Pastor Marcus Blair, Grandview Baptist Church
So many good people are trapped by their thoughts. We have people all around us in life – and many times you’ll never see it, because they hide it so well – who are prisoners to their minds. They are wrapped up in worry, doubt, anxiety, fear, depression, and they can’t see any way out. Folks, I’m here to tell you with certainty that God wants better for your life.
Here’s what I discovered: the Bible is absolutely full of information about the human mind. In fact, I’ve been astonished at how much God speaks to this area. I have discovered the Bible is stuffed with truth about our minds and how they can be turned to God
2. Corinthians. 4:3-4
The first thing I want you to see is that Satan (the god of this world) has done some of his best work through the minds of people by hiding the Gospel from them. How does he hide the light from them? An unbeliever’s mind has been blinded through all the filth that is in the world around us, competing for the attention of our brains. People all around us are walking in complete spiritual blindness, and it’s the devil’s doing, by luring people into sinful patterns of thinking. Please understand: the devil doesn’t own your mind, and he can’t force you to think something. But he has corrupted this world so badly that it’s all set up to make you fall. He doesn’t have to own your brain, because if you don’t yield it to God, you are already yielding it to darkness. He just puts the bait out there, and we take it, because we haven’t renewed our minds to think differently about it and reject sin.
Without mind renewal, without letting God into the mind and letting the Holy Spirit work on our brains, we are so accustomed to living in a world blinded by sin, we will go on living in the same old way as everyone else. We need the light, and in order to get that light, we need the Holy Spirit to remove the blindness from our minds so we can see the truth of God.
Ephesians 4:17-24
So we’ve seen in the Scriptures that the devil blinds people’s minds, and that people are following and living in any sin they can find because they love it. Sin warps your thinking, and will warp your personality. Sin and lies will twist your mind until you can fully believe and embrace what is WRONG and think it is right. And the real problem is, most of us live inside that sin-warped, corrupt way of thinking so long, we get stuck in a lifelong pattern that’s been carved out by years of sinful thinking. It’s like a cattle trail. They walk the same path again and again it gets carved out until years later, you could still see it even if they quit using it. Sin warps the mind, and then it warps the personality. I’ve seen people twisted by sin until their very personality is changed.
But folks, the opposite is also true: if living in this world will warp your mind, and your personality can be changed by sin, don’t you think that living in the truth long enough can straighten out your mind? Spending time in the light of God can also alter someone’s personality for the better! Have you ever seen someone like that? It’s beautiful – life spent in God is transformative – it renews the mind and repairs the damage, the ruts, the cattle trails, that years living in sin carved out. God can redeem what Satan has wrecked.
What is the antidote, then? How can our brains be fixed? What can a person do to be free of the lies? How do you get out of the mental prison Satan has constructed? V. 22-24:
Put off the old self – it is corrupt
Be renewed in the spirit of your minds
Put on the new self – righteousness and holiness
It’s like changing clothes. Some of you are still wearing the old stinky, corrupt rags from the lost way of living. I know people who have come to Jesus and put on the new self, which is a fresh, beautiful suit of clothes. But then they want to keep on walking around in those dirty rags they are supposed to put off. Why? Why do we choose corruption instead of beauty? This scripture tells us plainly: Mind renewal, in the spirit. That’s the key ingredient that so many people are tragically missing.
Getting born again is a one-time thing. Having your mind renewed is the rest of your life.
Just because you get saved doesn’t mean you start automatically thinking in a redeemed way. Once a person is saved, they begin a lifelong process of renovation and learning how to think in a new way. Reprogramming of the brain from worldly (sin focused) to godly (Christ focused). Getting us out of those cow ruts and into the wider pasture takes years – think about it, you spent years walking the cow ruts of the worldly way. Change can’t happen if you continually insist on grabbing the old filthy rags you had on back then and putting them back on.
Getting saved is not the end. It’s the beginning of a beautiful, redeemed, new life. What we need after salvation is the spiritual washing of our minds, to free us of all the junk and death and lies we have been fed for so many years. Each day, every day, you and I spend so much time in that culture of lies, we are marinated in it. We need help! We need God to help us change our minds.
