The Bible says:
“Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.”
— Philippians 2: 5
We know we have a mind and we know Christ has a mind and that we are to have the mind that Christ has.
The mind cannot be the brain for we cannot all have the brain of Christ. The mind of Christ must be something that every Christian can possess that will make them like Christ.
Every Christian has the Spirit of Christ, but in order for them to live the life of Christ they must develop or form the mind of Christ.
What is the mind? We know the mind is not the brain. The brain is a medium the mind uses to express itself publicly.
The Holy Spirit has a mind that expresses His thoughts and that He uses when He intercedes for the saints. (Romans 8: 27) So the mind is not something physical but something spiritual.
The mind is the heart of man; the inner man; the spiritual part of our being. It is the source of our intellectual activities.
(Isaiah 10: 7; Proverbs 23: 7), the switchboard communicating messages from the conscience (1 Samuel 24: 5; Job 27: 6), the source of sin (Jericho 7: 24, 11: 8, 16: 12), the repository and directive center of thought, will, feeling, and conscience.
The right spirit was the clean heart (Psalm 51: 10), practically synonymous with a “pure mind.”
(2 Peter 3: 1)
The mind is also called the nous — the responsible intellect.
Swiss theologian Henry Bullinger writes this word means, “the organ of mental perception and apprehension, the organ of conscious life, and the organ of the consciousness preceding the act, or recognizing and judging the fact. It is generally the organ of thinking and knowledge, i.e., contemplation.”
(The “organ” Bullinger is referring to is not a physical organ of the body like the brain, but a spiritual organ of the spirit like the conscience.) We should therefore think of man in terms of mental and moral energy rather than in material concepts only.
The mind has an eye (Luke 11: 34) and we can have a “mind set” a thought form, a set way of seeing things and thinking about God, ourselves and the world. We must give up this old mind set and by the renewing of our minds (Romans 12: 1, 2) come to have the mind set of Christ.
The mind of Christ is identical to all truth and our thought process must be molded by truth if we’re to have the mind of Christ.
James H. Cagle is a Ray City resident who pastored several churches for a total of 11 years. Email him at pastorjameshcagle@ yahoo.c
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