Here's My Problem - the Whole Problem - It's My Own Mind.
[Note: The idea for this essay, and many of the statements made herein, come from the articles by Warren Rogers in www.christisyourlife.corn. I give all credit to his articles and the fabulous insight he has into these matters, and unqualifiedly recommend his articles for further study.)
WHO WOULD'VE EVER THOUGHT THAT, LIKE DOROTHY IN THE WIZARD OF OZ, THE SOLUTION TO MY LIFE ISSUES WAS WITH ME ALL THE TIME?
Isn't that what He really meant when He said on the cross: "It is finished"!
We often examine the contrast between our Christian walk and the walk of the saints of Scripture and other people of faith whom we read about, and we wonder: what’s wrong with me?
Why is my joy not full? Why don’t I feel close to God? Why am I constantly fending off despair and hopelessness, and beset by fear and anxiety? Why aren’t I doing great works for God? Why am I constantly getting tripped up and disappointing myself? Why do ) feel I just don’t measure up to God’s standards?
We think: either the Scripture lies about the reality of the Christian life, or even as a believer in Christ, something is still very wrong with me. What is it then? How do I get over it or past it?
The first thing to check is whether I have ongoing sin in my life. If I am living in rebellion against God. He hasn’t left me but I have left Him. Simply put, we will not realize the benefits of walking closely with God if we are not walking closely with Him.
The so-called “Prosperity Gospel” makes this mistake. It assumes that God is here to make our plans for rebellion come true. It ignores the fact that we are here to make His plans for obedience come true.
But assuming that one is not walking in sin, and continues to seek and believe God on a deeper level, one should have expectation of realizing the benefits of closely walking with God. such as rest, peace, and joy.
But if that is not one’s experience, as is the case with many, many believers, let’s focus on the real problem or hindrance.
In a nutshell, the problem is this: MY OWN MIND.
My own mind is the problem - the whole problem. Because my own mind is what I’m listening to, and, according to the Scripture, my own mind is subject to a silent but overwhelming and dangerous deception.
I have assumed all my life that everything my mind tells me is true and reliable. As a result, I am constantly tempted to take sense knowledge (i.e., sight, hearing, touch, “real life experience”) as ultimate, and the verdict of my own mind as the sole guide for my life.
But that is a huge mistake. Why?
Because truth is not found in my mind.
Truth is found in the Word of God. And where there is no truth, neither is there joy, rest, and peace. Only fear, anxiety, and depression.
Clearly, then, there’s only one solution. I must quit listening to my own mindl
Exactly. If the thoughts of my own mind don't bring me rest, it's time to dump it and find one that does.
In Genesis 3, immediately after Adam and Eve decided that they would no longer listen to and follow their Creator but would instead listen to and follow His enemy, Satan, the Lord came upon the scene and called out to Adam.
When the Lord discovers Adam and Eve hiding, Adam explains: “1 heard the sound of you in the garden, and 1 was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.”
Then the Lord utters one of the most enigmatic statements in all of Scripture; “Who told you that you were naked?”
What a strange thing to say? Adam was not a fool. Surely he could see his situation and could conclude in his own mind that he was naked.
So why in the world would the Lord ask such an obvious and simple question?
Maybe because things were not quite that simple. And in fact, Adam doesn't expressly answer the question. But surely because the Lord Himself knows the answer, He clues us all in by answering it with a follow-up question: "Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”
Note that the Lord is linking Adam’s hiding in fear with something Adam was told by someone, and not something that Adam received from the Lord, or thought or concluded on his own!
The Scripture does not expressly tell us who that “someone” was, but the Lord also in His follow-up question links Adam’s thinking these negative thoughts with his eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which Satan was certainly promoting.
Who else could it be but Satan in the guise of the serpent, the only other creature on the scene.
We can only conclude then, that as a result of sin only a few moments earlier, Satan had somehow slithered inside Adam’s head, but so subtly that Adam believed that his thoughts were still his, and was therefore tooled as to their real source - Satan.
The implications of this are nothing short of staggering...
Reduced to its essence, what the Lord was communicating to each of us in Gen. 3:11 was this shocking truth: Satan, not you, is the source of the thoughts in your head.
Just wow...
But why should I be surprised? Left on their own, in a very short time my own thoughts inevitably lead me to a dark place of hopelessness and rejection from which I have to claw free. And my own mind constantly fights against the thoughts of Scripture.
Let’s face it: the old. carnal mind I was born with, as a child of Adam, is utterly incapable of directing the new Spirit person that I am. Having received Christ as my life. I am no longer a creature of flesh; I am a Spirit person. Therefore, the old mind of the flesh needs to be jettisoned, my own fleshly thoughts totally abandoned. (Note: I will use ‘carnal mind’ and ‘mind of the flesh’ interchangeably herein.)
As Adam’s offspring we should assume that, like God indicated to Adam in Gen. 3:12, our thinking is not our own. in fact, there are only two sources of thoughts in my human mind - my flesh and the Spirit.
Romans 8:3-8 says, in part:
By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, [God] condemned sin in the flesh, 4 in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. 5 For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. 6 For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. 7 For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot. 8 Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.
Each thought is one or the other. It is either of the flesh or of the Spirit.
The mind of the flesh is the carnal mind focused on the material and the temporal, and deriving all value, knowledge, wisdom, and input from the things of the worldly realm. The mind of the Spirit is the Mind of Christ, focused on the spiritual and the eternal, and deriving all value, knowledge, wisdom, and input from the things of the heavenly realm.
There is no third option whereby we humans can source thoughts independent of both God and Satan.
Bear in mind, we do have an independent will, but the role of the will is to select the thoughts that it receives and decide which are valid and are to be followed.
However, as sons and daughters of Adam we had no choice of whether to choose the thoughts of the flesh, because since birth, before we came to Christ and received His life (and mind), we only had one source of thoughts - the mind of the flesh which we inherited from Adam. It's what we were born with.
Therefore, we lived strictly out of the mind of the flesh. It was the only mind we had. We grew up trusting in our own thoughts, and the ability of our mind to make sound decisions.
But since Satan is able to feed his thoughts to the carnal mind, every moment since birth we were really thinking his thoughts about how to live.
Eph. 2:1-3 makes this plain:
And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we ail once lived in the passions of our flesh...
In other words, we each at birth have been set on a “course" by another being in the universe, the ‘prince of the power of the air’, and it is his course for us, not one we choose. Any thought that we choose our own course, then, is utter deception according to the Scripture.
Satan keeps his slave kingdom intact by keeping ail of his slaves, the sons of Adam, on a certain course, the “course of this world”, which is a course of oppression and destruction. And Satan does this by directing our thoughts every moment of every day.
Our thought life, then, is the instrument of Satan’s slavery over the human species, it’s as simple, and diabolical, as that
But we don’t see it. Why? Because first, this carnal mind is all we have known so we have no way to expose the deception.
Second, all the world is under an evil spell that further deceives us from recognizing the truth of our situation, as Paul explains in 2 Cor. 4:4:
the god of this world (i.e., Satan) has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
However, the Lord, knowing that the oppression of our slave master was centered in our minds, and consisted of lies, knew exactly how to set us free.
He gave us a new mind - the mind of Christ! A mind unburdened by the evil spell. As with everything else, God's solution for us is always this - a New Creation (2 Cor. 5:17)!
We received the mind of Christ when we received Christ. So the issue is not whether we now have the mind of Christ.
The question is whether we know that we have the mind of Christ!
Although in Adam we were blind, now in Christ we see, because now in Jesus we have been gifted with His mind, the mind of Christ {1 Cor. 2:16; Ph. 2:5) which is the mind of the Spirit of Jesus. Our will now has a choice: to think God's thoughts, the thoughts of the Spirit of Jesus, or to think Satan’s thoughts, the thoughts of the fleshly or carnal mind.
That’s it - one or the other. Everything not of faith is sin. Rom. 15:23. There is no middle or neutral ground.
The things we believers still allow to parade through our minds are alien to the mind of Christ. In the mind of Christ, which I now have access to since I now am one with Christ, there is no worry, fear, despair, or frustration.
There is joy, peace, and rest. That is the mind I must use to live this life.
Always.
And this means that I must ruthlessly, diligently resolve to think only God’s thoughts, speak only God’s words into my life and the lives of others, and do only what God does. Anything else ensures that I will be thinking, speaking, and doing exactly what the Enemy of God is directing me to do.
God’s goal is abundant life for me. Satan’s goal is to continue his brutal oppression as long as I permit it.
If Satan announced out loud beforehand every thought he was sending into your head, knowing this, would you still blindly receive those thoughts?
Of course not...
Conclusion
It’s all about thoughts.
Man will obey his thoughts, and these thoughts spring from one of only two sources - God or Satan. Man is ruled either by God’s thoughts or Satan’s thoughts. Each moment we choose one or the other.
There are only two spiritual forces active in the World, and only two realms to choose from!
Knowing this means the deception has been exposed! We must now wake up and violently claim our freedom.
We cannot give our hearts to the Lord and then try to keep our mind for ourselves.
The battle is in the mind. Thoughts are what Satan uses to oppress us. He does not abandon his centuries-old operating plan just because we become a Christian. He sticks with his game plan.
Man has a choice; He can either think thoughts of loneliness and despair, or he can capture his mind and make it a prisoner of Jesus Christ. As long as I continue to think thoughts of hopelessness, I will always feel hopeless.
From 2 Cor. 10:3-5;
For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ...
It’s time to make every thought bow the knee to the Lord Jesus, and thus break off Satan’s thought shackles and claim and live our freedom God has purposed for us in Jesus.
And to draw a line under everything that has gone before!
Mark B. Meyers
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