Transformed Thinking

Are you guys ready to participate? Yes. Oh, there we go. Okay, fill in the blank.

Rene Descartes, the philosopher, said, I think, therefore, I am. Oh, you’re off to a good start. This is a great group.

Okay, this one can have a couple different answers, so hopefully you get the right one and you put your big brains to the test. Think twice before you… Some of you said that louder than others. You’ve been told that a few times.

Okay, here is a tricky one. You can’t teach an old dog new… We’re going to push against that a little bit as we go. The mind is a terrible thing to… Whoever controls… Oh, this is Jim Morrison said this.

He’s a rock guy, but he had some insight here. Whoever controls the media controls the mind. Controls the mind.

And actually, some people also say controls reality. That’s kind of creepy either way. Okay, when you mess up, somebody says to you, what were you… Everybody got that one.

Okay, here’s the big one. Great minds think… Amen. You guys did good.

There are so… What did you say? And that sounded Latin, so… I only know Korean, not Latin. The… You’re going to interpret it? Fools seldom differ. Yeah.

Oh, fools seldom differ. With great minds think alike. I was looking for audience participation.

I wasn’t looking to be tested. There are so many phrases we have in our culture that have to do with thinking, with the mind, with how we make decisions. So it’s important to our Christian life.

It’s important to our life, and it’s important to our Christian life. Who we are as Christians is a direct result of our minds. In this life, our minds, our brains, our thoughts, and our thought processes impact greatly who we are in Jesus Christ.

So I started going through and looking up Bible verses that have to do with the mind and with thinking and all of that, and I realized I could be talking for a year on all the Bible has to say about the importance of your mind and your thoughts and what you have. So then I was a little perplexed going, how am I going to break… cut this down to four weeks, and what do I prioritize? And then all of a sudden it spilled into October, and October is where we start usually talking about our stewardship for the year. But believe it or not, there’s a big connection between our mind and our thoughts and our stewardship.

So it’s actually going to spill out for eight weeks talking about our minds because it is just so important to how we function as followers of Jesus Christ. And I think the basis of what we are going to look at over the next four weeks comes from Romans 12, 1 through 5, where it talks about some transformed thinking. Do you ever think after you say something, do you ever say, I wish I would have some transformed thinking? Will you stand as you are able? I think this is important stuff because if we understand this, then we can more readily accept what the Bible has to tell us about our minds.

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. For by the grace given to me, I say to everyone among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.

For as in one body, we have many members. It’s back there if you want to turn around, if you don’t have your Bible on. We have many members, and the members do not all have the same function.

So we, though many, are one body in Christ and individually members of one another. The Word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.

Amen. You may be seated. It says quite a bit in here about our Christian life and about our minds.

In verse 1, it says, present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Now, the spiritual worship we have is to present our whole selves, and when we do that, it becomes holiness. But holiness starts where? In our minds.

I think, therefore I am. It starts in your mind. It starts with what your thoughts are.

And what you do, when I was in school, you know, in the 90s, we had great computer stuff that really impresses my boys. No, not really. But it said, I took a class in college called Management Information Systems, and they had all these great lines like W-Y-S-I-S-I-Y-G.

What you see is what you get. And then it also talked about what you put into it is what you get out of it, as in when you program a computer, what you put in is what the output is. And what we put into our minds is what we put out.

So what we put in is what we’re thinking. If we decide to read the Bible or if we decide to do something else, that is what goes into our minds and impacts our thinking. The challenge we faced is we are faced with many different world views.

Has anybody ever noticed that? We are faced with things we have that are called preconceived notions. If our mind’s already blocked, how do we understand? And a barrage of information that can make life difficult to follow Jesus. If you just let Google put in your mind whatever Google wants to put in your mind or AI on Google or on Bing, it’s not going to lead you so much to Jesus.

That’s something that has to come from another source. That’s something we need. Now yesterday, this is probably a pretty common thing in the world today.

Colin had his first soccer game of the fall season. And I am not coaching. And I got to tell you, it is hard not to coach because I’m on the sidelines wanting to coach him even though all I’ve ever done is play soccer at recess when I was a little kid.

That’s why I’m not coaching because I don’t know it all that well. Of course, the mom who decided to coach our team tells us many times, I didn’t play soccer, but I learned how to play it for my son. And I go, ooh, that hurts.

So she’s coaching. And I’m on the sidelines behind there. I have the K-State game going on my phone and I’m watching their game.

And one of the moms turns around to me and she says, is it hard to keep up with both games as you’re watching this one? And I was, in my mind, I just laughed. But in my mind, I’m thinking, nah, it’s not hard. If the Royals were playing, I’d have had that going too.

And we’re down on this end. And down on the other end, you see they only have everybody on one side so all the families are mixed. And all of a sudden, the ref comes over and I hear the coach of the other team and the ref talking to a mom about her language and how she was yelling.

And I didn’t hear any of this probably because I already had two games going on. I didn’t have time to have games going on on the sidelines. And then the coach said what is not the smartest thing a man ever says to a female? He said, you need to calm down.

I’m going, dude, you’re married, right? And he’s turning around and everybody’s looking at the lady that’s right behind him and she’s going, it’s not me, it’s her. She outed her right in front of everybody. And then they’re asking her to calm down.

And then after he tells her to calm down, she tells him he’s number one in a different kind of way. And I was like, wow, what happened? What is going on in her mind that is different from everyone else’s mind? And our coach ended up going over there and talking to her too so I realize she’s on our team. Proud moment for our team.

James Hilton says your triggers are your responsibility. It is not the world’s obligation to tiptoe around you. Your triggers, those things going on in your mind.

Does anybody here not have triggers? Not have that button that you can push and then you just, you become a different person. It’s unreal. And those triggers are something why we have these phrases like you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

Or another one that I didn’t read because it doesn’t say anything about the mind directly but it’s the same point. See if you can fill in this blank. A leopard can’t change its.

Now that is, talking about the leopard, it’s a proverbial saying that expresses the notion that things cannot change their innate nature. Usually spoken by saying someone who has done bad things will continue to do bad things. And they cannot change.

And I hear more and more pessimism in the world today that people cannot change. There’s a couple of things that say we can change. One of them is science.

Science says we can change. Science says this. Neuroplastic, everybody say neuroplastic.

Neuroplastic refers to the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. The precise definition of neuroplasticity is a concept that neurons are not necessarily fixed in their functioning but are capable of functional modification as a result of changes of environmental signals. Are there any doctors who would like to interpret that for us? Meaning, neuroplastic means our brains, no matter how much we say that’s how I’m wired, our brains have the capability to adapt and to change and to grow.

Sometimes it’s tough. Sometimes it’s hardship in life that changes our thinking for the good or the bad. Sometimes it’s when we realize something we’ve had on our minds is not correct and we change our thinking for the good or the bad.

But here’s what we need to know. The Holy Spirit is personal and can rewire the way you think by the renewal of your mind. The Holy Spirit can rewire our minds.

All those neurons, those snapping of the electricity going on inside your mind, what are you putting on your mind? How are you letting God into your mind? How are you letting the Holy Spirit transform your mind? So your mind becomes less worldly and more godly. So we allow our minds to think more like Jesus than anything else. Robert H. Mounts said this, Believers are exhorted, in our Romans verses, to make decisive dedication of themselves as worshippers, stepping forward to place their offerings on the altar.

Holiness of life rarely progresses apart from deliberate acts of the will. While sanctification is gradual in the sense that it continues throughout life, each advance depends upon a decision of the will. Are you willing to let the Holy Spirit be your guide? Are you willing to let God’s word inform your life? Are you willing to bend your will to the will of God? It all starts here.

Everybody just point to your mind and say, Hmm. Hmm. I know you all remember this, but I’ll remind you back on March 3rd.

You remember we were going through a series and I was talking about fitness that day. Everybody remember March 3rd? We talked about the different types of fitness, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. And all those work with each other.

I tell you, sometimes I don’t even realize how tired I am until I keep making mistakes and I keep forgetting things and all of a sudden I realize how exhausted I am. How sleep plays into our minds. Is anybody in a better mood when you’re really, really tired and worn out? It all plays together and how it works together is an amazing thing.

Robert H. Mounts also said, A renewed mind is concerned with those issues of life that are of lasting importance. When the Holy Spirit renews your mind, you’re thinking more toward the eternal than you are the mortal. You’re thinking more for heavenly thoughts than you are for earthly thoughts.

As in what happens here now doesn’t bug you as much. So you don’t get mad, as mad, at soccer games. So things like that, that are a bunch of 5th and 6th graders running around having fun.

Some of those kids were just so upset with themselves. Their coach was trying to encourage them. It was just tough how seriously they took it and how they thought it was so bad if they missed a goal.

The question is, are you willing to let the Holy Spirit transform your mind? Are you willing to let the Holy Spirit transform your thought processes, your mindsets, your views, your paradigms, the way you think, all those things going on in your mind? Are you willing just to stop and instead of telling God what to do, just invite God into your mind, into your life, to transform you, to move you. Tom Landry, kind of, if you don’t know who Tom Landry was, he was the coach of the Dallas Cowboys way back in the 70s when the Cowboys were good, really good, win Super Bowls. He said, my task is to renew, oh, who was his quarterback then? Roger Staubach.

How come you got to be over 50 to answer that question? My task is to renew the minds of our players so that I can get them to do what they do not want to do in order for them to achieve what they want to achieve. The Holy Spirit works like that in our lives. Sometimes we don’t want to do what God wants us to do.

But when we stop and we submit and we trust in God and we let God’s word be on our mind and we let the Holy Spirit inform our lives and we let our minds think more like Jesus would think, which would be not to attack those who persecute you, but say, Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. That’s so unworldly like, but it’s eternal thinking that God gives us. And when we do that, we accomplish more than we can even ask or imagine.

Our minds can work in a whole different way. Our brains will respond to the word of God and to the Holy Spirit, but we just have to trust in Him. Let’s pray.

Almighty God, thank you for your Holy Spirit. Thank you for being personal. Today we ask you to renew our minds, to transform our thinking.

May our eyes be on Jesus. May our eyes be on the heavenly prize. Help us to think like you.

Help us to do more to put you on our minds through prayer, through Bible study, through healthy conversations with one another that challenge us and move us and take that neuroplasticity in our brains to transform our thinking so that we can be like Jesus, so that we can trust in you, so we will not be slaves to the world and the ideology of the world and the world view that we get through the media and other places, but so our minds will be set free to live and to love and to think like Jesus thinks. We pray this in your holy name. Amen.