“And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all He has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice – the kind He will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship Him. Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.” (Romans 12:1-2 NLT)
The only way to get our body under control is by allowing the Lord to harness our thoughts and redirect the intentions of our mind. Right behavior follows right thinking, not the other way around. If we can’t get our thinking right, we’ll never act right in the sight of God and others. Faking it can only get us so far, then the real us begins to seep through. But how can we get our mind harnessed to think God’s thoughts?
Therein lies the problem – WE can’t! Only by yielding our life and allegiance to Jesus, being filled and empowered by His Spirit, can we ever hope to allow the Spirit to give us what we need to not only think correctly, but live and act correctly. Every addiction with which we wrestle is at its core a spiritual issue. To try to escape the tentacles of pornography or immorality in whatever form, alcohol, drugs, misuse of money, lying, gossiping or whatever other sin pattern we’re seeking to escape, without the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit, we’ll sink as quickly as Peter on the water.
We’re too prone to trust our feelings, not our informed and Spirit-directed mind. When we DO the right thing, we’ll FEEL the right way about it. Right actions follow right thinking and right thinking only comes by the empowerment of the Spirit of God. You may be familiar with the “Train” illustration. There are three cars in the train – the engine is FACT, pulling the second car FAITH, then the caboose, FEELINGS.
Facts are gathered in our mind through study, memorizing, and meditating upon God’s Word, listening to godly teaching, followed by growing faith developed through the establishment of godly disciplines, fellowship with Spirit-filled brothers and sisters, consistent worship, and devotion to the habit of prayer. The proper emotional response to all of that will be channeled by the Spirit and governed by His authority.
The Spirit leads us, not through our emotions, but through our mind. We can get all worked up emotionally, but until and unless we allow the Holy Spirit to harness that emotion and channel it in healthy ways, it can result in nothing more than an emotional frenzy that doesn’t honor the Lord or anyone else. Never in His life did Jesus lose touch with the Spirit’s control of His body, mind, and spirit, and neither should we.
E. Stanley Jones guides us when he writes: “The Bible redirects my will, cleanses my emotions, enlightens my mind, and quickens my total being.” Everything the Lord desires to teach us will come from His Word. Nothing of eternal value will be derived from anything that isn’t rooted in the Truth of Scripture. To deviate from God’s Word is to lose our way, whether that comes in the form of false teaching, emotional misunderstandings, neglect, or blatant disregard to the Spirit’s leading through yielding to sin.
Feeding our mind on the words of Scripture fueled by intentional meditation upon them and meaningful, God-honoring, faith-filled prayer are the only avenues of proper nourishment of our mind, which, under the anointing of the Spirit, must be the governing agent of our walk with Jesus.
Food for thought.
Blessings, Ed 😊
Walking With Jesus 