The Mind of Christ

The apostle Paul believed a renewed mind was the key for the body of Christ to truly live as a newly formed humanity that has been set apart and saved out of “this present evil age.” References to the mind proliferate his letters, but perhaps the most important mention is made in the climax to his letter to the Romans.

Romans 12:1-2 (NIV) “Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God - this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform 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.”

Paul is denouncing the “pattern of this world,” which is thinking and acting characterized by godlessness, wickedness, and the suppression of God’s truth. In Romans 1, Paul explains that the root of this “pattern” is the rejection of God.

Romans 1:21, 25 (NIV) “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened...they exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator - who is forever praised. Amen.”    

Paul tells us that the minds and hearts of those who reject God become “futile” and “darkened.” This futility and darkness lead to idolatrous forms of worship and the degradation of the mind and body.

Romans 1:28-31 (NIV) “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.”

Christians are set apart from the unbelieving world in that they have freely received the gift of the Holy Spirit, and, thus, the mind of Christ. The Holy Spirit’s presence immediately plugs our mind into God’s way of thinking. Our mind is now being renewed to think more and more like Jesus. The renewing of the mind is what transforms us so that we may discover what God’s perfect will is for us and others, escaping thinking patterns that characterized life before Christ. Unlike those who reject the love of God, we are a set-apart people who live in the reality of our new humanity in Christ.

Ephesians 4:17-24 (NIV) “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. 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.”

In this passage, Paul tells the Ephesians the “new self” is a result of having the “attitude of the mind” made new. The “new self” is the internal realization and external manifestation of the abiding, indwelling Christ. In Colossians, Paul writes that this “new self” is being “renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.” Although we have been given access to all of Jesus and everything He has, there is a process that we walk through to become more like Him, stepping into the fullness of what has been made available. Paul makes it clear the mind is the epicenter of this process.   

Many Christians live in a paradigm of belief that God loves us, we are not permitted a true, tangible experience of Him in this life. Because of this, an intellectual understanding of the Bible has become the commonplace substitute for a living, dynamic relationship with the Lord of life. Knowing God has been replaced with knowing about God.

Jesus reveals a God who relentlessly pursues intimacy and closeness with His children. Jesus is the perfect image of God, the fullest revelation of God’s character, purposes and intent for humanity. Jesus healed the distance between God and man on the Cross by destroying the power of sin and lifting humanity back into union with God. In Jesus, the unknowable Creator has become the known lover of humanity.  

The indwelling Holy Spirit, who is both the spirit of the Father and the spirit of Jesus, freely makes known to us the deep things of God. His purpose is to glorify Jesus by revealing Him in us and through us. In Christ, we have been freely given all things, including the things of heaven.

The human mind is the channel through which continual, unceasing communion with the Father flows. It is the connector between the natural and spiritual realms. God’s original design for the human mind was that it would facilitate and enable a dynamic, living relationship with Him. This intention for the human mind was marred by the sin of Adam, but restored in Jesus Christ. On the Cross, Jesus healed the human mind by allowing us access to His. We have the mind of Christ.

1 Corinthians 2:12-16 (NIV) “What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so 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, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words… for ‘Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?’ But we have the mind of Christ.”   

The mind of Christ is the cornerstone component of our spiritual inheritance. Through it, our experience of the Lord moves beyond the intellectual to the intuitive and experiential. It allows prophetic revelation, wisdom, and supernatural power to flow freely from heaven. His mind enables us to hear His voice as clearly as we would our own. It is an exciting gift to steward!  The mind of Christ is all about awareness. To have His mind is to share His knowledge and perceptions about all things. It is to see and experience the world as Jesus does. It is to think like He does.