The mind of Christ is the mindset you need to get you to peace, love, and joy in your life.
Not the cliched versions you buy on a card or wall hanging or wear on a sweatshirt at Christmas. Those are ideas and suggestions and wishful thinking. The actual realities go into your heart and work themselves out through your disposition, attitude, and relationships. They change you.
We need a path there because life is more enjoyable there.
Weigh your other options. No peace? Welcome to the anxiety and fear spectrum. No love? Welcome to the apathy and loathing spectrum. No joy? Welcome to the bitterness and sorrow spectrum.
Those spectrums create misery, and life has enough of that already. No one wants to be found on those spectrums. And to get off the misery spectrum requires a mindset change, a paradigm shift, a renewal of thinking, a transformation of mind.
The Apostle Paul calls it the mind of Christ in 1 Corinthians 2 and says in Romans 12 it transforms you through the renewing of your mind.
What is the mind of Christ? As one of my mentors puts it, it’s “thinking what Jesus thinks.”
About what is important.
About yourself.
About other people.
When I know what is important, I know where to focus, what to do, and where to find life. When I don’t know what’s important, I am diffused, confused, and easily mistake things that bring me pain for places that will give me life.
It all starts in my thinking.
The Cleveland Clinic did a study and found the average person has something like 60,000 thoughts a day. Of those, 95% are repeated each day, and of those repeated thoughts, 80% are negative in some way.
Quibble with the numbers, but every day you are fighting a deluge of thoughts that drag you onto the misery spectrum. What’s important gets drowned out by the sheer volume of what’s in your mind.
Thinking what Jesus thinks leads you out.
Current attempts to find what’s important
Here’s a short list of how we currently discern what’s important apart from the mind of Christ. In the Bible, these are given names because they are broad categories of thinking that act like flypaper. They glue people onto the misery spectrum.
#1 The world
In the New Testament, “the world” represents patterns of thinking separate from God everyone accepts as normal.
All the great sages and divines will tell you these aren’t so much patterns as they are scripts—programs that seem to run how people operate, think, and behave.
These scripts sound like “how the world works.” But in reality they are psychologically and socially worn paths we agree to in order to convince ourselves we live in an acceptable world.
That’s the polite version. Anthony DeMello says more plainly they are designed to “keep you productive and controllable.”
• Politics are a script—whether you are a liberal or a conservative. We believe our script is the only legitimate way to see and use power—and dismiss as stupid or dangerous all others.
The script makes us contemptuous of half of humanity, which labels them “unimportant.”
• The sovereignty of the self is a script. Create your own world. Be true to yourself. Create your own ending. Ignore the crowd and boldly be you. This script came about as an act of resistance, ironically, to conformity to society’s messages. It now is society’s message and the new script to which you must conform.
The script tells me that in the end I’m the only one who's important.
• Maximization of profit at all costs (people costs, dignity costs, community costs, environmental costs, etc) is a script. This is a powerful script about how the world “works.” Fear is used to get us to fear not buying in.
The script allows us to accept the dehumanization of ourselves and others in the name of profit.
These are only representative—the world has so many scripts. The power of the world’s scripts is that only what fits inside the script is important.
See the scripts and their grip on you dissolves.
#2 The flesh
The flesh is the New Testament’s way of describing the self—you—that wants immediate satisfaction. The brain science way of saying this is we've become dopamine dependent, always looking for the next dopamine hit.
“Flesh” (the Greek word, sarx) is sometimes translated “sinful nature” which is not fully accurate. Sarx means literal flesh. The New Testament writers use it as a metaphor for me without God. “Flesh” is a word-picture of the physiological and psychological super-structure of the self if God and everything God brings is removed.
In other words, the flesh is the habits, patterns, responses, fears, and longings that run my life if God isn’t in the picture.
Social media has tapped into the flesh and created what one person calls “attention factories.” In these attention factories, we slave away giving or trying to get attention for free. Meanwhile, the companies who build attention factories make billions.
The flesh weaponizes legitimate needs against me so that I believe only what satisfies me counts as important.
#3 The Devil
The devil is that being, that force, that entity and its collective partners whose only game is to fan the flames of the world’s scripts and the flesh’s desire for satisfaction. “The father of lies” (John 8:44), Jesus calls him.
The devil doesn’t care if you think you are worthless or if you think the entire world is beneath you. The devil doesn’t care if you are a nobody or a somebody, religious or non-religious. The devil just doesn’t want you to think beyond the scripts of the world or the confines of your flesh.
The devil is that evil power that does not want your head and heart lifted to God. So, the devil weaponizes shame, fear, and guilt (and provokes us to do the same) to steal, kill, and destroy any sense of what’s truly important.
The flesh, the world, and the devil create a laundry list of what we humans think is important.
• The “right” view of politics.
• Self-determination at all costs.
• Profit over everything.
• What satisfies me right now.
• Weaponized shame, fear and guilt so my side wins.
Where has this gotten us?
The misery spectrum.
What Jesus thinks
What does Jesus think is important?
The labyrinth 613 mitzvot (commands) in the Old Testament would be hard for anyone to categorize and summarize.
A Torah observant Israelite strove to keep them all because the law was understood to be the way, the truth, and the life. To keep the law was find the way to life.
Jesus didn’t argue against this.
Jesus—the master of life—summarizes what’s hard for us to categorize. 613 commands are about two; love for God and love for my neighbor. These two are the summary of everything God wants, intends, means, and commands. Jesus: “The whole law and prophets hang on these.” Matthew 22:40
If the image helps, they are the only two hooks on the wall mudroom wall in Jesus' house. Everything else hangs from them and is an expression of them. In them, Jesus is announcing a better spectrum for humanity: The love of God and neighbor spectrum.
This means love of God and love of neighbor is what Jesus thinks about and what Jesus thinks is important. God above everything and my neighbors’ good.
All else is commentary.
Filter every interaction Jesus has in the Gospels through this grid of understanding and you start to understand what Jesus was doing. Every time he was thinking about how to grow love of God and neighbor.
Teaching his disciples and the crowds.
Driving out money changers.
Challenging the Pharisees.
Welcoming children.
Healing.
Being spat on.
Enduring the cross.
Rising from the grave.
If you want the mind of Christ, think what Jesus thinks.
Filter every interaction through the grid of growing love of God and your neighbor.
Dealing with your next-door neighbor.
Talking to or about co-workers.
Business decisions and deals.
Decisions as a parent.
Handling money.
Hobbies.
Your body.
Other people’s bodies.
Your political involvement.
All of it. Everything. Think what Jesus does.
This seems almost too simple to be real.
Surely there is more.
Many Christians struggle to understand the Old Testament in light of the New Testament. The laws in the Old Testament can seem arbitrary or confusing, and often the law seems like something to be kept for its own sake. “If I’m only keeping 2 commands, what about the other 611? God gave all of them to us!” They feel like they are doing something wrong.
They start to think the filter is keeping the law for the sake of keeping the law because God said so.
When that thinking takes root, it sounds like this toward other people. “But what they are doing is wrong! I can’t love them until they stop.”
On one side is the law.
On the other side is people.
And they can’t think of how to make them meet.
That’s not what Jesus thinks.
Jesus didn’t keep the law, he fulfilled it. Meaning, he kept it for the reason it was intended—to foster love of God and neighbor. Jesus intent is always to bring people and God together in love. And everything in God’s economy is ordered to this end. Including the law.
This is the mind of Christ.
How do we access this?
John said that love for God comes from the love of God.
“This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” 1 John 4:10
If you struggle to love God, your issue isn’t dedication or motive or even faith. It’s that you don’t know you are loved by God. If you wonder, look at the cross. And what’s the cross? God’s eternal sign that he loves you.
Read John’s gospel and you find him describing himself in a peculiar way. “The disciple Jesus loved.”
John knew the love of God, so love for God and his neighbor was his life theme. Read his gospel and his 3 letters. It’s clear.
I wonder, do you think of yourself that way?
If you don’t yet beloved, take heart. Jesus does.
Pastor Scott Marshall, Wichita First Church of the Nazarene
Here’s where we’ve been in this series on the mind of Christ
Part 1 | The mind upgrade you missed
Part 2 | You’re one thought away from peace
Part 3 | Your logic can't love you back