The New Mindset – Colossians 3:1-3
The New Mindset – Colossians 3:1-3.
“Since you have been co-resurrected in a shared life with Messiah Jesus, keep on seeking the things above, where Christ the Anointed One is seated at the right hand of God. Continue to set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on the earth. For you have died and your life is now hidden within Christ inside God.” (Colossians 3:1-3).
In Other Words: Since your mind and spirit have been raised from the dead, keep thinking ‘up’! Continue to fill your thoughts with what pertains to the heavenly realms with Christ. You were with Christ when He resurrected, so keep trying to think about what He thinks about. Gain the mental habit of focusing your mind’s eye on life from God’s perspective. Keep putting your heavenly glasses on, the ones with the right prescription, and look through the lens of God’s world view. Think about life here as if we were already there with Christ in heaven. Strive to put God’s priorities into daily practice. Set your mind on the realities of heaven, Truth, Goodness and Beauty, where Christ sits at God’s right hand. Think like a resurrected person who can now see things from a heavenly perspective. Give your mind over to the virtues of heaven. Devote yourself to the higher things that permanently reside in the heavenly realms. Fix your mind on God’s purposes by lifting your inner gaze to the risen Christ. You are as good as there, seated with Jesus in Heaven, so think like it. “Keep seeking first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness.” (Matt. 6:33).
Living Within Christ: Literally participating in the life of Christ; living in union with Jesus; united as one with God; inseparably joined with Christ; when we started trusting in Jesus, His Holy Spirit hand-delivered each of us into the very Person of Christ; we are tightly wrapped into His nature and essence; our spirit is inside His Spirit, and He is inside of us; our human identity is hidden within Christ; we belong to Him, and He is in possession of each of us; by uniting with Jesus, we married into His family, and are embraced within the fellowship of the Trinity; we are not ‘lost in the cosmos’ but instead have a permanent location within Christ. Inside of Christ, we go wherever He went and wherever He goes, including His death, resurrection, ascension, and now in the heavenly realms. We were baptized into the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19), are united with Him, and thus our union with Him enables us to be with Him right now seated with Christ at the right hand of the Father (Ephesians 2:4-7).
Spiritual Time Travel. “Anyone united with the Lord becomes one spirit with Him.” (1 Corinthians 6:17). Each of us has an inner core that is eternal and outside of time itself. It can be called our spirit, and it effortlessly travels from one time period to the next, between the past, the present and the future. Our God-given spirit is not captive to chronology in any way, even though it overlaps with our earthly body. Each of us has a spirit that freely engages in time travel. St. Paul loves to mess with our minds by referring to a past event and future facts as current realities. The fact is that those of us follow Christ were with Him in spirit on the Cross, with Him in spirit inside the tomb, and with Him in spirit now in heaven. Our old self was dead and buried along with Jesus, and that’s a cold, hard fact. Our new self was raised from the dead and given a new nature, the nature of Christ, which is also a truth we can hang onto. Not only that, but our spirit won the trifecta because of our union with Him… It is a spiritual fact that we are with Him in the heavenly sphere even as we live in the earthly sphere. Paul in his letters kept trying to describe the ongoing, back-and-forth flow of spiritual time. What has happened in the past and what will happen in the future is spiritually true right now. Past events and future events have continuous results in the present. Inside of Christ’s spiritual life, our spirits have been co-buried, co-resurrected, and co-ascended. Go figure.
Using the Heavenly Compass. Keep asking Jesus for the heavenly compass so we can navigate through life according to His purposes. The Scripture is the map as we find the right path that is based on true north, the heavenly realms. Keep setting our minds to being guided by the higher things, the things above. God has made the heavenly compass user-friendly as we think hard about godly directions. God’s compass is our heavenly GPS as we get oriented and pursue our quest for the Holy Grail of the Kingdom. Profoundly enough, the compass needle always has a red point. The blood of Christ has enabled us to pursue Truth, Goodness and Beauty, the ultimate treasures rooted in heaven. The heavenly compass will keep us from developing a taste for spiritual junk food, and will help us to grow an appetite for the qualities of Christ.
Keep Remembering. Our time-traveling spirit is front and center as we think about what it means to ‘remember‘ in the biblical sense. Remembering something in Scripture is not merely recalling something that’s been forgotten. It always brought with it the purpose of bringing the past into the present, of having the person doing the remembering participate in the memory. For example, when Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of me,” He wasn’t limiting remembrance to merely a mental activity. Jesus wants the New Covenant to be brought into the current reality whenever we remember His body and blood. Jesus intended the Communion act to have an impact on the person who is doing the remembering. He wants the body and blood of the past sacrifice to remain real and effectual, taking effect now as surely as it did during Christ’s Passion. The elements of Communion, through faith in Jesus and the work of the Spirit, are intended to become a part of our spiritual digestive system, a vital part of who we are in our current spiritual walk with God. The body and the blood of the past is intended to become present to us now in its original power and fullness, real spiritual food, enabling us to grow in the Lord. After all, God doesn’t forget anything, and yet the Scripture repeatedly points to the fact that “God remembered.” With reference to God, remembering means, not to recall, but to be mindful of something, to acknowledge something, to choose to focus on something. And in the Bible the word “remember” implies God’s action, intervention, about Him doing something about what He is mindful of. God often remembers in order to be faithful to a promise. When God remembers, be prepared to see God in action. When God remembers, there is a focus of divine attention, and the action soon to come makes clear what God is mindful of. God doesn’t just think about something when He remembers, God actually does something about it. When God remembers, He chooses to participate with what is on His mind. When we remember to set our minds on things above, we will actually participate in that memory.
Setting our Minds. To continue fixing our thoughts and entire thinking process on the heavenly things means we work hard at developing a new mindset. We learn to rewire our brains by working new patterns into our thought life that become habits from heaven. The brain and the mind are complementary but separate. The brain is the physical organ, and the mind is the intangible result of the brain’s functioning. The mind is what the brain does. The brain is like the hardware that is used to produce the software of the mind. The brain directs the body’s central nervous system, and the mind is the mental energy that produces thoughts, creativity, memory, our acts of conscience, logic, our intellectual reasoning. The brain is the physical structure in us that enables us to think, to feel, and to choose. The physical brain is built to respond each time it is stimulated by the mind. The mind is able to change the neural structure of the brain, and we can choose what we build into the brain. Some interesting thoughts on the mind:
(1.) I am what I think. I become what I choose to think about. My character is shaped by the life of my mind. My attitudes are built on the foundations of my thoughts. My lifestyle is determined by whatever I fill my mind with. My destiny begins with my thought life.
(2.) According to the latest brain imaging studies (2022), we each have about 6,200 different thoughts a day. They are called “thought worms” and are distinct, measurable shifts in brain activity that represent the transition from one idea or image to another.
(3.) We each can rewire our brains by how we think. It’s called “cognitive reframing,” based on the plasticity of our brains that are able to build new neural pathways by choosing to think differently. We each have the ability to train our minds to identify harmful thoughts, replace them with life-giving thoughts, and then practice those healthier thoughts through repetition until those new thoughts become a mental habit.
(4.) Each brain has a mind of its own. Because of life experience, genetic framework, home context, nutrition, etc., no two brains are like. Therefore in education there is no possibility of a one-size-fits-all strategy. It won’t work. Explore a wide variety of teaching and parenting strategies and love languages so the adults can reach a wider profile of children.
(4.) By setting our minds on higher things in the heavenly realms, we are making new neural pathways that become dominant and succeed in rewiring the brain to have the ability to naturally filter out harmful thoughts and welcome life-giving thoughts.
(5.) When we are “in Christ,” we are inviting God’s Holy Spirit to renew our minds and enable us to rewire our brains, our ways of thinking, which determine our attitudes, behaviors and feelings. Each person has the ability to do a lot of the legwork in this process, but only the Spirit of God can do the heavy lifting and enable us to think with the “mind of Christ.”
(6.) In this sinful world, harmful thoughts assault us every day, and there’s not much we can do about those assaults from outside us. But we can try to keep them at a minimum by not entertaining these thoughts, by not welcoming them into our minds in such a way that we dwell on them and fill our minds with them. As Martin Luther once said about temptations… “We can’t stop the birds from flying overhead, but we can stop them from building a nest in our hair.”
Safe and Secure. Our spiritual life is protected within Christ. Our new life in Him is a permanent reality, He is the new home for our spirit. We have been spiritually relocated in a castle of love that cannot be overtaken in any way. This undeniable spiritual reality is true in the present life we enjoy here on earth. Our new life will remain hidden, concealed, covered up, kept secret from anything harmful to us. Our spiritual life is settled within Christ, who is inside of God Himself. Our spiritual life is safely locked away like a treasure in an impregnable safehouse. When Christ is finally and fully revealed, our hidden spiritual life within Him will accompany His trek to the earth and it will no longer be hidden, but visible for all to see.
“Since you have been co-resurrected in a shared life with Messiah Jesus, keep on seeking the things above, where Christ the Anointed One is seated at the right hand of God. Continue to set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on the earth. For you have died and your life is now hidden within Christ inside God.” (Colossians 3:1-3).