The other day I was working on a sermon and I went on line to look at a couple of articles completely unrelated to what I was doing.  Then I worked on the sermon.  Then I started thinking about the weather forecast the next day.  I was hoping it would be cooler and so I went on line to find out what was predicted.  I went back to the sermon and thought about the sweet tea I had in the refrigerator.  I quickly gave up on studying and went to get some sweet tea.  I sat back down and immediately began to wonder who would start for the Raiders at cornerback.  Would D J Hayden or someone else?  I thought about that for a while and then considered the possibility that the Raiders would trade a draft pick to get someone.  I knew though that did not seem to be the way the general manager operated…he liked those draft picks… but then the cornerbacks were the weak link of the team and something had to be done.  This was perplexing.  I started working on the sermon again and really concentrated on the topic.  But then I thought about someone I needed to call and once again the “cow was out of the barn”.

When you and I think, and we are at some level thinking all the time, what dominates our thinking?  Is it sex?  Is it work?  Is it the text messages we have received?  Is our mind on our children, our marriage, our plans for dinner, are we reliving conversations and correcting them in our head?  Do we think about a date we have planned or one we hope to have, about an argument we just had, a terrifying task we must undertake, the messiness of our child’s room, an important document we have lost, the headache we have developed, some movie we just saw, a blouse we saw on sale?  Most of us probably think about all sorts of things over the course of an hour and if our minds are undisciplined, we think without purpose or direction.

Perhaps surprisingly, the Bible has much to say about our thinking.  How we think is quite important to God and to Christianity.  The Bible makes two categories of thinking.  One sort comes out of the “sinful mind” and the other form of thinking is generated by the “mind of Christ”.  The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace; the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God's law, nor can it do so. (Romans 8:6-7 NIV)  The sinful mind might be quite disciplined in its thinking.  It may have quite effective methods of accomplishing tasks, making sense of things and solving problems.  There are great scientists, philosophers and CEOs of corporations who have this sort of mind and they are successful at what they do.  There are two skill sets though that the sinful mind is unable to develop.  It cannot get past the great barrier of death.  There is nothing the sinful mind can do to stop the dying it has entered. Regardless of what it thinks should or will happen to it, the sinful mind shall die.  It cannot live forever.  The second skill set the sinful mind lacks is the ability to connect with God as God actually is.  It can think about God, develop theories of God, create wild, unfounded proposals of what God is but the sinful mind is hostile and disconnected from who God is as a person.

The sinful mind may be quite proud of its accomplishments, satisfied with its values and priorities but it is dying and it cannot stop that dying and it has no love for the real God who exists.  This mind has a ceiling and it can only go so far when it comes to thinking.  The other day I heard a famous atheist talking about the universe and he clearly is brilliant but his thinking can only go so far and no farther.  He cannot think with God and he cannot gain the knowledge God possesses of what is happening.  The book of Ecclesiastes calls every form of intellect without God a vanity of vanities, a puff of smoke that disappears and is in the end meaningless.  You can think of atoms and stars and black holes and all sorts of matters that seem important and valuable but you lack the very beginning of wisdom and insight if the mind of sinful man is all you have to work with.  You cannot think your way into what is most crucial to your life because it is all hidden to you by your inability to get there with the mind you have.

The second sort of mind is the one that is “the mind of Christ.”    The Bible speaks of it as a sort of treasure or something precious to possess because of its connection with God.  For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man's spirit within him?  In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us.  This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words.  The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man makes judgments about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man's judgment: "For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him?"  But we have the mind of Christ.  (1 Corinthians 2:11-16 NIV)

The psychology of the mind of Christ is different from the sinful mind much like a car is different from a lioness.  One is alive mechanically, the other is fully alive.  The topic for discussion is not the sinful mind so we must abandon it for now but we turn our complete attention to the mind of Christ.  There are two scriptures that at a casual first glance seem to contradict each other.  The first is what we have before us.  The person who has been made new by the Spirit of God has the mind of Christ.  It is a fact declared by Scripture.  When we are born again and the Spirit of God is in us and joined to our spirit, we have the Mind of Christ.  But why is it that we don’t seem to think with His mind.  Why are we so confused and perplexed, easily offended, frustrated by circumstances, worried about things, angry with people, discouraged and depressed, bitter, apathetic toward the scriptures, holiness and purity?  It is really quite simple.  Our second scripture passage explains our difficulty thinking through the Mind of Christ we have when we are truly Christian.  Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. (Romans 12: 2a NIV)

We must be transformed by the renewing of our mind if the Mind of Christ is to join our thinking.  But here is where we can be completely off on our approach toward this.  The natural assumption is that to think with the Mind of Christ, we must study more or become more Biblically astute.  If we just could understand better key doctrines that are confusing like predestination, the Trinity or eschatology…if we even knew what that was…we would gain access to the Mind of Christ but that is not the case.  We do not think with the Mind of Christ by studying God ideas or God principles.  We are in fact transformed by the renewing of our minds when we stop conforming to the pattern of this world.  That sounds so simple.  Do not conform to the pattern of living found in the world and you will think with the Mind of Christ.  Your mind will be transformed.

The Mind of Christ becomes operational for us when we think long and hard about what God wants us to do or how Scripture tells us He thinks about the matters of life.  Once we know a single thing the Lord is directing, then we do that thing whatever it is.  He might tell you to ignore an insult.  He might tell you to forgive a wrong done you.  He might tell you to respond to an enemy with real love.  He might tell you to turn off a certain movie that is not good for your mind or the minds of your family.  He might tell you to help someone.  He might tell you to take a step of faith.  He might tell you to apologize for your bad language, your judgmental attitude, your lazy effort, your self-pity.  Whatever God tells you to do as you see it in Scripture, you do it and immediately you begin to think with the Mind of Christ.  You see things His way.  You understand God’s perspective.  You see how He is working with different people and how you can join Him in His work.  The love that comes from God becomes the love you possess.  You know in a supernatural way when to go forward and when to hesitate.   The Mind of Christ is worked out in you as you submit to the direction He gives you.

A few examples should help us here.  When the Lord blinded Paul and He spoke to him with a voice Paul’s companions could not understand, He was given orders.  God told Paul to go to Damascus.  It was only after he went to Damascus that Paul would be told further what to do.  “Who are you, Lord?” Saul asked.  “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” he replied.  “Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.” (Acts 9: 5-6 NIV)  First he had to go at the Lord’s orders, then Paul would learn more.  When the Disciples were saying their good-byes to the resurrected Lord Jesus just before He went back to Heaven, Christ told them all to stay in Jerusalem.  Only if they stayed in Jerusalem would the Holy Spirit come upon them and the Mind of Christ would then become more known to them.  If they went back to their homes in Galilee, they might have discovered all sorts of things but never would they have had the Mind of Christ made known to them in the way that they did on Pentecost.  When Peter, who had a very natural and rational dislike for non-Jewish people, was told by Jesus to go with some very non Jewish people to a non-Jewish home, Peter had to go if he was to gain more of the Mind of Christ directing his thoughts.  …Peter went inside and found a large gathering of people.  He said to them: "You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with a Gentile or visit him. But God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean. So when I was sent for, I came without raising any objection… (Acts 10:27-29 NIV)  Peter could not stay where he was if God was going to think through him.

Our Lord will stop thinking through us the minute we refuse to do what He has told us to do.  We immediately become on our own.  We still have the sinful mind to use to plan and decide, calculate and choose but the Mind of Christ becomes dim and silent to us.  Jesus asked the most important question we face.  “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?”  (Mark 8:36 NIV) We must ask a second question that is very close to it in substance.  What good is it to do anything if the Mind of Christ is not directing your actions?  What do you hope to gain without the wisdom of Jesus Christ processing everything before you?  It is so very simple to have the Mind of Christ thinking through you if you have become Christian.  You just do what God tells you to do when He tells you to do it and then His thoughts start flowing freely through you.  What good is it to think without God thinking with us?  We might as well be atheists if that is the case.  But since we aren’t, and we have the Lord of the Universe longing to think through us as we think, why wouldn’t we want Him guiding our thoughts and pointing out the way for us as we work through all the difficulties, big choices and opportunities that are awaiting us today.  We face a big world.  Why not have a big God to guide us in it!