October 25th, 2005
" And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 18:3"
When we have only the natural mind, we are blind to the most critical ways and nature of God. It took the blinding light of Glory for Paul to come to terms that for all his KNOWLEDGE, he was without understanding. He was daily in the Word, the Torah---he had the best teaching of men on earth at the time, he participated from what can be read daily in the synagogue or Temple and in his own words, was zealous. There was a 'crossing over' though, that he had missed, without which one 'knows' about God, maybe even with expertise, whatever that is, but does not walk with God in fullness.
When I first came to the LORD [or vice versa], it did not happen in a blinding light. I was a University professor at a medical school at the time, and had no real thoughts for God. Raised Catholic and attending church often as a young person [often means as many times as a Baptist]; at home we had tapestries of Jesus on the wall, my mother painted a few religious pictures, and there were pictures of Mary, the sacred heart, crucifixes, and other religious paraphenalia. I was taught mostly in the ordinances of the Church, only secondarily in the Bible, and that was usually sections out of a missal, with latin or other readings until Vatican II changed everything and we could sing folk music at Mass. By 16, I felt I had no need for religion or church, and spent years floundering with different philosophical perspectives, particularly humanism and existentialism. In college most of us were at best 'agnostic' or atheist, or more realistically young and busy with other things. The first time I remember considering whether there really was some kind of God as an adult was when I was driving through the hills of North Carolina, and overcome with the beauty, just began to at least question whether there really was a God. Subsequently after several years of trials, and while successful on a professional level, life had become tough as it does for many: I was a single parent having suffered a divorce, had a child with juvenile diabetes and a toddler, an oppressive situation at work, new mortgage and so on. One afternoon, while my son took a nap and my daughter was still at public school, I picked up a Bible which had been given to her and which had since fallen in the washer, and began to peel apart the pages, serendipitously. I began reading the book of Proverbs, which I realized later was a providential place to start for a wondering psychologist, and I began to think that just perhaps there was more wisdom to the 'way people are' than what is found in psychology alone.
Not long after, I began talking to some co-workers who were Christians, who suggested some readings, but I just kept reading. This lengthy preface leads to the passage that convicted me that the Word was real, God was real, Jesus was real and if that was true than so was everything else He spoke of. The passage was:
When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?
And they said, Some [say that thou art] John the Baptist: some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets. He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed [it] unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Matthew 16:14-18
The other passage which strongly convicted me was the passage at the beginning of this blog:
" And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 18:3
"
The first overwhelmed me, because after much reading, I realized that was the choice, the choice every living person must make, whether a youth or a university professor, whether an urbanite or a tribesmen, all were counted alike in that choice, "Whom say ye that I AM?" Jesus does not leave many choices. If He was the Jewish Messiah, then everything else was true, and if not then all 'truths' are as good as another. But he was seen calming the winds and waves, healing the sick, feeding massive crowds from hardly anything at all, raising the dead: all this was seen not just by his own, but by soldiers from Rome and Pharisees and Saduccees who had no vested interest in defending him, in fact the opposite. But after the discussion about who others said he was, what King herod had said, or speculation among the clergy or prophets, His question is directed at Peter Whom say YE that I AM? [The I AM always finds a way to introduce himself in important situations]. And the reply? Seem not remarkable? It was the foundation of the house He would build. The Jewish fisherman declares Him the Messiah, the Son the Living God. One statement setting sail to 2000 years of faith, and the question repeated billions of times.
But what Jesus says next is also remarkable: He lets Peter [Simon} know that he did not receive that thought of his own ability or reasoning, but that it was REVEALED to him by His Father in Heaven. This was DIVINE knowledge and the beginning of a new mind. It was also the one point of faith that caused Jesus to give Simon Peter the keys to the Kingdom, and the point of faith upon which His Kingdom would stand.
AS A CHILD
The Second Passage is the critical passage to understanding how anyone wrestling with belief comes to the LORD at all in these days when the world hates faith and tries to destroy it: conversion is not coming up to an altar and signing a pledge card, or kneeling at one and receiving bread, or any of the other things one sees readily, but COMING AS A CHILD.
A Child trusts a parent: one has to trust the one who saves. Further, especially among bright and academic people, the idea of 'becoming like a child' is not enticing, many consider it the putting away of reason. But it is not putting away reason, only exchanging it for divine reason. One has to let go of pre-conceived notions of the 'way the world is' in order to be taught of God. When one can look and trust, deciding what really happened on that dark afternoon on Golgotha that changed the world, then one enters life: life that will last.
It was terribly difficult for me to surrender to that kind of trust and belief: I was a researcher---I wanted evidence. But Salvation or the healing of man to God, the saving for Eternal Life from everlasting suffering, and the atonement for ALL sin and separation from God that we might continue even after death in His presence: this is the high calling: but we have to trust in the very same manner as a child trusts his mother or father. When you do, you will find the rest to be true and worth suffering and dying for.
Spurgeon, the great London preacher constantly preached his theme: "Look and Believe". Pascal the great philosopher/mathematician/scientist had a childlike trusting faith in Jesus with no apologies. The list of scientists, even pivotal ones such as Pasteur and Fahrenheit and others, learned to believe as children, even beyond the gift of Salvation to the 6 day creation. No doctrinal matter is one of human reason and 'convincing': human reason cannot explain God. The first and most critical basis for coming to the Messiah that saves, that has already saved, is to enter in at the door, and become as a child: not exchanging human reason for stupidity or blind leaps, but for the wisdom of God. This is the foundational principle of the Mind of Christ.
Monday, March 20, 2006
The Mind of Christ: Our Conversation is in Heaven
I am beginning this new blog in order to express in an ordered fashion, what I have learned about the "Mind of Christ". I would not ever claim 'expertise', anyone would be foolish to do this, but I have learned a few things over 20 years, which may perhaps build up new believers and those farther along.
I obtained my doctorate in Psychology in 1981 from the University of Florida in Psychology, specializing in "Personality Psychology" [it is hardly called that any more], and while I was occasionally teased in graduate school about having too many interests, my specializations were in Thanatological issues including Mourning and Bereavement, Death Anxiety, and other aspects of death and dying. Later my interests developed into Holocaust, or Shoah Studies, especially studies of the Church and Faith in the Shoah. Also, though, before entering mostly into thanatological issues, I studied Self-Concept and Definition, Depersonalization phenomena in normals, and related concepts on what people mean when they say 'Self'. If I was to be asked now, I would reply, there are as many definitions as there are people asked.
The above description is not written at all to impress, but to show that the first part of my adult life and much of my professional career was spent studying the world's way of thinking. I was either trained or had interests in psychology and deviant behavior, Existential and 'humanistic' psychology and other branches of philsophy, psychology and ethical considerations. In short, I was fairly well introduced into the way the world thinks, or what I will call in this blog 'natural thinking'. The Mind of Man. Some 30 years after entering college for the first time, our understanding of the person remains a little chaotic, a little divisive and misunderstood. It also changes constantly.
The Revelation of a Different Way of thinking
After having taught at several Universities for the first few years of my career, I became a Christian: a miracle only God could produce, a Psychologist becoming a Believer! I was once told by a faculty coordinator at a large Northern U that of all the faculty who attended Campus Crusade's bible studies, the faculty least represented was that of Psychology Departments. I suspect this is because they are not predisposed to 'faith' having been trained for years to assess every thought and possibility, and I have never seen research psychologists entertain a concept such as love, fear, hate etc without first 'operationalizing' it or giving it a discreet number of defining terms and criteria. The Well-Known Psychologist Rollo May tells the story of a psychologist who gets to heaven, and attempts to read his CV [resume] and show copies of published articles as to why he should get into heaven. St. Peter listens carefully, and then informs him, that none of that had anything to do with getting into heaven. The Psychologist asks the reason for his refusal, his great sin, and he is told 'nimis simplicandum'---he is guilty of taking a valuable creation and reducing it to its simplist level: love becomes 'attachment behaviors', nobility becomes a self-satisfying altruism, and so on. But that, is the Mind of Man.
The Mind of Christ
There are a few scriptures we hear often if we stay in the Word, though, which call us to a different 'mind'---the mind of Christ. Says one passage in Corinthians
" For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. 1Corinthians 2:16"
It is clear that when we come to Christ, and are privileged to the adoption in the Holy Spirit, that our walk with our Redeemer and Messiah is not to stop there. Even before Heaven, even before the Rapture, there is to be a transformation in the way we live and think. We leave behind the old ways, and come to the New Life which we are gifted with. This entails a change of heart and thinking
The strength to do that does not come through our own intuition or adaption of old ideas, it comes through the revelation God gives us through the Word and the Holy Spirit. There is also a process in shaping and changing our minds to agree with the Mind of God, the Mind of Christ. It is not as too many people suppose just mean you change political parties or positions, or start liking Christian music instead of pop, etc, it is a whole way of life. He alone is the instrument of that change, although we often choose to get in the way.
Says another passage:
Only let your conversation be as it becometh the gospel of Christ: that whether I come and see you, or else be absent, I may hear of your affairs, that ye stand fast in one spirit, with one mind striving together for the faith of the gospel- Phl 1:27
The Apostle Paul is one of the most notable examples of this change to the Mind of Christ which took place beginning on the Damascus road. He is on his way to persecute and arrest, perhaps even kill the new Christians [little christs], when the Lord appears to him, knocking him from his horse, crying 'Saul, saul, why persecutest thou me?" Even in this small beginning, we see a difference between the mind of Christ and the mind of man: if someone was on the way to hurt our loved ones, we would immediately react with violent opposition: but God sees the Paul who will be: the great champion of the faith, who will teach his people from his epistles for the next 2000 years.
More than that, the Rabbi Paul was in training for a position of leadership in Israel, having been brought up at the "feet of Gamaliel".
I am verily a man [which am] a Jew, born in Tarsus, [a city] in Cilicia, yet brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, [and] taught according to the perfect manner of the law of the fathers, and was zealous toward God, as ye all are this day. Acts 22:3
He has obtained, or at least been very schooled in the 'mind of man', or 'the Natural Mind': he has studied even the scriptures from early in the way prescribed, with the theories and commentaries of men, and their methods and theologies. His first encounter with Christ leaves him somewhat bewildered, and he is shown that he is blind to the ways of God: but rather than condemning Paul, he begins with the first lesson: coming as a Child to a loving Father. This arrogant young 'theologian' who would probably have sat on or even led the Sanhedrin, confronts the God of Heaven, instead of the God of men's thinking and dogma. Do not consider this a 'Jewish' issue: there are just as many Churchgoers, who know the Word, the hymns, and who even have degrees in Divinity, who have met God only in the Natural Mind. By the time God has finished his re-education which appears to last even 14 years,
Then fourteen years after I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, and took Titus with [me] also. Galatians 2:1
In my own experience, I learned this early in my walk, as God called me out of everything I had known and trained for: it did not seem 'logical': it did not seem like God would have done that, so for 2 or 3 years after I became a Christian, I danced first this way, then that, and did not understand why He did not just 'stamp with approval' what I was already doing. After years, though circumstances and trials have been sometimes overwhelming, partly through persecution and partly through a lack of total obedience, I have come to understand that His purposes and ours do not match in rank order: He was more interested in preparing me to have His mind, His Life, and to be fit to live in His presence in Eternity than momentary comfort. At the time I was doing 'a good work': working with families experiencing Perinatal Death, but even then, my mind had so formed in Psychological thinking and natural logic, that had I continued, I would have done it the world's way, and probably soon fell out of a relationship with Him. As one of the scriptures above notes, a conversation in the Gospel of Christ: the hymn 'Away in the Manger' by Martin Luther has a last line which in the original reads,
"fit us for Heaven to live with you there".
There is no doubt that Salvation is not EARNED, it is a gift from God: this is the core of the Gospel replete in the Old and New Testament, but after we are given this gift, He begins the arduous task in our life of making us ready to be in His Presence: a two year old, if he remains with the manners of a two year old, would find an uncomfortable situation at a State Dinner!!!
We are taught often about the change of life and heart, and these are critical: Paul acknowledges that above every gift of 'power' and discernment is Love: we are nothing without that. However even the Love of God must be transformed in our thinking: our paltry concepts of love in the flesh or carnal mind are of no value: our vision, our feelings, our willingness to surrender, our way of looking at the LORD and His Word and other issues necessitate His transforming power in our lives. Sometimes that takes years.
With each entry in this blog, a different and fundamental issue of the 'Mind of Christ' will be examined: all will be found tied entirely to His Word. In the Next Blog, we will look at 'Coming to the LORD as a Child'.
I obtained my doctorate in Psychology in 1981 from the University of Florida in Psychology, specializing in "Personality Psychology" [it is hardly called that any more], and while I was occasionally teased in graduate school about having too many interests, my specializations were in Thanatological issues including Mourning and Bereavement, Death Anxiety, and other aspects of death and dying. Later my interests developed into Holocaust, or Shoah Studies, especially studies of the Church and Faith in the Shoah. Also, though, before entering mostly into thanatological issues, I studied Self-Concept and Definition, Depersonalization phenomena in normals, and related concepts on what people mean when they say 'Self'. If I was to be asked now, I would reply, there are as many definitions as there are people asked.
The above description is not written at all to impress, but to show that the first part of my adult life and much of my professional career was spent studying the world's way of thinking. I was either trained or had interests in psychology and deviant behavior, Existential and 'humanistic' psychology and other branches of philsophy, psychology and ethical considerations. In short, I was fairly well introduced into the way the world thinks, or what I will call in this blog 'natural thinking'. The Mind of Man. Some 30 years after entering college for the first time, our understanding of the person remains a little chaotic, a little divisive and misunderstood. It also changes constantly.
The Revelation of a Different Way of thinking
After having taught at several Universities for the first few years of my career, I became a Christian: a miracle only God could produce, a Psychologist becoming a Believer! I was once told by a faculty coordinator at a large Northern U that of all the faculty who attended Campus Crusade's bible studies, the faculty least represented was that of Psychology Departments. I suspect this is because they are not predisposed to 'faith' having been trained for years to assess every thought and possibility, and I have never seen research psychologists entertain a concept such as love, fear, hate etc without first 'operationalizing' it or giving it a discreet number of defining terms and criteria. The Well-Known Psychologist Rollo May tells the story of a psychologist who gets to heaven, and attempts to read his CV [resume] and show copies of published articles as to why he should get into heaven. St. Peter listens carefully, and then informs him, that none of that had anything to do with getting into heaven. The Psychologist asks the reason for his refusal, his great sin, and he is told 'nimis simplicandum'---he is guilty of taking a valuable creation and reducing it to its simplist level: love becomes 'attachment behaviors', nobility becomes a self-satisfying altruism, and so on. But that, is the Mind of Man.
The Mind of Christ
There are a few scriptures we hear often if we stay in the Word, though, which call us to a different 'mind'---the mind of Christ. Says one passage in Corinthians
" For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. 1Corinthians 2:16"
It is clear that when we come to Christ, and are privileged to the adoption in the Holy Spirit, that our walk with our Redeemer and Messiah is not to stop there. Even before Heaven, even before the Rapture, there is to be a transformation in the way we live and think. We leave behind the old ways, and come to the New Life which we are gifted with. This entails a change of heart and thinking
The strength to do that does not come through our own intuition or adaption of old ideas, it comes through the revelation God gives us through the Word and the Holy Spirit. There is also a process in shaping and changing our minds to agree with the Mind of God, the Mind of Christ. It is not as too many people suppose just mean you change political parties or positions, or start liking Christian music instead of pop, etc, it is a whole way of life. He alone is the instrument of that change, although we often choose to get in the way.
Says another passage:
Only let your conversation be as it becometh the gospel of Christ: that whether I come and see you, or else be absent, I may hear of your affairs, that ye stand fast in one spirit, with one mind striving together for the faith of the gospel- Phl 1:27
The Apostle Paul is one of the most notable examples of this change to the Mind of Christ which took place beginning on the Damascus road. He is on his way to persecute and arrest, perhaps even kill the new Christians [little christs], when the Lord appears to him, knocking him from his horse, crying 'Saul, saul, why persecutest thou me?" Even in this small beginning, we see a difference between the mind of Christ and the mind of man: if someone was on the way to hurt our loved ones, we would immediately react with violent opposition: but God sees the Paul who will be: the great champion of the faith, who will teach his people from his epistles for the next 2000 years.
More than that, the Rabbi Paul was in training for a position of leadership in Israel, having been brought up at the "feet of Gamaliel".
I am verily a man [which am] a Jew, born in Tarsus, [a city] in Cilicia, yet brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, [and] taught according to the perfect manner of the law of the fathers, and was zealous toward God, as ye all are this day. Acts 22:3
He has obtained, or at least been very schooled in the 'mind of man', or 'the Natural Mind': he has studied even the scriptures from early in the way prescribed, with the theories and commentaries of men, and their methods and theologies. His first encounter with Christ leaves him somewhat bewildered, and he is shown that he is blind to the ways of God: but rather than condemning Paul, he begins with the first lesson: coming as a Child to a loving Father. This arrogant young 'theologian' who would probably have sat on or even led the Sanhedrin, confronts the God of Heaven, instead of the God of men's thinking and dogma. Do not consider this a 'Jewish' issue: there are just as many Churchgoers, who know the Word, the hymns, and who even have degrees in Divinity, who have met God only in the Natural Mind. By the time God has finished his re-education which appears to last even 14 years,
Then fourteen years after I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, and took Titus with [me] also. Galatians 2:1
In my own experience, I learned this early in my walk, as God called me out of everything I had known and trained for: it did not seem 'logical': it did not seem like God would have done that, so for 2 or 3 years after I became a Christian, I danced first this way, then that, and did not understand why He did not just 'stamp with approval' what I was already doing. After years, though circumstances and trials have been sometimes overwhelming, partly through persecution and partly through a lack of total obedience, I have come to understand that His purposes and ours do not match in rank order: He was more interested in preparing me to have His mind, His Life, and to be fit to live in His presence in Eternity than momentary comfort. At the time I was doing 'a good work': working with families experiencing Perinatal Death, but even then, my mind had so formed in Psychological thinking and natural logic, that had I continued, I would have done it the world's way, and probably soon fell out of a relationship with Him. As one of the scriptures above notes, a conversation in the Gospel of Christ: the hymn 'Away in the Manger' by Martin Luther has a last line which in the original reads,
"fit us for Heaven to live with you there".
There is no doubt that Salvation is not EARNED, it is a gift from God: this is the core of the Gospel replete in the Old and New Testament, but after we are given this gift, He begins the arduous task in our life of making us ready to be in His Presence: a two year old, if he remains with the manners of a two year old, would find an uncomfortable situation at a State Dinner!!!
We are taught often about the change of life and heart, and these are critical: Paul acknowledges that above every gift of 'power' and discernment is Love: we are nothing without that. However even the Love of God must be transformed in our thinking: our paltry concepts of love in the flesh or carnal mind are of no value: our vision, our feelings, our willingness to surrender, our way of looking at the LORD and His Word and other issues necessitate His transforming power in our lives. Sometimes that takes years.
With each entry in this blog, a different and fundamental issue of the 'Mind of Christ' will be examined: all will be found tied entirely to His Word. In the Next Blog, we will look at 'Coming to the LORD as a Child'.
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