In the last issue we observed that when Adam and Eve
declared their independence from God, their consciousness was altered. They experienced
shame, and their relationship with God and with each other underwent a radical shift. We
discussed this in terms of their reality and their consciousness. In reality they had died
in relation to God. But they were not conscious of a changed attitude toward God and
toward each other. They had become addicted to the fruit of the tree, to themselves as the
new centers of reality, and to the Evil One. They were not, however, conscious of being
addicted. Addicts never are. They were experiencing the baleful consequences of idolatry
without realizing that they had become idolaters. What they needed was deliverance from
their addictive idolatry and a consciousness to match their new identity.
In Addiction and Grace May points out that the only solution to their desperate
case lay in the grace of God, the most powerful force in the entire universe. Since grace
can be defined as unmerited favor, we could as well say that their only help lay in the
love of God. The Good News is that God does love us, inconceivable as that may seem. He
loves the creation; that is the only reason it goes on existing. He holds it in being by
His Word because he likes it. Furthermore, He loves us. However, as May also points out,
God’s grace of love cannot be managed, manipulated, or stockpiled. Like the manna in
the wilderness, it must be used when provided. Like the manna, if kept overnight, it will
breed worms and stink. So we are dependent upon receiving grace or love in a
moment-by-moment experience. And the only way to receive it - this is the hard part - is
in our weakness, not in our strength. Paul complained to God about his thorn in the flesh
and was told that God’s strength was made perfect in his weakness (2 Corinthians
12:9) God’s love has the power to change us in reality and to afford us a new
consciousness. It does so when we accept Him in our weakness, that is, in repentance and
faith.
"Just as I am, without one plea,
But that thy blood was shed for me.
And that Thou bids’t me come to Thee,
Oh Lamb of God, I come, I come."
The preaching of the gospel opens the way for us to be changed inside, to be born anew
by the Word of God, and to have a new consciousness. It is in this new consciousness that
we must relate to ourselves on the being side of the Christian mind. This is a repentant,
humble and loving consciousness, that is, a consciousness different from that of the world
around us. This self-forgetful, God-directed, other-directed consciousness is the work of
the Holy Spirit who teaches us to love by pouring out God’s love in our hearts.
The dominant feature of this new consciousness will not be a sense of how humble and
loving we have become. If we really draw near to God, we will be different, but we will
not then insist, as we do naturally, on seeing ourselves as great saints. We will, as Van
Ruler suggests, find it possible to laugh at ourselves and to forget ourselves in a
child-like commitment to God and our neighbor. We will be learning to love! This will mean
a new mind in relation to ourselves: the mind of the Holy Spirit.
The Mind of the Spirit
When Moses came down off the mountain from his encounter with God, his face shone so
that the people were afraid, and he had to put a veil on. There is, however, no indication
that he was aware of the phenomenon. By the same token, our relationship to ourselves as
we grow into the mind of the Spirit will not be one of self-congratulation but one of love
to God and to our neighbor. Romans 5:5 attributes the change to the outpouring of
God’s love in our hearts. " . . . because the love of God has been poured out
within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us." Love is the most
important thing in the world. It is the only thing that can set us free from our addiction
to idolatry and produce in us a new consciousness.
Romans 8 contrasts the mind of the flesh, which is death, to the mind of the Spirit, which
is life and peace. The three sides of the temptation in Genesis 3, echoed both in Matthew
4 and 1 John, seem to offer a good description of the mind of the flesh. It is concerned
with pleasure, possessions, and being or power, but with all of these derived from
something created rather than from God through the creation. No elaborate argument is
needed to demonstrate that these are indeed the characteristics of modern Western people.
These are the goals for which modern people live. These are the things to which they look
for security and the satisfaction of their longings. How different is it for Christians?
One fears that the church has learned how to live in two worlds. In the world of spiritual
things, we believe in Jesus and expect to go to heaven when we die. In the ordinary world,
it is often difficult to distinguish our goals from those of the world - pleasure,
possessions and being or power.
The mind of the Holy Spirit is different. While it is not described in any particular
passage, one good way of considering it is to think of Jesus’ mind in contrast to the
three sides of the mind of the flesh. All that Jesus did, He did in the power of the Holy
Spirit. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin. He was empowered by
the Holy Spirit’s descent in the form of a dove at His baptism in the Jordan. He
offered himself without blemish to God in His redemptive sacrifice on the cross through
the Holy Spirit (Hebrews 9:14). We may safely conclude, then, that His mind was the mind
of the Holy Spirit.
How did His mind compare to the mind of the flesh? First, He was not known as a man
committed to the pursuit of pleasure. He was known as a man of sorrows and acquainted with
grief. This does not mean that He was depressed or joyless. He experienced the deepest joy
possible because of His intimate communication with the Father and His sense of the
Father’s approval. He graced weddings and banquets and surely was not a surly guest.
Had He shown a sour disposition, children would never have been drawn to Him as they were.
What it does mean is that He saw the brokenness of the world in its true light and
sorrowed over it. For example, He loved Jerusalem for all it might have been, but he wept
over it because of its sin. His love for the world, His Father’s world, was deep and
full. Therefore He sorrowed over the ruin produced by human sin.
Second, He was not known for His possessions. He told a prospective disciple that He had
no place to lay His head; He owned no real estate. The funds for His support were gifts
managed by another. He was even buried in a borrowed tomb. Apart from His fine robe, woven
without a seam, He was a poor man indeed. Does this mean that Christians all ought to
follow Jesus’ advice to the rich young ruler by selling all that they have, giving it
to the poor, and then following Him? This is never enunciated as a general principle
applicable to all who believe in Him. What He did say was that we should not lay up
treasures on earth but in heaven. Further, He warned that we cannot serve both God and
mammon. Someone has suggested as an illustration of this aspect of a Christian mind that
when Abraham came down from the mountain where he had gone to sacrifice Issac, the head
count of his flocks and herds had not changed a bit, but their significance to him had
undergone a radical alteration. They meant little to him now; his heart had been given in
a new way to the living God.
In the third place, Christ’s relation to power was a very unusual one. He had
unlimited power. He could heal sickness and physical disabilities. He could quiet the wind
and the waves and drive out demons. At the capture in the garden of Gethsemane, He could
have had more than 72,000 angelic troops to protect Him (Matthew 26:53). When He asked the
police detachment whom they were seeking and responded to them with the Old Testament name
for God, "I Am," they all fell backward. When Pilate asked if He were a king, He
acknowledged it directly. Yet He would never use His available power in His own selfish
interest. In a marriage or family, in a schoolroom or a business, even in a political
activity, we must never use power to achieve anything other than God’s glory and our
neighbor’s good. This is why husbands are told to lay down their lives for their
wives (Ephesians 5:25) and fathers are warned not to drive their children up the wall
(6:4). Master (employers) are forbidden to use the threats their power would make possible
and to remember that God has no favorites (6:9). The vulnerability which this side of
Christ’s mind models would make it impossible for Christians to suppose they can
honor God by forcing their views on others by majority vote, even if they were able to
achieve that.
The mind of the Spirit has strong implications for us in our relationship to ourselves. We
are not to seek pleasure as an end in itself. Pleasures we shall have. God is prodigal in
His provision of them. We experience thousands of them every day. But, as C.S. Lewis has
it, pleasures will become doorways into fellowship with God. They will elicit from us
prayers of praise and adoration far beyond the usual. And they will move us into the
fellowship of Him who loved us so much that He endured the sorrow of Gethsemane and the
cross in the process of providing redemption. Then our pleasure will always be infused
with Christ’s sorrow over a lost and sinful world. Pleasures will be channels to God,
not objects in themselves for our aggrandizement.
In a similar way our possessions will become tools for stewardship rather than investments
in our temporal security. What this will mean in individual instances, no general
principle can encompass. Each one must seek God’s will himself or herself in relation
to possessions. But there will always be the reminder that we are not to lay up treasures
on earth.
Again, the implications of Christ’s weakness were touched on above. Here too, we
shall need to seek the will of God for our actions, instance by instance, but always under
the guidance of the principle of not using power to our own advantage and in our own
interest.
Conclusion
A useful passage for helping to sum up what our attitude should be toward ourselves if
we are to demonstrate the being side of a Christian mind is Matthew 11:28-30. "Come
unto Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon
you, and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart: and you shall find rest for
your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My load is light." What does He mean? In that
day a young ox was taught to work by being yoked to and older ox and learning from its
leading partner. Jesus is inviting us into a relationship with Himself in that He will
lead the way and in the process transfer to us his way of being human.
The problem here is this. How can we become subject to Jesus in the entirety of our lives
without losing our autonomy? The answer is, we can’t. But our autonomy is an
illusion. When we declared independence from God, we did not achieve genuine autonomy or
independence. That is impossible for a creature. What we did was to trade the freedom to
grow holy under the care and direction of a loving Creator for the cruel bondage of an
idol and ultimately of the devil himself. Because of our sinfulness, we see subjection to
God in Christ as bondage whereas it is actually the only true freedom. This is the new
consciousness that we need so desperately.
Human life is dependent life. We are held in being every instant by the loving power of
the Word of God. Paul says of God in acts 17:28 " . . . for in Him we live and move
and exist." We need not fear the loss of our identity or the shrinking of our
personality when we take Christ’s yoke upon us. The God who makes every snowflake
unique is fully able to make us all we are capable of being if we will but have Him and
not the idols for our God. We will never be so much ourselves as when we are most
completely yielded to Him.
Calvin’s comment is relevant here. The first two sentences in the Institutes
are these: "True and substantial wisdom principally consists of two parts, the
knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves. But while these two branches of knowledge
are so intimately connected, which of them precedes and produces the other, is not easy to
discover." Remembering that Biblical wisdom is active rather than passive, this means
that we will be more and more our true selves as we get to know God better and better.
This is what taking God’s yoke involves. This will lead to a self-forgetfulness and a
self-giving which take place as we learn to love our God with all our heart and our
neighbor as ourselves. The independence we thought to gain by forsaking God and trying to
fulfill our longing through the creation in itself will be replaced by the genuine freedom
of knowing Christ, who is the truth, and being liberated in Him.
The life thus renewed in us by the Holy Spirit will be one of humility, for Christ is meek
and lowly of heart. If this is the way God is, how could we imagine that our own proud
autonomy could really satisfy our hunger of heart? It will mean a life of love, or, as Tom
Howard puts it, "my life for yours." Out of love will proceed all the other
fruits of the Holy Spirit: joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,
gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23) Now the "blesseds" of the
kingdom will show themselves increasingly in our lives: poverty of spirit, mournfulness,
gentleness, hunger and thirst for righteousness, mercifulness, purity of heart,
peacemaking and even persecution for righteousness’ sake.
The Christian mind on its being side is most difficult as it touches our relation to
ourselves because this is the very core of our sinfulness and consequently the place where
we most resist the grace of God. This is the critical battle in the whole long campaign
against the power of sin in our lives. God grant us grace to conquer here by yielding to
Christ.
Editor: Al Greene
Alta Vista College
Alta Vista
1719 NE 50th Street
Seattle, Washington 98105
Phone: (206) 524-2262
Fax: (206) 524-1837
