There are a few statements that are quite popular in churches. I’ll go ahead and give just one, and if you hear it quite often too, we are going to do some serious thinking. You can go ahead and share this piece so we learn a thing or two today.  

“This work, we don’t do it with our minds. We do it as we are led by the Spirit.” 

These and other statements like this, suggest to us that the mind of an individual is a hindrance to the operations of the Holy Spirit, and thus must be laid aside. I am pretty sure all of us got to certain points in our lives where we were told that faith contrasts with the mind and how we think. So in your spiritual walk, you either have to walk by faith or use your mind. And these kind of statements sound sincere and very powerful. People who talk like this are seen as highly spiritual, and we often want to be like them. 

Now there is no doubt that in walking with God and working for God, faith and the leading of the Spirit are essentials. We just cannot do without them. But is the mind an enemy or a friend? Is the mind a hindrance or an advantage? 

There is such a thing as cognitive dissonance.  A big word for a phenomenon where an individual holds two contradictory thoughts. An example is a smoker, who knows he enjoys smoking, but also knows smoking is unhealthy. Now, when an individual finds himself in this place, he will end up addressing it, by discarding one of the thoughts. So every smoker you meet is actually either actively trying to quit, or believes that smoking is not unhealthy. A lot of wee smokers can lecture you on the health benefits of marijuana. They have dealt with their cognitive dissonance by discarding the thought that smoking is unhealthy.  

Thus, in being told that the Spirit and the mind are always at variance, we are made to believe that it is normal to always be in a state of cognitive dissonance as a believer. In fact, if you’re not in this state, you’re not spiritual enough. The real challenge is that this state is not stable. You cannot believe something that just does not make sense to you. I believe that this is one of the main reasons why there is a lot of shallow Christianity today. If we are made to believe Christianity conflicts with our sensibilities, we will definitely discard the former and follow our sensibilities. A lot of this happens subconsciously and we don’t even know it. You will always side with what makes sense to you. 

But a much stronger argument for the truth that God does not expect the mind to be in conflict with the Spirit is in Matthew 22:37. Jesus declared, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with ALL THY MIND.” Jesus expects that the mind be fully involved in this spiritual journey. God wants us to work for Him as led by the Spirit and with our minds also.  

For this reason, God shows us the way in Romans 12. In there, He instructs us to be transformed by the renewing of the mind. The believer who does not actively go through the process of renewing His mind will not last. A sign that a believer is growing in God, is not that he does not reason out spiritual things. Rather, it is that spiritual things increasingly make sense to him because his mind is being renewed. He is able to think through issues and take decisions out of the renewed mind. He doesn’t always have to wait for a prophetic word before making a move. His renewed mind submits to the Spirit and he is led into eternal bliss.  

So our minds are not an enemy. And if we do not renew our minds and have it form an alliance with the Spirit, we will not last in this Christian journey and our love for God will be woefully inadequate. Renewal of the mind is the only way to survive this journey.  

“But we have the mind of Christ”. Selah.