We were on the way to town, the bucolic scenery passing us out the windows, only the soft purr of the engine penetrating the comfortable quiet in the car.
Just before the second four-way stop Keith said, “I think you should call.”
It came out of the clear blue, a topic we hadn’t spoken of for over an hour, but I knew exactly what he meant. After all these years, our minds tend to run on the same wavelength. Not always, I will admit. Sometimes I look at him and say, “What in the world are you talking about?” Sometimes he says that to me. Yet most of the time our concerns are the same and our interests the same. What worries him, worries me. We’re both trying to solve the same problems. We are as much “of the same mind” as it is possible to be, but it took awhile to get that way, and it took effort.
Jesus expects the same from his disciples. Once he looked at the apostles and said, “Beware the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees” (Matt 16:6).
They looked at one another and said, “Uh-oh. We’re in trouble because we forgot to bring lunch.”
Jesus was not pleased. In the first place it had not been that long since he had fed the five thousand with five loaves and two fish. How could they ever worry about going hungry from then on?
More than that, he expected them to be thinking in spiritual terms by now. “How could you think that physical bread was any concern to me at all?” he asked, and then they got it. He wanted them to beware of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees. He expected them to be thinking in spiritual terms just as he did.
He expects the same spirituality from us. “Have this mind in you which was also in Christ,” Paul gives as one example in Phil 2:5. He told the Romans we are to have “the mind of the spirit” not the flesh (8:5). He told the Corinthians he couldn’t even talk to them because they always thought in physical terms, not spiritual (1 Cor 3:1-3).
What is filling your mind this morning? Perhaps more telling, what does your mind run to whenever you hear a comment, see an action, or experience an event in your life? Do you let it frustrate you? Do you feel insulted or get your feelings hurt? Do you worry about the other person or yourself? Do you chafe at the inconvenience, or do you try to find the lesson? Is your mind so much on spiritual things that you think, speak, and behave as Jesus would, or are you still stuck in a physical world where you matter more than He does?
We can all predict how certain people will act and what they will say in a given situation. We say they have a one track mind. Having a one track mind is not necessarily bad, as long as we are on the same wavelength as the Lord.
Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart… But that is not the way you learned Christ!-- assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus… be renewed in the spirit of your minds, put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness, Eph 4:17,18,20,21,23,24.
Dene Ward
Just before the second four-way stop Keith said, “I think you should call.”
It came out of the clear blue, a topic we hadn’t spoken of for over an hour, but I knew exactly what he meant. After all these years, our minds tend to run on the same wavelength. Not always, I will admit. Sometimes I look at him and say, “What in the world are you talking about?” Sometimes he says that to me. Yet most of the time our concerns are the same and our interests the same. What worries him, worries me. We’re both trying to solve the same problems. We are as much “of the same mind” as it is possible to be, but it took awhile to get that way, and it took effort.
Jesus expects the same from his disciples. Once he looked at the apostles and said, “Beware the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees” (Matt 16:6).
They looked at one another and said, “Uh-oh. We’re in trouble because we forgot to bring lunch.”
Jesus was not pleased. In the first place it had not been that long since he had fed the five thousand with five loaves and two fish. How could they ever worry about going hungry from then on?
More than that, he expected them to be thinking in spiritual terms by now. “How could you think that physical bread was any concern to me at all?” he asked, and then they got it. He wanted them to beware of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees. He expected them to be thinking in spiritual terms just as he did.
He expects the same spirituality from us. “Have this mind in you which was also in Christ,” Paul gives as one example in Phil 2:5. He told the Romans we are to have “the mind of the spirit” not the flesh (8:5). He told the Corinthians he couldn’t even talk to them because they always thought in physical terms, not spiritual (1 Cor 3:1-3).
What is filling your mind this morning? Perhaps more telling, what does your mind run to whenever you hear a comment, see an action, or experience an event in your life? Do you let it frustrate you? Do you feel insulted or get your feelings hurt? Do you worry about the other person or yourself? Do you chafe at the inconvenience, or do you try to find the lesson? Is your mind so much on spiritual things that you think, speak, and behave as Jesus would, or are you still stuck in a physical world where you matter more than He does?
We can all predict how certain people will act and what they will say in a given situation. We say they have a one track mind. Having a one track mind is not necessarily bad, as long as we are on the same wavelength as the Lord.
Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart… But that is not the way you learned Christ!-- assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus… be renewed in the spirit of your minds, put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness, Eph 4:17,18,20,21,23,24.
Dene Ward
RSS Feed