THE WRONG MINDSET
to persuade the worshipper to set their minds on God's interests.
The Text
According to the New York Times, in the summer of 1994, a Virginia state trooper, who was a member of the bomb squad, and his dog, Master Blaster, became local celebrities when they found bombs at malls in Hampton and Virginia Beach.
That bit of celebrity evidently went to the state trooper’s head. A hidden camera later recorded him placing a bomb in a shed that he had been asked to search for explosives. He was arrested and later pled guilty to planting explosives at two malls, a courthouse, and a coliseum. He told investigators he had not intended to hurt anyone. The bombs—a cardboard tube filled with explosives, and pipes filled with gunpowder and nails—never exploded. He said he was simply trying to enhance his image.
Selfish ambition is one of the most powerful—and potentially destructive—motivations we can have. When we are in the grips of selfish ambition, we can rationalize almost anything.
Being Unteachable
In Broken in the Right Place, Alan Nelson describes a scene from the book A Layman Looks at the Lord’s Prayer.
The author talks about watching a potter mold a lump of clay. On the shelves in his workshop stood gleaming goblets, beautiful vases, and exquisite bowls. The potter went to an odorous pit in the floor and took out a lump of clay. The smell was from rotting grass, which increased the quality of the material and made it stick better. The potter patted the lump of clay in his hands into a ball. Placing the lump onto the slab of stone with seasoned skill, the potter sat down on his wobbly little wooden stool. Already the master potter could envision the work of art this lump of earth would become. Whirling the wheel gently, the artist caressed the spinning mound. Prior to each touch, he dipped his hands into the two water basins flanking each side of the wheel. The clay responded to the pressure applied by his fingers. A beautiful goblet arose from the pile, responding to each pinch and impression.
Suddenly the stone stopped, and the potter removed a piece of grit. His seasoned fingers detected the unpliable aggregate. The stone spun again, allowing him to smooth out the former lodging of the grit. Suddenly the stone stopped again. He removed another hard object from the goblet’s side, leaving a mark in the vessel. The particles of grain within the cup resisted his hands. It would not respond to his wishes. Quickly the potter squashed the form back into a pile of clay. Instead of the beautiful goblet, the artisan formed the material into a crude, finger bowl.… When we resist the Master Potter’s hand, we run the very real risk of becoming less than we could become.
Influenced by Satan
Peter clearly understood Jesus’ words (8:31), but could not reconcile his view of “Messiah” (v. 29b) with the suffering and death Jesus predicted. So Peter began to rebuke Him for this defeatist approach.
Peter’s reaction, which the other disciples probably shared, was a satanic attempt similar to the wilderness temptation (cf. 1:12–13), to divert Jesus from the Cross. Jesus … rebuked (cf. 8:32) Peter for the benefit of them all. This was not a personal attack. The words, Out of My sight, are literally, “Go away behind (after) Me.” This is probably not a command to Peter to take his proper place as a disciple (contrast 1:17; 8:34), for Jesus named Satan as the source of Peter’s thoughts.
WHEN you burn a CD, you take the music or the movie and you pass it on so that on the other disc has precisely what was the original disc being burned. The copy is precisely the content of the original.
Satan does the same thing when he burns his thoughts into our thinking so that we think his thoughts after him. His goal is to get us to do this until those thoughts are burned so deeply they become our thoughts. His thinking, which starts as a suggestion, turns into a way of thinking for us, which then turns into a way of operating. The incorrect thinking ends up creating the actions that result from the thoughts.959
Motivated by Self-Interest
Nichelle Nichols played Uhura in the original Star Trek TV program and six Star Trek movies. She was one of the first Black women regularly featured on a weekly TV show. As such, she had obstacles to overcome. According to Steve Jones in USA Today, a few studio executives were hostile toward her character, which was often diminished by script rewrites, and the studio even withheld tons of her fan mail. After one year on the program, she was fed up. Nichols, who was also an extremely talented professional singer and dancer, told Gene Roddenberry she was going to quit and pursue her performing career.
Before she did, however, she went to a fundraiser for the NAACP. There she happened to meet Dr. Martin Luther King, who urged her not to leave the show. She was a role model for many.
Says Nichols, “When you have a man like Dr. Martin Luther King say you can’t leave a show, it’s daunting. It humbled my heart, and I couldn’t leave. God had charged me with something more important than my own career.”
The rest, as they say, is history. Not only did she become a fixture on Star Trek, she actually influenced NASA, challenging them to hire Blacks and women for their astronaut corps. She led a 1977 NASA recruitment drive that saw 1,600 women and 1,000 minorities apply within four months.
By giving up her plans to sing and dance, Nichols found the defining role of her career—Uhura—in one of the most popular TV shows ever and influenced a nation.
Like Nichelle Nichols, as we die to ourselves and our own plans so that we can pursue something far more important—the cause of Christ—we find our God-given destiny.
Conclusion:
(Phil 2:5-11)
Invitation:
According to an October 29, 1994, story from the Reuters news agency, a Chinese woman named Zhang Meihua began to suffer mysterious symptoms when she turned twenty. She was losing the ability to nimbly move her legs and arms. Doctors could not find the cause, and the symptoms continued.
Two decades passed, and Zhang began to also suffer from chronic headaches. Again she sought help from the doctors. This time a CAT scan and an X ray found the source of the woman’s mysterious symptoms. A rusty pin was lodged in her head. The head of the pin was outside the skull, and the shaft penetrated into her brain. Doctors performed surgery and successfully extracted the pin.
The Xinhua news agency reported the doctors expressed amazement that the woman “could live for so long a time with a rusty pin stuck in her brain.” After noting the position of the pin in her skull, they speculated that the pin had entered her skull sometime soon after birth and before her skull had hardened. Zhang, now fully recovered, said she “had no memory of being pierced by a pin in the head.”
Like the rusty pin in that woman’s brain, unwholesome thoughts, bad attitudes, and painful memories can lodge in our minds and cause chronic problems. God tells us to renew our minds.
