What’s the one thing you feel committed to completing in this New Year? What are the area’s of spiritual growth that you feel called into and how do you plan to walk that out faithfully and to completion?
It seems for many followers of Jesus that the major area of progress needed is in our thinking. Scripture encourages us to fall in line with right thinking about Jesus, our witness and our mission.
Wrong thinking is when we see the world through the eyes of our fallen flesh. We deny specific sins as being sinful, we lack empathy for the lost and the poor, and we justify our ignorance and omission as permanent and unchangeable attributes of our fleshy nature.
Right thinking rears its head in the moments of complete surrender to the movement of the Holy Spirit in and through our lives. It is nothing gained by works but received when we cried out to the Lord to save us from this dying world. When Paul wrote to the people of Corinth to remind them that “… we have the mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16) he did not commission anything new. The gateway to seeing the world through the eyes of Christ begins with our ability to surrender fully.
Paul’s appeal to the Romans to “not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Rom. 12:2) speaks volumes on how we get off the track of right thinking and also how to get back on it. We conform when we lack renewal of the mind. We are transformed when we do renew the mind.
An immensely practical way that we can and should be renewing our minds on a daily basis is through the reading and study of the word of God. Study of God’s word helped Jesus fight temptation from the devil while he was in the wilderness, it helped the new testament authors see the promise of the old testament fulfilled in Jesus and it helps you and I today by correcting, teaching and encouraging us to think God’s thoughts and see the way Jesus see’s.
As a challenge to each one of us in this New Year, let’s recognize our gifting of the mind of Christ. Let us allow that gifting to be lived out each and everyday as we surrender more fully to the power and work of the Holy Spirit.
