The Christian Mind: Through, Not At

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone, and welcome to our worship service on this beautiful Sunday morning. It’s good to see you all here.

I have just a couple of announcements to mention this morning from your bulletin.

The church council will be meeting tomorrow night. If you’re on the council, please try to attend.

The men’s group will be meeting tonight. All men are invited to that.

There’s still an opportunity for you to sign up to help our safety team. You’ll see an insert in your bulletin for that. If you’re interested, please fill that sheet out and place it in the offering plate as it passes.

And speaking of the safety team, we’ll be holding a church safety meeting this coming Wednesday. This is open to any and everyone, and I encourage you to attend if at all possible.

Michael Smith — Alabama — NCAA track event

Joanne, do you have an announcement this morning?

Jesyka, do you have any announcements?

Sue, do you have anything this morning?

Opening Prayer

Let’s pray:

Holy Father we come to you this morning as a people of hope, a people of devotion, a people of love for You and for Your Son. As we enter into this Easter season we pray that You renew in us a spirit of hunger for your wisdom and your presence in our lives. We pray that that You continue to lead us and lead this church. We pray that Your love continues to abound in our lives, that we see Your gentle but powerful hand moving in us, in our community, and in our world to fulfill your glorious and perfect will. For it’s in Christ’s name we pray, Amen.

Lord’s Supper

Today we honor Christ as the fulfillment of every desire as we celebrate the Lord’s Supper. I’ll invite the deacons down front at this time.

Scripture teaches us that through Holy Communion, we connect with Christ not only in the memory of his death, but in the spiritual life he gives us. We have eternal life only with the life of Christ inside us.

I invite any who know Jesus as their Savior to participate.

(Bread)

Matthew writes that on the night of Jesus’s betrayal, he gathered his disciples in the very Upper Room where they would witness him resurrected. Each of the twelve were there.

And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is my body.”

(Juice)

And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, “Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” By him, we are made one with him. By his blood, we are made eternal. Amen.

Sermon

Today we’re going to finish our short series on how to have a Christian mind by looking at a few passages from both the Old and New Testaments that talk about the most important way to stop your bad thinking, and it all has to do with where you put God in relation to your problems. So have your Bibles open and your swords unsheathed. To start, you can go ahead and turn to Romans chapter 12.

We’ve talked a lot over the past years about how important it is to have a proper perspective on life. A lot of times we take the wrong perspective because we judge whatever’s happening to us now by all the bad things that have happened in the past. The trick to fixing that is knowing how to put your problems in the right place.

If you put all the mess in your life between you and God, you’re not going to get a true picture of either God or your mess. You won’t be able to see God clearly because your problems are going to look too big.

But if you put God between you and your problems, you’re not just going to see God clearly, you’re going to see your problems clearly too. All of a sudden your eyes are so filled with Him that your problems don’t seem so big anymore. Maybe they don’t even seem like problems anymore, because your focus has shifted from everything that seems wrong to the God who’s going to make everything right.

We’ve already talked about the cause of all your bad thinking. It’s that record player in your mind, and all of those deep grooves of bad memories that you’re always coming back to. The Bible says we smooth out those grooves by taking every one of our thoughts captive — we judge our thoughts according to scripture, and then we make the choice to believe the truth of what God tells us over the lies that we tell ourselves.

I don’t want to gloss over that last part and make it seem simple, because it isn’t. It should be the easiest thing in the world to believe God’s truth over our own lies. But the problem is we’ve believed those lies for so long that they’ve formed thick walls in our minds that Paul calls strongholds, and we have to tear those down. That means getting our eyes off ourselves and on God. And to do that, we have to change our perspective.

The Bible gives us four steps to do that, and they all begin with the letters R and E to make it easy to remember. They’re called Renew, Reframe, Rejoice, and Reply. We’re going to take those steps one at a time this morning, beginning in Romans chapter 12, verses 1-2. Here is what Paul writes:

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

And this is God’s word.

At some point I’m going to have to preach through the book of Romans because it’s so important to understanding the Christian faith. The first eleven chapters of Romans is basically one very careful and thought-out argument by Paul explaining that God justifies us — He forgives our sins — not through anything we can do, but only by our belief that Jesus is the son of God and that our sins are forgiven by his death and resurrection.

So when Paul uses that word “therefore” in verse 1, he’s saying that since you know all the wonderful things those first 11 chapters tell you about what God has done to rescue your soul, how are you supposed to live in return? How should you live as someone who is saved and justified before God? The rest of the book of Romans answers that question, and it’s all summed up in one word: godly. Your life should be a godly one.

But you have to be careful here. Don’t think that you need to live a godly life to get God’s approval. That’s never going to happen. You’re not perfect, and you never will be. No, you live a godly life because you already have God’s approval through Christ. You’ve already been given all these wonderful mercies from God, and so Paul says in verse 1, you’re to be “a living sacrifice.” And how do you become that? You do it by not conforming to the way this world tries to make you think. You do it, Pauls says, by being “transformed by the renewal of your mind.” Right here, Paul tells us just how important your mind is to living the Christian life.

The gospel is all about repentance. That’s the call to the unbeliever — repent and turn from your sin and embrace Christ. The Greek word for “repentance” carries the idea of changing your mind.

It’s your thinking has to be changed from ungodly ways that focus on you to godly ways that focus on Christ, because that’s where everything starts — in your mind. What you know to be true in your mind forms a conviction in your heart, and that conviction in your heart is behind the things you say and do. So if you want to fix how you feel and what you do, you have to first fix your mind.

Like we said last week — and I’m going to keep saying it — the only way you can get rid of the lies you’ve held onto is to replace them with God’s truth, and only source of God’s truth is revealed in the Bible. The more you study that book, the more you let those words sink into your mind, the clearer you’re going to see both your circumstances and God Himself. That’s what it means to have your mind renewed.

I’m going to give you a very short grammar lesson here, because the way Paul writes verse two says as much as the words themselves.

First, verse two is what’s called an imperative sentence. Imperative sentences don’t ask questions or make statements, they give direction. They tell you something that needs to be done. In this case, what needs to be done is that you don’t conform to the world, that you renew your mind, and that you discern the will of God.

But verse two is also written in what’s called passive voice, and the only thing you need to know about that is it means you don’t do any of those things. It’s God’s Spirit who helps you. It’s God’s Spirit that renews your mind.

And finally, notice that verse 2 is in the present tense, not the past tense. That means all of this renewing doesn’t happen just once, it’s ongoing. It’s always happening inside your mind, every day.

But renewing your mind is just the first step to changing your perspective. There’s something else you need to start doing as well. You need to reframe. Paul talks about that in the book of Philippians. Turn just a few books past Romans to Philippians chapter 1.

Once Paul realized that God’s true purpose for him was to spread the gospel to the Gentiles, to all the people who weren’t Jews, Paul had really only one goal. He had to get to Rome. There were new Christians there, and Rome was basically the capital of the world.

If Paul could get to Rome and preach there, if he could get some meetings with government officials, then the gospel would spread like wildfire over the entire empire, and then to the whole world. Getting to Rome was Paul’s dream. He prayed for that opportunity not for himself, but for God. All he wanted was to spread the gospel.

Read with me from Philippians 1, verses 12-14:

I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel, so that it has become known throughout the whole imperial guard and to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ. And most of the brothers, having become confident in the Lord by my imprisonment, are much more bold to speak the word without fear.

Here’s the good news — God answered Paul’s prayer. Paul got to Rome. But here’s the bad news — Paul got to Rome as a prisoner. He wasn’t meeting government officials to tell them about Jesus. He wasn’t going out to preach to all those believers. He was under house arrest, chained to a Roman guard twenty-four hours a day, waiting to find out if he’d be sentenced to death.

In other words, nothing worked out the way Paul thought it should, and that right there is the cause of a lot of your poor thinking. A lot of those lies you’ve spent way too long believing were born when you were reminded that you’re not in control of your circumstances.

Paul prayed for things to work out the way he wanted them to, but the answer God gave him was, “Sorry, Paul, but your circumstances are in My control.”

No matter how hard you try, you cannot control most of the things that happen to you. We don’t like hearing that. I don’t like saying that. But it’s true.

You’ve been where Paul is. You’ve said, “Well if I do this, then God has to do that.” But then God doesn’t do it. Or you’ve said, “As long as I love God and do my best, everything’s going to work out.” But then things don’t work out at all, or at least not in a way that makes you feel like God loves you and is there for you. How many times have you said, “I don’t deserve this”? How many times have you asked God, “Do you even care about me anymore?”

That’s where Paul is right now. He’s stuck in circumstances he didn’t ask for and can’t control. And in the middle of all the mess he’s going through, he writes this letter to the church in Philippi and says in verses 12-14, “I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that what’s happened to me is awful. I wanted to go to Rome and do good work for God, but He’s abandoned me. None of my plans have worked out, and now everything’s lost. So I’m just going to give up. I thought I had faith in God, but it turns out I had faith in nothing.”

No, wait a minute — that’s not what Paul wrote at all, is it? In fact, he writes just the opposite. Paul says God didn’t allow his plans to succeed because God had an even better plan. He says God hasn’t abandoned him, God’s blessed him even more.

How can Paul say that? What kind of faith is that? I’ll tell you. It’s the kind of faith that happens when you change your perspective.

Have you ever seen a beautiful picture or painting in a really ugly frame? Looks terrible, doesn’t it? The colors don’t match, or the textures don’t match, or the frame is too big or too little. A bad frame can ruin a perfect picture. That’s true for art, and it’s especially true for your mind.

If you think about what’s happening in your life as a picture, your opinion of what’s happening in your life is the frame that goes around that picture. It’s your perspective, and that perspective means everything when it comes to your spiritual health and your relationship with God. And here is the one thing you need to remember: you cannot control that picture of everything that happens to you, but you are always in charge of what kind of frame you put around it.

In these three verses right here, Paul is framing his circumstances. He looks at what’s happened to himself — under house arrest, maybe going to die, never left on his own — and says, “Well, these are the facts of my life now. Nothing I can do about that.”

But how he thinks of those circumstances is entirely up to him. Paul can’t choose the facts of his situation, but he can choose the frame he puts around them. He can say, “Everything’s terrible now, nothing’s worked out, and I give up,” but he doesn’t, because his mind’s been renewed. He’s not looking at God through his problems. Paul’s looking at his problems through God.

That’s why he can say, “You know what? Things are even better than I prayed for, because I’ve found a whole new way to preach the gospel. God’s worked it out so that I don’t even have to leave my house to share the Good News. He’s blessed me with prison guards who are chained to me twenty-four hours a day! They can’t get away from me! They don’t have any choice but to hear me talk about Jesus. And they think I’m the prisoner! Even better, these are the imperial guards! These are the guys who protect the leaders! The people who have all the power in Rome trust these guys. They listen to these guys, and now these guys are getting filled with Jesus. It’s amazing what God is doing here!”

How can Paul possibly think that way? It’s his faith. It’s a relationship with God so deep that Paul knows God won’t abandon him. And that relationship is what allows him to frame in his circumstances snd see them the way Gos does.

So many times your perception of what’s really happening in your life gets twisted by your emotions and the scars of your past. Those emotions and scars are called cognitive biases. They’re mistakes in our thinking, and we all have them. They twist what’s true into something that’s false but looks true, and then we cling to that falsehood because of our biases. And there are a million biases you might fall for, but I’ll give you a pretty common one as an example:

Your relationship with your earthly father directly impacts how you think of your Heavenly Father. If you had a great dad who loved you and was compassionate, that’s how you’re going to think of God. If your dad was abusive and distant, that’s also how you’re going to think of God. You see? It’s the same God, but looked at through two different perspectives.

Those cognitive biases are exactly why you have to take your thoughts captive. You have to think about what you’re thinking, and compare them to what the Bible says. And then you have to reframe your circumstances by looking at God through your problems instead of looking at your problems through God.

But how can you learn to do that? Here’s how, and it’s easy: To reframe your circumstances, you have to start looking for God in everything that’s happening to you.

Turn with me to Jeremiah chapter 29. Very famous chapter in the Old Testament. Jeremiah 29, verses 11-13. A lot of you probably remember Dempsey Carwile. Dempsey was an interim pastor here years and years ago. Jeremiah 29:11 was his favorite verse. He’d have us say that verse out loud all the time. Let’s read verses 11-13:

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.

Jeremiah 29:11 is great, but Jeremiah 29:13 might be even greater. Your circumstances are always going to be colored by your thoughts. Your thoughts can turn something beautiful into something ugly. They can also turn something ugly into what’s beautiful.

There is nothing that’s going to lift you up when you’re down, nothing that’s going to give you hope when you doubt, nothing that’s going to start healing your broken heart, like the goodness of God. And the goodness of God is in everything. I’ll say that again. The goodness of God is in everything.

No matter how bad things look, no matter how much you’re suffering, no matter how dark and lonely your circumstances might seem, God’s goodness is still there. And the key to getting changing your perspective is to always look for God’s goodness. Because what verse 13 says is that if you go in search of God, you are always, always, going to find what you’re looking for. That’s His promise to you.

So if you’re always looking for God no matter what you’re going through, if your thoughts are focused on noticing all the little things He does to support you and encourage you and lift you up and show you His love, your mind isn’t going to be focused on your problems. It’s going to be focused on Him, just like Paul’s was.

And when you do that, you’ll find there’s a better way to look at whatever’s happening to you. You can look at it through the goodness of God. Your frame stops being your fears and worries and disappointments and instead becomes God’s mercy and grace. Just think how great everything would look if you could see your life through God’s mercy and grace.

That’s exactly how God wants you to see things. Because once you start seeing your life through God’s eyes — once your mind is focused on looking for and finding all of those moments of His mercy and grace during your day — something incredible happens. It’s not just your mind that gets renewed, it’s your soul. And what have we always said about you and your soul? You don’t have a soul, do you? You are a soul, you have a body.

And when your mind is always being renewed by the Holy Spirit and your circumstances are reframed because you’re always looking for signs of God’s mercy and grace, then you can take the next step and start doing what truly marks the Christian life: You can rejoice.

Let’s go back to the book of Philippians. Turn with me to Philippians chapter 4. You know where I’m going with this, don’t you? How many times have you turned to Philippians 4 to feel better and find God’s encouragement? Let’s read it again, Philippians 4:4-8:

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

Remember where Paul is while he’s writing these words. He’s under arrest. Paul’s writing this letter with a Roman guard literally chained to him. At any minute, word might come that Paul’s going to be killed. Nothing’s worked out the way he planned it, but he still tells us to rejoice. He even says it twice in verse 4 — “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice.”

We look at a faith like that, and we just shake our heads. We look at a person like Paul and say, “There aren’t many people in history who have that kind of faith.” And that’s true.

But it’s also kind of a cop-out, isn’t it? Because when we say, “Well, Paul just has a faith unlike any other,” what we’re really saying is that Paul’s faith isn’t just greater than ours, it’s greater than anything we could ever manage.

But over and over the Bible says that the faith of Paul and Peter and John and Moses and Mary and Ruth isn’t the kind of faith we can have, it’s the kind of faith we should have, because the God of Paul and Peter and John and Mary and Esther and Ruth is also your God, and God never changes.

The key to that kind of faith, the secret to renewing your mind and reframing your circumstances and searching for God, is in that third step you take. It’s the word Paul uses twice in verse 4 — rejoice. And Paul tells us how and why we can rejoice right there at the end of verse 5. We rejoice, and we’re able to rejoice, because “the Lord is at hand,” or “because the Lord is near,” depending on your translation.

God is near to you. The Lord is always at hand. And you say, “Well that might be true, but sometimes it sure doesn’t feel like it.” Okay, but since when can you trust your feelings? Your feelings make a terrible frame around your circumstances, because your feelings are always based on incomplete information. You don’t know what God knows. You can’t see what God sees. And let me tell you this — if you knew what God knows and saw what God sees, you would ask for exactly what you’ve been given.

You say, “I don’t think God’s with me because He never tells me anything.”

But He is telling you, and He’s telling you all you need to know. Because the Lord is at hand. The Lord is at hand no matter what you’ve done, no matter what you’re doing, no matter what you’re feeling. He’s always there because He always loves you.

Remember when Elijah ran from Queen Jezebel and came to the mountain of the Lord? God appeared to Elijah as wind and an earthquake and a fire, but God spoke in a still, small voice. In a whisper. Why did God speak to Elijah in a whisper? Because God was right there beside him. If someone sitting beside you whispers, what do you do? You lean in closer, don’t you? God will speak to you in a whisper in order to draw you closer to Him.

The reason why God renews your mind is so you can learn to reframe your circumstances. The reason why you reframe your circumstances is so you can rejoice by seeking Him with all you heart. And the reason you to seek Him with all your heart is so that you’ll discover He’s right there beside you, and always has been. And if God is right there with you, whispering in your ear, the very best thing you can do is talk back to Him. The very best thing you can do is our last step in changing our perspective. It’s to reply.

Knowing that God is always there with you is so important because it helps keep you calm when everything goes bad. It keeps your mind focused on Him. But there’s also another simple reason why it’s important to keep your mind on God’s presence — if you forget God is next to you, you won’t talk to Him. You’ll just go off and do things on your own, and then you’ll find your thoughts moving in the wrong direction too.

We know how important the Bible is in taking every one of your thoughts captive. You have to know scripture in order to fix your mind. Here’s the other part of that. It’s prayer.

Look at what Paul says in verse 6. In all of those times when your mind’s racing and everything seems to be going wrong, the one thing you have to do is to pray. “In every situation,” he says, in the good and the bad, in the hopeful and the hopeless, when everything’s going great and everything’s going terrible, “let your requests be made known to God.”

If it’s big enough to worry about, if it’s big enough to wrestle with, then it’s big enough to pray about. If it’s on your mind, it’s on God’s heart. So talk to Him about it.

We can get into what praying is all about some other time. For now, we’re just going to keep it simple. Paul says, “let your requests be made known to God.” All that means is to tell Him your needs. That’s it. That’s all there is to it. And it doesn’t matter how you do it. You can talk your prayers, scream your prayers, sing your prayers, write your prayers. It’s all the same to God. Just tell Him your needs. Be yourself, and pray your way.

But when you pray, pray with confidence. Know that God hears you. Know that God wants to do more than help you, He wants to bless you, and He wants to bless you beyond anything you can hope for. The point is to pray, because prayer works. It works more than you might know.

Your brain is constantly changing and evolving to the point where it can strengthen just like time spent at the gym strengthens your muscles. That’s what prayer does. It’s a workout for your brain to the point where science has proven over and over again that prayer actually changes the chemistry of your brain for the better.

We’ve already said that your life is always moving in the direction of your strongest thoughts. If your thoughts lead to worry, if you’re giving in to those cognitive biases you have, if you’re letting that needle slide right into those deepest grooves in your record, then your life is always going to be moving in a direction that neither you nor God wants it to go.

But prayer changes your brain and moves your life into a positive direction. Prayer literally and physically renews your mind, and the result — if you do it enough — leads exactly to what Paul writes in verse 7: “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and” — what? — “your minds in Christ Jesus.”

Paul’s giving us a roadmap to follow that connects everything we’ve been talking about. Nothing’s going the way he wanted or expected it to, but he’s able to look through God to see his problems instead of staring right at those problems.

Because of that, he can reframe his circumstances and see the blessings in what’s happening. Because he can reframe those circumstances, he can rejoice.

Verse 5 tells us why he can rejoice — because God was near.

Verse 6 says that because God is near, Paul’s always talking to Him.

Verse 7 says that since Paul’s always talking to God, Paul’s mind is at peace.

And verse 8 says that since his mind is at peace, all of those horrible thoughts and memories and shames and guilts that Paul could dwell on are replaced by what is honorable and just and pure and lovely and commendable.

Do you see how it all of that works together? How each step builds on the other? And prayer is the key to all of it. That’s how you get God’s perspective, just by talking to Him. Tell Him everything. There’s no small thing to God. If it has to do with you, then He wants to hear about it. And there’s no sense in keeping it all to yourself, because He already knows about it anyway, doesn’t He?

I hear that a lot — “God already knows what’s going on, so why should I pray?” Here’s why: because prayer is turning to God and surrendering your feelings and the control over your life to Him. It’s trusting His promises and His power over your lies and your weakness.

That’s how you begin to have that Christian mind. That’s how you fix your record and take your thoughts captive and destroy your strongholds. That’s your path to victory over your thoughts. And that’s how you start living the life that God wants you to enjoy. And if you’re ready to start living that life, I invite you down front as we sing our closing hymn.

Let’s pray:

Father we’re so thankful for the miracle that is the mind, and for the wonders that You continue to reveal to us every day about how You’ve created us, how You care for us, and how it is your absolute will that we all live in victory over our thoughts. Fill us with Your Spirit, Father. Do a work in us that erases those deep grooves in our records. That captures every one of our thoughts and holds them captive to you. That helps us to renew, and reframe, and rejoice, and reply. Keep us close to Your heavenly presence, and grow us each day into the people You wish us to be. For it’s in Christ’s name we ask it, Amen.