Yet to all who received Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave them right to become children of God. Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come – John 1:12; 2 Cor. 5:17.
INTRODUCTION
The ultimate aim of our redemption is to be delivered from the kingdom of Satan – Acts 26:18 in order to serve God “in holiness and righteousness before Him all our days” – Eph. 1:4. Therefore every child of God must aim at a life of holiness and righteousness in this evil and depraved world. This lifestyle of holiness is lived in God’s presence day by day and in His own power – Dr Charles R. Swindoll.
When we come to Christ we are made brand new beings by the very Spirit of God and given new life – lives controlled by God. Christians are not reformed, rehabilitated or even re-educated but we are new creations – created anew – recreated and living in vital union with Christ.
All this means that as Christians, we should have a mind-set which is based on our new being. We should have new perspectives, new ideas, new thoughts, new principles. We should go back to the very basics – to the life that God wanted for us when He created us and which – He sent Jesus Christ to model for us.
Transformed Lives
God created us pure and innocent but when sin entered our lives, shame, awkwardness selfishness and self-centredness became our nature – Gen. 3:8-10. Indeed we can all say that before we believed in Christ our nature was evil. We were disobedient, rebellious and ignored God with all our heart, soul and mind. Many of us lived in depravity and wantonness.
Now however God, through Christ has given us a new nature, one that is filled with God’s love and drawn towards fellowship with God and with one another. As Christians, we have to acknowledge Christ Jesus as Lord of our lives and continue to follow His leadership by being rooted, built up and strengthened in Him by faith – Eph. 3:17-19.
- We need to submit our wills to Him – 12:1-2
- We need to learn from Him, from His life and His teachings – 3:10
- We need to recognise the power of the Holy Spirit in us – transforming our thought life and helping us with our lifestyle – Acts 1:8; Gal. 5:22.
As we read in 1 Cor. 2:16, having the mind of Christ means that through the guidance of the Holy Spirit we have insight into some of God’s plans, thoughts and actions as we spend time with God through Bible Study and prayer, not forgetting other spiritual disciplines.
A New Mind-Set
Are we spending enough time with Christ to have His mind in us? So what is this mind of Christ that would transform our own minds? In Phil. 2:5-11 we read that Christ was humble, meek and gentle – He was equal with God but He did not insist on His rights – He lay them down and took the form of a servant.
What about us? Most of us stand on our rights – so-called rights that come from our old nature – the nature that Christ took away on the cross. How very foolish of us to want to cling to something that is dead and rotten – belonging to the graveyard. Our insistence on our rights leads us to selfishness, pride and all forms of evil – Eph. 4:17-5:21.
As believers our mind set should be different – we should lay aside our rights in order to serve others knowing that in serving them we are serving Christ – being like Him. We should develop Christ’s attitude of humility as we serve even if nobody will give us awards for such service. In fact sometimes we will get insults but then so did Christ – 1 Pet. 3:23; Heb. 12:3.
More Like Christ
We must allow the Holy Spirit to train us to think and act like Christ. If we do not allow the Holy Spirit to help us to store Christ’s thoughts in our memory bank, we will retain all the wrong thoughts of our sinful nature. The sinful mind is hostile to God, it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God – Rom. 8:7-8.
Praise God! Our loving God and Father is committed to the task of conforming us to the image of Hisis SonSS Son – He is working on us, changing our thoughts so that our character will reflect that of His Son in patience, in gentleness, in goodness, in grace, in truth, in discipline.
God is committed to conforming our inner lives to His own character. Everyone is a product of what he or she thinks about. If our thoughts are pure – we will be loving, kind, compassionate, forgiving and gracious. If our thoughts are evil – you know what follows.
I pray that we will not be like the Corinthian Christians whom Paul calls infants in Christ and worldly (carnal) because they were filled with jealousy and strife – they did not behave as if they had the mind of Christ. – 1 Cor. 3: 1-3
New Thought-Life
Let me ask :– upon what do you spend most of your mental energy? If we do not spend the greatest part of our mental energy on the Lordship of Christ, we will be like the man who built his house on sand as Jesus teaches in Matt. 7:26-27 – But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the wind blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”
The Christian mind should be one filled with joy – the joy of the Lord and confident hope in God’s eternal goodness – one that can say with the Psalmist in Ps. 46:1-3 & 7.
The Christian mind is one that seeks to give God his best because he has received the best from God – Phil. 4:8 – “Finally, brothers, 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.”
To be continued!
Remain Blessed!
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