EPHESIANS 4:17-24 – “Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart.  They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ!— assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”

THEME OF THE DAY: THE MIND IN THE CHRISTIAN LIFE.  One of the areas of intense spiritual battle for the Christian is learning to live by faith and not feelings; to not be controlled by our emotions but to control our emotions by our minds.  Much of the difficulties we face in the Christian life are due to the ease with which we allow circumstances to trigger our emotions, and we find ourselves in all kinds of emotional turmoil smothering our faith.  We basically succumb to our feelings and never engage the mind with truth to rule our feelings. The Christian life is orderly – mind to heart to will.  Too often the mind is skipped and we let the heart, the seat of our emotions rule, and the Proverbs warn us – “he who trusts in his own heart is a fool” (Proverbs 28:26).

D.M. Lloyd-Jones wrote in his commentary Studies in the Sermon on the Mount the importance of thinking in the Christian life . . .

“Faith according to our Lord’s teaching is primarily thinking; and the whole trouble with a man of little faith is that he does not think. He allows circumstances to bludgeon him. We must spend more time in studying our Lord’s lessons in observation and deduction. The Bible is full of logic, and we must never think of faith as something purely mystical. We do not just sit down in an armchair and expect marvelous things to happen to us. That is not Christian faith. Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, and draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them. Faith, if you like, can be defined like this: It is a man insisting upon thinking when everything seems determined to bludgeon and knock him down in an intellectual sense. The trouble with the person of little faith is that, instead of controlling his own thought, his thought is being controlled by something else, and, as we put it, he goes round and round in circles. That is the essence of worry . . . that is not thought; that is the absence of thought, a failure to think.”

Do a study in the New Testament on the mind.  We will be amazed how often it is mentioned and applied in the Christian life.  Today’s scripture is a fine example.  This section of the letter to the Ephesians shows us the vital place the mind has in spiritual growth.  The Apostle Paul instructs us . . .

“To put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 4:22-24).

He emphasizes this work of putting off the old self and putting on the new self occurs in our thinking.  The growing Christian will be the thinking Christian, and a thinking Christian is the one whose mind is under the control of God’s Word.   Remember, mind to heart to will . . . that is the order of the Christian life.

PRAYER: Father, help me to renew my mind and establish my thoughts in the heavenlies, not on the earthly.

REFLECTION:  The mind determines our Christian life. It is to control our affections and direct our wills.