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How do we develop the mind of Christ?
Requisitos de finalización
Though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil. Therefore, let us… move forward to maturity.
Hebrews 5:12-14; 6:1
Most of us would hopefully agree on what a Christ-like mind looks like. It is more difficult to figure out how to develop one – how to get there. Rev. Deneff mentions how Dr. Paul Brand discovered that when you do a skin transplant from one part of your body to another, you have to train your mind to know the new location of the skin. You are just as likely to reach for where the skin used to be.
So, Dr. Deneff suggests, developing the mind of Christ requires training. We may be redeemed, but it sometimes takes some time to retrain our habits toward a Christ-like mind. We may still find ourselves reaching for where the old flesh used to be. True, sometimes the Spirit does instantaneously heal us of our former ways of thinking, but movement toward holiness also involves training.
He gives two bits of advice. First, he emphasizes that any attempt to develop a Christian mind must integrate all parts of that mind. It is not just a matter of what we believe. It involves our inclinations, our imaginations, and our instincts. We have to develop habits of holiness. We have to educate our desires.
How do we do this? In part, we put in front of our minds only ideas and images that are edifying. We avoid the kinds of “inputs” that might reinforce older habits of the mind. In previous days, holiness preachers told us to “abstain from all appearance of evil” (1 Thess. 5:22, KJV). Perhaps they took that verse out of context, but their line of thinking was not entirely wrong. When we are retraining our minds, we should avoid anything that might lead our minds down unfruitful paths.
Darkness recedes only as fast as the light advances.
- Steve Deneff
Deneff’s second bit of advice is to intentionally develop virtues that run counter to our previous vices. We develop counter-cultural disciplines that educate and inform our biases, that speak into our imaginations and desires, and retrain our instincts. We replace our previous areas of spiritual weakness with the opposite virtues.
Francis de Sales in the early 1600s suggested that we find our spiritual vulnerabilities and set up life disciplines in the opposite direction. We do think not to be legalistic but for the sake of freedom in the pursuit of holiness. Such disciplines can include practices like daily Scripture reading, silence and meditation, fasting, and private worship.
Deneff ends the Lesson with this reminder of where we have been as we have pursued holiness throughout this course:
“God has called us to himself for himself. The image of God is stamped in us. The humanity of god is in front of us. The body of Christ is all around us and now the operating system of god, the mind of Christ is in us. In that confidence and in that power, let us pray together that you and I step in freedom toward holiness.”
-Steve Deneff