In preparing for this talk, I remembered listening to a conference called Think, that was later turned into a book (pdf download). That was quite influential for this talk. I also skimmed a few chapters in the book You Can Change, but none of that made it in, however, there was a good bit about talking to yourself when being tempted and six arguments John Flavel had identified the devil uses to get us to sin, with responses to each argument on page 140-141.
I’ve never been to a gym, but I heard somewhere that in the first few weeks in January gyms put in extra equipment for all the news signup for that year. But by February they pack up all the extra equipment away as people stop coming, they lose motivation and go back to their old routines, sometimes a little poorer for it.
This January we are looking at a Fresh Start. How we can change. But this isn’t some self-help series, in one sense it is an anti-self-help series, as we will see its God who does the change. We can toy with the edges of our life, we can take more responsibility for our actions, we can stop and start habits, but this month in this series we are going after longer-lasting change. This is something that we clearly need God’s help for. So I’m going to pray.
Our mind affects everything we do. We are confronted with a whole bunch of choices, every day, every hour and we constantly decide what we do with those choices. As Dumbledore said in the Chamber of Secrets "It is not our abilities that show what we truly are, it is our choices."
Our choices show who we are. And we make loads of choices, and sometimes we don’t even realise we are making them. This is how habits are formed, we just switch on to autopilot sometimes and go with the usual decisions we always make. We have a habit of worrying, a habit of procrastination, a habit of sin, and we don’t even notice sometimes[1].
How do we break these cycles? How do we fix our own minds?
There are many answers out there.
There is meditation. You seek to clear your mind, empty it. You have negative thoughts, you feel something you don’t like, just empty it. People try that.
Or our culture see education as the silver bullet to almost everything. Wanna stop racism, we teach Australian values in the classroom. Wanna help someone need to deal with an addiction, we send them to rehabilitation classes. Want look after minorities, originations run training and awareness courses to stop prejudice actions.
Another tact is we can read and listen to self-help and motivational speakers. They tell you that you need to identity the slackness, or triggers or whatever and remove those things from your life. You are to be vigilant, try hard and when you hit the wall, you have to punch thought it. Be the 1%, give the 110%. Dig deep. Fight[2].
Now look, there is some truth in clearing your thoughts, but after your mind is clear, what are you filling it with again. And education and in self-help can be good things, but that is not the full picture. Our minds a complicated, we cannot just apply some one-dimensional solution to our minds. We need something more. We also need to recognise how big the problem actually is.
We need more than an adjusted mind - one that has been tweaked here and there. We need more than a mind that has a strong focus or determination, or one that is well educated and trainable. We need a renewed mind, and this takes a miracle.
From the Bible’s viewpoint, there are only two types of minds. One that is in darkness or one that is renewed. Today we will look at both of these minds, and then look at the ultimate goal of a renewed mind.
And we are pretty clever. I mean in my house I have a fireplace I can turn on with a remote control. I just got a new car that doesn’t have a key and yet it still locks and won't start unless I have a little box somewhere near it. I can talk to my phone ask it to tell me jokes.
But while we humans are good at solving problems no one really had in the first place, we are ignorant of the biggest thing in the universe. And this ignorance leads us to fall back into the same human condition all people have fallen into for all history.
While we are clever with our technology and science, we still are foolish in how we live our lives. We make wrong and immoral decisions. We cause arguments and splits in relationships. We miss certain clues and tone and say something showing that we are not as emotionally intelligent as we thought we were. We do things that we aren’t even happy with and don’t want others knowing. We struggle with worry and confidences and even make up new creative problems in our head just to throw us off guard.
And on top of all that, we are also really clever in how we write off our own behaviour and justify ourselves. For example, smart people can still hold to star signs and auras, as if that somehow dictates who they are. Others come up with excuse with their behaviour because of where they grew up, or because of what nationality they come from. I'm Maltese so I am argumentative. Some cling to their Myers-Briggs letters to explain why they do what they do[3].
The Bible is very clear and tells us that the knowledge of God and His power and divine nature is plaine to everyone, and yet we suppress this truth. Instead of giving thanks to God, our thinking becomes futile. While we may label our own species wise, we are actually fools. At the end of Romans 1[:28-31], the argument concludes
The good news is that there is a way to break this way of foolish thinking. There is a way to really short-circuit our minds to remove boasting and gossip and envy and all sorts of evil.
Wanting to Change
Well, it’s the new year, the time for resolutions. Do you ever make resolutions? A time for a new you. This time you are going to change. This time you are going to be more disciplined. This time you will do all your readings for your degree, you will spend more time with the children, you will lose weight and of cause go to the gym.I’ve never been to a gym, but I heard somewhere that in the first few weeks in January gyms put in extra equipment for all the news signup for that year. But by February they pack up all the extra equipment away as people stop coming, they lose motivation and go back to their old routines, sometimes a little poorer for it.
This January we are looking at a Fresh Start. How we can change. But this isn’t some self-help series, in one sense it is an anti-self-help series, as we will see its God who does the change. We can toy with the edges of our life, we can take more responsibility for our actions, we can stop and start habits, but this month in this series we are going after longer-lasting change. This is something that we clearly need God’s help for. So I’m going to pray.
Heavenly Father, thankyou for your wisdom and love. Thank you for knowing what our needs are and acting on them. Be with us now as we hear more about you and empower us to live a changed life.So today we are looking at getting a new mind. Wouldn’t you like a new mind?
Our mind affects everything we do. We are confronted with a whole bunch of choices, every day, every hour and we constantly decide what we do with those choices. As Dumbledore said in the Chamber of Secrets "It is not our abilities that show what we truly are, it is our choices."
Our choices show who we are. And we make loads of choices, and sometimes we don’t even realise we are making them. This is how habits are formed, we just switch on to autopilot sometimes and go with the usual decisions we always make. We have a habit of worrying, a habit of procrastination, a habit of sin, and we don’t even notice sometimes[1].
How do we break these cycles? How do we fix our own minds?
There are many answers out there.
There is meditation. You seek to clear your mind, empty it. You have negative thoughts, you feel something you don’t like, just empty it. People try that.
Or our culture see education as the silver bullet to almost everything. Wanna stop racism, we teach Australian values in the classroom. Wanna help someone need to deal with an addiction, we send them to rehabilitation classes. Want look after minorities, originations run training and awareness courses to stop prejudice actions.
Another tact is we can read and listen to self-help and motivational speakers. They tell you that you need to identity the slackness, or triggers or whatever and remove those things from your life. You are to be vigilant, try hard and when you hit the wall, you have to punch thought it. Be the 1%, give the 110%. Dig deep. Fight[2].
Now look, there is some truth in clearing your thoughts, but after your mind is clear, what are you filling it with again. And education and in self-help can be good things, but that is not the full picture. Our minds a complicated, we cannot just apply some one-dimensional solution to our minds. We need something more. We also need to recognise how big the problem actually is.
We need more than an adjusted mind - one that has been tweaked here and there. We need more than a mind that has a strong focus or determination, or one that is well educated and trainable. We need a renewed mind, and this takes a miracle.
From the Bible’s viewpoint, there are only two types of minds. One that is in darkness or one that is renewed. Today we will look at both of these minds, and then look at the ultimate goal of a renewed mind.
The darken mind
Now when I say our minds are in darkness, that is not to say that we are necessary dumb, or unintelligent. We are after all humans or homo sapiens. You know what that means in Latin? Wise person. I love that we named our own species wise. We can label ourselves whatever we want, and we go for wise.And we are pretty clever. I mean in my house I have a fireplace I can turn on with a remote control. I just got a new car that doesn’t have a key and yet it still locks and won't start unless I have a little box somewhere near it. I can talk to my phone ask it to tell me jokes.
But while we humans are good at solving problems no one really had in the first place, we are ignorant of the biggest thing in the universe. And this ignorance leads us to fall back into the same human condition all people have fallen into for all history.
While we are clever with our technology and science, we still are foolish in how we live our lives. We make wrong and immoral decisions. We cause arguments and splits in relationships. We miss certain clues and tone and say something showing that we are not as emotionally intelligent as we thought we were. We do things that we aren’t even happy with and don’t want others knowing. We struggle with worry and confidences and even make up new creative problems in our head just to throw us off guard.
And on top of all that, we are also really clever in how we write off our own behaviour and justify ourselves. For example, smart people can still hold to star signs and auras, as if that somehow dictates who they are. Others come up with excuse with their behaviour because of where they grew up, or because of what nationality they come from. I'm Maltese so I am argumentative. Some cling to their Myers-Briggs letters to explain why they do what they do[3].
Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy...That was written 2,000 years ago and yet, with all our progress, with the internet and microwaves and power steering and our many new fields of science and understanding - are we any further away from this description of human nature?
The good news is that there is a way to break this way of foolish thinking. There is a way to really short-circuit our minds to remove boasting and gossip and envy and all sorts of evil.
The renewed mind
In our reading of Ephesians 4 it picks this up. It shows us a darkened mind in the first paragraph and then it shows us the solution of a renewed mind in the second. See if you can work out how we get a renewed mind.Starting from verse 17[-19] we have the bad news:
So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed.Their old way of life involved futile thinking. They were ignorant and had a darkened understanding.
And then we have this good news:
That, however, is not the way of life you learned when you heard about Christ and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. (Eph 4:20-24)Do you see the solution to our ignorance and darkened understanding? We need to learn about Christ. We need the truth of Jesus. When confronted with this truth, we see that we had deceitful desires, but Jesus can change us. We put off our old self, our old ways and patterns and behaviours and instead we are made new. We are given a new self to put on, one with a new attitude of our mind; we have a new self that is made to be like God. Made to be good and perfect. It is God who renews our minds and creates in us something new.
When we put off our old self and put on the new self, we may use the word “repentance”. The Greek word for repentance is metanoia, which means “a change of mind.” The mind is central to repentance because transformation comes from a renewed mind[4].
Before we met Jesus, we think just like everyone around us, like our neighbours, like the movies and songs we listen to. Everyone in the world buries their sin in their subconscious, but when the Holy Spirt awakens us to our need for a Saviour, we go to the cross, and our minds and the direction of our lives change[5].
If you are a Christian there should be a contrast to our lives once we have encountered Jesus.
Jesus likewise makes us new and creates us to be more like God. An encounter with Jesus should fundamentally change who we are - because God works and changes that person.
Our work on our minds
While it is God who renews and creates in us a new mind, that is, once we have been empowered by the Holy Spirt, we still have work to do. This change is not totally passive.We do move from death to life. From darkness to light. But once we have become a new creation, we are made to grow and change, to be more like Jesus.
We don’t change to improve our position or identity or status before God. That has already been done. All believers, no matter where they are on their Christian walk are adopted by God and have immediate and free access to Him.
Your personal racial background is fixed, no matter if you have visited your parents or grandparents’ countries of origin or not. You’re an Australian citizen, no matter how much tax you do or don’t pay - because your citizenship isn’t based on your work and the tax that you pay.
Our citizenship is in heaven (Phil 3:20), it is fixed - but we do change, in that we are ever moving from our old way of life to a new way. We change in our new way of thinking and behaving as we hear from our King Jesus and obey and love Him more. Disciples after all are students, and Jesus says disciples are to be taught to obey all that Jesus has commanded them (Mat 28:19-20).
So, what are we to do with our renewed minds?
We are to set or focus our minds on something different to the world’s thinking. 1) We need to be careful in what we believe and 2) what we put into our minds[7].
Our citizenship is in heaven (Phil 3:20), it is fixed - but we do change, in that we are ever moving from our old way of life to a new way. We change in our new way of thinking and behaving as we hear from our King Jesus and obey and love Him more. Disciples after all are students, and Jesus says disciples are to be taught to obey all that Jesus has commanded them (Mat 28:19-20).
So, what are we to do with our renewed minds?
We are not to get muddled and anxious. The Bible talks about people having a troubled, dull, corrupt or blind mind. Our mind can be confusing. This means we should not believe everything we think. We all have blind spots, we can only see things from a limited perspective, so we need to be careful and not believe all that we think.
We should also be careful in what we are putting into our minds. Like the saying, “Garbage in, garbage out”. Philippians 4:6-8 has some really good advice about we should be doing with our minds, first up it says:
Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Phil 4:6-7)We shouldn’t be anxious. I think there will be more on this next week, but here we see the remedy is to pray. And when we pray, something we may not even understand happens. It says we will have peace which will guard our minds.
Then the passage goes on to help more with our minds:
Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. (Phil 4:8)What do you fill your mind with? What could you be filling your minds with? Some things should be avoided altogether. Others in moderation. If you drew a pie chart of your week, how much time would it say you spent watching TV or chatting with friends compared to spending time with God in the Bible and in prayer? Do you have the right balance?[8]
John Owen said:
We can test ourselves by asking whether our spiritual thoughts are like guests visiting a hotel, or like children living at home. There is a temporary stir and bustle when guests arrive, yet within a little while they leave and are forgotten. The hotel is then prepared for other guests. So it is with religious thoughts that are only occasional. But children belong to their house. They are missed if they don’t come home. Preparation is continually being made for their food and comfort. Spiritual thoughts that arise from true spiritual mindedness are like the children of the house—always expected, and certainly enquired for if missing[9].What are your thoughts like? What do you entertain in your mind when you don’t have to think about anything else? Where does your mind go to?
It is possible to think occasionally about spiritual things sometimes, but do you do it religiously? What lasting change might you start this year?
The primary goal of a new mind is love
So finally, this may all seem fairly high level, all cerebral, not much real action. I mean what is the goal of having a renewed mind? Is it so we can sound smart to others? Offer intelligent advice to people around us and appear wiser than we really are?Being knowledgeable is not the goal of a renewed mind. I don’t care how many Wikipedia pages you have adjusted, and the edits are still live.
We are warned in 1 Corinthians [8:1] that “knowledge puffs up while love builds up” and then later Paul says if I “can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, …but do not have love, I am nothing.” (1 Cor 13:2)
People can study the Word of God and get a perfect score on every theological exam without that knowledge ever getting into the heart. No one is transformed apart from heart change. But God has designed us in such a way that the avenue to the heart is through the mind[10].
Knowledge is essential, but it’s not sufficient[11]. Even the demons believe there is one God (James 2:19). Our renewed mind should lead us to action. We are to love. We are to act. We are to give of ourselves. To follow not just the ideas of Jesus, but to actually copy Him in our actions towards other people.
[[[12]Francis Chan talks about this documentary he saw on TV once about these massively obese people[13]. They were so big they take up a double bed, can’t stand up, if they have to go to a hospital, they need a little forklift to carry them. It blew Chan’s mind when he saw one shot of someone feeding this large person, as they couldn’t lift their own arm. He was like, food is the problem for this person, and yet they need someone to feed them as they can’t for themselves. He then thought this was the story of the American church. People would sit in the pews, feeding on Gods word, they would go to small groups and learn something else, maybe listen to a podcast or another sermon that week, and yet with all this feeding, was there any exercise? Because feeding with not exercise is unhealthy.
Now is that just a problem with the American church? How much do we retain and then put into practice? How much do we learn for the sake of passing on to someone else?
You don’t judge the health of an army by how many soldiers sit in the mess hall and eat every week; you judge the health of an army by how many are on frontlines doing battle in the world.[14]
Let us not just be lovers of God’s word, but doers as well (James 1:22–25).]]
Let us use our minds to think about loving people. How hard do you think about loving your fellow Christians, or about loving those who don’t know Jesus?[15]
At the end of the day, we are not smarter than the rest. We are not morally superior to those who do not know Christ[17]. Our minds are made new by God.
Let not just try and change something in our life for the first two weeks of the year and then give up like most new year’s gym rats.
Let us exercise our minds so we can put into practice God’s word in our life to those around us, doing it all in love.
Heavenly Father,
Please transform our minds so that we can know how to speak the good news of your Son to those around us. Help us to think about how we can practically love our friends and family. Please give us wisdom in our daily, habitual choices we make all the time.
Amen.
[1] I took this from a previous youth talk: Abram's choices (Genesis 13-14)
[2] This got cut: I just love this great advice from Jacko Willink, How To SMASH DAYS When You Don't Feel Like It, – Q: “What do you do when you don’t feel like it” A: "I do it anyway." // Simple really. It’s a shame he is not sponsored by Nike :P
[3] Got these examples of all places from here, Don't Blame Your Crappy Behavior on Personality Tests
[4] R. C. Sproul (2009), Romans (St. Andrew’s expositional commentary) on 12:1-2
[5] R. C. Sproul (2009), Romans (St. Andrew’s expositional commentary) on 12:1-2
[6] I heard this somewhere years ago, but for the life of me can’t remember where maybe J. D. Greear?
[7] Some of this bit I took from Rick Warren (2010), The Battle for Your Mind
[8] From a previous talk: Rejoice Always (Philippians 4:1-23)
[9] The original illustration is from John Owen, “The Grace and Duty of Being Spiritually Minded,” in The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold, Vol. 7 (Edinburgh: Johnstone & Hunter, 1850-1853; reprint, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1965), 297-298. The far more readable paraphrased version used here is from John Owen, Thinking Spiritually, ed. John Appleby (London: Grace Publication Trust, 1989), 21-22
[10] R. C. Sproul (2009), Romans (St. Andrew’s expositional commentary) on 12:1-2
[11] Francis Chan (2010), Think Hard, Stay Humble: The Life of the Mind and the Peril of Pride; R. C. Sproul(2009) also said: “While a changed mind is a necessary condition for transformation, however, it is not a sufficient condition.”
[12] This bit I added to the 4pm service talk, so it’s not on the audio file.
[13] Francis Chan, I think this comes from his marriage book, You and Me Together, but I am not 100% sure...
[14] Rick Warren (2010), The Battle for Your Mind
[15] Questions have been taken from Francis Chan (2010), Think Hard, Stay Humble: The Life of the Mind and the Peril of Pride
[16] I think I got this somewhere from that Think book, maybe from Chan or from the sentiment of Multiply (which is also by Francis Chan)
[17] Al Mohler (2010), The Way the World Thinks: Meeting the Natural Mind in the Mirror and in the Marketplace
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