January
6
We
have the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16).
Our natural mind is a
great obstacle in the race which we are running, cropping up all the time with
its complexes, its arguments, its interests and its methods. When the
Corinthians were brought into the Church they left behind their obvious sins,
but they carried over into their new realm the old, natural ways of thinking
and reasoning which belonged to the world and not to the Spirit of God. But the
apostle remonstrated with them: "But we have the mind of Christ" (1
Corinthians 2:16), so urging them to allow the Cross to be planted between the
natural mind and the spiritual.
We shall only come to
the fullness of Christ as we leave behind the mind of the natural man and move
on more and more in the progress of the mind of Christ. On everything: every
judgment, every conclusion, every analysis, every appraisal, we must ask the
Lord: "Is that Your mind, Lord, or is it mine?" We may sometimes feel
that we have the strongest ground for taking up a certain attitude or coming to
a certain conclusion; we may feel that we have all the evidence and so are
convinced; and yet we may be wrong.
The man who wrote the
letter to the Corinthians knew from deep and bitter experience that this was
the case. "I verily thought... that I ought to do many things contrary to
the name of Jesus of Nazareth," he said (Acts 26:9). There was no man who
had stronger convictions as to the rightness of his course than Saul of Tarsus.
The great revolution which took place in him when he came to Christ was that he
had to say: "I have been all wrong in my fundamental way of
thinking." After that confession he made good headway in the race because
he was always ready to subject his thinking to the jurisdiction of his crucified
Lord. This is the way of spiritual progress. We shall not get very far while we
hold to our own opinions and our own conclusions, even though we may have the
support of others; we have to learn to conquer our natural mind by submission
to the mind of Christ. This is most important if we are concerned about
spiritual progress. And spiritual progress is the increase of Christ – there is
no other.
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