Kennystix's podcast
The Renewed Mind and How to Have It
The following resource is from desiringGod.org. This morning's text can be found in Romans 12 verses 1 and 2, or on page 947 if you're using a Pew Bible, Romans 12 verses 1 and 2. I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. I invite you to pray with me as we begin with the message. One is a very precious thing, Lord, and to be free in our souls, even if we're in prison in our bodies is what we long for. Father, I pray for freedom around the world from sin, I pray for the Holy Spirit to move across the nations. Lord, I pray for Sudan, my heart just aches, that our country doesn't do more, 2,000 a day dropping dead when we have so many planes to take it there, so much extra grain. God come down and shatter the obstacles to mercy in that place. Put your people to praying and talking, calling the senators, bringing some kind of coalition to bear against that wicked regime that stars people to death. It's one kind of freedom we long for, Lord, freedom from starvation. And I pray, O God, now in this room, that while we're just sated with our food and have way more than what we need, another kind of freedom, freedom from food, freedom from the love of the praise of men, freedom from craving for acknowledgment and power and applause, may come true, these songs that we've sung, and rather have Jesus than anything help us to show that with the kind of lives we live, Lord, make it so real that those lives come freely out of our hearts. And now use this message, just a part of this service, to renew the mind of your people. Through Christ, I pray, amen. I've thought a lot about how much to say from Romans 12, 1 and 2, and I believe the Lord wants us to linger here for this week and one more week. Because I see two more issues that feel big enough to merit sermons. One of them, which we'll deal with next week, is the issue of the will of God. See that? In verse 2, "By testing you may discern what is the will of God. I want to devote a whole message to the meaning of the phrase, the will of God, and how to find it." And I feel we need to linger there because I think it's one of those common phrases that come out of Christians' mouths. And I think a lot of the time we don't know what we're saying. We don't know what the phrase means when we use it. Now that's not spiritually healthy to use phrases that you don't know what they mean. Because over time when you use language because it's sort of learned language and you don't know what it means, you become a shell with a religious veneer and emptiness inside and you know what Jesus says about empty spaces. They don't stay empty long, alien affections and passions and demons can move in on shells. Like the beach. You've got these shells and the real animal's gone and here comes another animal and lives in there. And that's the way it is with minds that use religious language with no affectional, mental, clear, biblical content. And I think the will of God is one of those phrases. And so that's where we're going next week. For example, just give me a taste. There at least two, probably three, maybe four meanings for the term will of God in the Bible. One is sovereign will, everything that comes to pass is the will of God. In one sense, secondly, moral will like thou shalt not kill, don't steal, don't covet. Now that doesn't come about lots of times. So that will of God can be broken, the first will of God can't be broken. And then there's this whole issue of living out lives of wisdom in which we take biblical truths and then try to apply them to complex moral situations that aren't directly addressed in the Bible and we hope we're hitting upon something called the will of God, which isn't explicit in a sentence in the Bible. What's that? Can you talk that way? And then there's this whole issue where we live 95% of our lives called spontaneous either godliness or ungodliness because it is an overwhelming thought. Is it not to ponder this fact? 95, maybe more percent of your life you live without premeditation. I don't think about these gestures that I'm using and I don't stop before everyone's mouth. Is that a wise gesture? Is that a God honoring gesture? They just come, boom, there it was. You live 95% of your life that way. Sentence after sentence comes out of your mouth, emotions rise in your heart, gestures or not, turn this way, turn that way and you're not stopping every minute of the day putting a list of biblical principles in front of you, weighing the merit of this next action and then choosing it because it measures up to the list that is not the way you live your life nor can you live your life that way. 95% of your life is spillover, which sets an agenda about transformation that has almost zero to do with lists. You got to become something so that the spillover is Christ-exalting because that's the way you are. Well, that's next week. It's worthy of a sermon, even a little one on this morning. Here's what we're going to do today. There's this other phrase called renewing or the renewal of your mind. You see that one there in verse two, let's read it again, "Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind that by testing you may discern what is the will of God so we're underneath, we're behind next Sunday's sermon and pointing out that in this text, a huge issue is transformation and as a means to it, renewal of mind. Transformation is what this is about, right? Be transformed. The alternative to conforming to the world in this verse is not a new list of behaviors. If you've got in your mind or in your heart a list and they're all disobedient and you're doing them, Christianity does not come along and say the solution to that problem of your list of immoral behaviors is a new list of moral behaviors. That's not Christianity, that's not Christian morality, that's not freedom. The alternative in Christ is transformation, change so that the spillover doesn't do that stuff anymore, which is why the song we sang about if the sun has set you free, you are free indeed what's so relevant this morning. What is freedom? Christians are called to be free, Galatians 5-1, for freedom Christ has set you free. Do not be enslaved again to a yoke of bondage. The Lord is the spirit and where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. Second Corinthians 3-17, freedom is huge for the Christian. We are not a people in bondage. What does that mean though? It means this, you're free when you do what you want to do. And what you want to do is what you ought to do. And transformation is becoming the kind of person who wants to do what you ought to do so that you can do what you want to do and be doing what you ought to do and thus be absolutely free and not pay for it in hell. That's the way we want to be. Goodness gracious, I don't want to live my life wanting to do all bad things, consulting my list of good things, denying what I really want to do and always doing what I don't want to do. That's bondage, big time. And a lot of people try to live the Christian life that way because they don't know anything about verse 2. Verse 2 is just huge. It's built on 11 chapters of glorious truth about Christ, and it's all about not having a list mainly. There's a place for this, we'll talk about that, but mainly it's about becoming new, miraculously, spiritually, powerfully, actually being changed, transformed by the renewing of your mind. So if you long for nonconformity to the world, free from being just a jellyfish in the tide instead of a dolphin against the tide, or free from being a chameleon, adapting color to every rock you happen to be on during the day, I mean what a rotten way to live, jellyfish and chameleon. You want to have some character about you so that others bring their lives into conformity to yours because it shines with the brightness of the glory. You're going to just conform, conform to conform, heads up, teenagers, especially. All of us are guilty of this, but the teen years are the big conformity years because the desire for acceptance is so strong, and we haven't quite found out who we are yet, and so we've got to wear just the right thing, and we love to preach on that, but I don't do that yet. If you long to be transformed and be free, if you long to not be duty driven as a Christian, but do what you want to do because you've been so changed that what you want to do is what you ought to do, if you long to offer up your body, verse 1, as a living sacrifice so that your whole bodily life becomes an act of spiritual worship, displaying the glory of Christ spontaneously and freely because of what you've been made on the inside. If you want all of that, then give yourself to pursuing the renewal of your mind. That's this morning's message. What is the renewal of the mind? Because there it says so plainly, be transformed by the renewal of your mind. So all this glorious freedom and transformation I'm saying comes from that. What is it? And how do you get it? What's wrong with the human mind? Why do you even need to think in terms of renewing it? When this is addressed to Christians, what's wrong with our minds and what would renewal look like and how do you pursue it? In our culture, maybe it's not as true today as it used to be, but I think it is for many. People think that the main problem with the human mind is that it doesn't have all the information it needs. Therefore, education becomes the redemptive solution to society's problems, get education to all these kids and then maybe we won't have all the problems that we have. Like the invention of elaborate scams or sophisticated terrorist plots or complex schemes of embezzling or fast talking, mentally nimble, radio rudeness. Now that little list right there shoots itself into foot because all those people are educated. They're the most educated and what education did for them was refine the power of their sinning. It takes a lot of education to make people feel stupid on the radio by being a good talk show host. That takes a lot of education and so do all the other elaborate computer sinning that's going on in the world. Education only helps sinners do it better, smarter, more shrewd, more successfully. How in the world can stock in our brains with more information produce transformation? That's not the solution and I love the Bible so much and one of the reasons I love the Bible is because it provides for me diagnoses and analyses of the human condition so much wiser than anything I read anywhere else. You read analyses of the human problem in sociology or psychology or psychiatry or anthropology or history or newspapers or political commentary and I just read them and I come away, they don't have a clue what the problem is unless of course they've got a Christian worldview filtering in to those disciplines. Here's what the Bible says, be renewed. And now I'm going to bring out a phrase by going to the place where Paul uses the verb of that noun renewal. Go to Ephesians 4.22, just listen, it's only one phrase, I'll read it to you. Paul says in Ephesians 4.22, be renewed in the spirit of your mind. Now that's a very strange phrase, spirit of your mind, what in the world is that? Spirit of your mind, be renewed in the spirit of your mind. This is a far deeper analysis than just be renewed in the data fed into the computer of your mind. The least that phrase means is that our brains are not mere mechanical computers handling data objectively and then offering them to the heart for appropriate moral responses. That's a totally inadequate conception of what the mind is. I think the spirit of the mind means something like the mind has a mindset. The mind just doesn't just view things, it has a viewpoint. The mind doesn't just perceive and detect, it has a posture, it has a demeanor, it has a bearing, it has an attitude, it has a bent. Those are all my efforts to get at the biblical phrase, spirit of the mind. That's what's got to change, not just the data. The spirit of the mind, the viewpoint, the bent, the mindset of the mind has got to change and the reason it's got to change is that John Piper's mental problem is not merely my finitude whereby I lack certain pieces of information, not being God. My problem is that I'm fallen, not just finite and I want to be God. The mind is bent in a way that says I don't like having a supreme absolute being, having sway over my life. No thank you. I will write my own list, I will determine what I want and nothing coming from outside of me is going to be my absolute authority. No. You are who I am by nature and that's who you are by nature and as long as that mindset, that bent, that demeanor, that bearing, that attitude, that viewpoint of hostility to God in his absoluteness exists, you will not be transformed except in the most external, artificial ways. That's got to go. That's got to be changed. We saw this last week, right? We went when we were talking about the issue of homosexual behavior, which we won't talk about again this morning, but we went from verse 2 of chapter 12 back to chapter 1 verse 28 where it says, "They did not see fit or they did not approve of having God in their knowledge." In other words, their mindset was, "Get out of my life with your absolutes, with your claim on my life, with your absolute holiness and your absolute justice, your absolute truth, claiming to be for me truth and be for me purity, get out of my life. I want to do what I want to do without anybody telling me what I ought to do and telling me I've got to be changed in order to conform to that. Just bug off God." That's verse 28 of chapter 1. And we saw the connection between, therefore, mind in verse 2 and knowledge in verse 28. They didn't want to have God in their knowledge, therefore they need renewal of their mind so that their mind just got resistant to the true knowledge of God. And then we went back up to verse 23 of chapter 1 where it says, "They have exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man." And I argued the image we are most in love with besides God is the one we see in the mirror, or the achievements of the one we see in the mirror, or the achievements of the collective one we see in the mirror called humanity. We have exchanged the glory of God for the glory of what? This is yesterday's front page of the Star Tribune. Now, every time the Olympics begin, I am all the ears, and if I had a television, I'd be all eyes, and I will try to borrow one to see some of my favorites. And every time it rolls around, I have a field day on language. Sometimes I'll preach on a text like Romans 1, 23 that says, "They've exchanged the glory of God for images." And somebody will say, "Piper, you're always talking in religious language about the glory of God," you know, that's just, that's jargon for Christians. That's not the way the world talks until the Olympics. So, the headline in yesterday's paper is, there's a picture of it, opener ablaze in glory. I say, "Yeah, right, that's the religious word. That's my language. Give me my language back. You can't use my language for sport." Oh, yes, they can, because every human being knows what glory is, even when they only see a little dim reflection of it in the sky over Athens. They know what glory is. They can't reach, they get a reach for language to describe a fireworks display like that. And they say, "Glory!" We know what, I wasn't watching the television. You know what I was watching? I was watching Charlie in Florida. You want to see power? You want to see glory in one split second, one millionth of the power of Hurricane Charlie makes Athens go poof. But one little fraction of Charlie and Athens is gone. Every candle, little firecracker, poof, poof, blown out. And yet, the irony of it is, the irony of it is, we do stand in awe of human achievement. And we are moved, and we do call it glory, and we turn it on, and we're locked in there, we just are amazed, and we blow off the hurricane when it is the breeze caused by the flick of God's little finger. If he choose to take this country out, he might use two fingers. Oh, how we need to wake up to the glory of God. Put a perspective on the Olympics. Now mind you, I'm not telling you you shouldn't watch the Olympics. I'm telling you how to watch the Olympics. Trying to give a little pastoral help here. When you watch my favorite, for example, gymnastics, and you see a triple back flip and they didn't use any springboard, they just built up enough speed catapulting across the floor exercise. They did actually three of those, there were three of those. Just realize Jesus could do ten without moving. He just standing there, and he just jumps up and shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh. Or a hundred, or any of the other sports, do you get so amazed at? Just realize they are all echoes of something that your heart is longing for, and it isn't on the television, it isn't in Athens. The reason we all love sports, the reason we love extravaganza is because we were made for God. I'm just telling you how to move from the Olympics to real worship, not worshipping the creation of God with all of the human achievement that we are capable of, but rather letting those things be the echoes and the reflections that they are, tiny, tiny little echoes of the hurricane, and the hurricane is a tiny little echo of the glory that one day will be revealed to us and satisfy our souls like they were made to be satisfied. Don't lock in on the Olympics as the satisfaction of your soul, or anything like it in this life, let it all be echo, let it all be reflection. That's what's wrong with our minds. We have traded the glory of God, and we fall in love so quickly with our achievements and our accomplishments. Now, I want to turn to the remedy of this mind, but before I do it, let me give you two other biblical diagnoses of the mental problem that all humans have. One from Peter, one from Ephesians, quickly, two more diagnoses. I want you to feel the depth of our problem before we get the remedy. First Peter 1.13, prepare your minds for action, or literally gird up the loins of your minds. Pull your toga up between your legs, put it around you so that you can move mentally. Prepare your minds for action. Do not be conformed, and now I've got two words, parallel in verse 2 of Romans 12, do not be conformed. Now what's this? Do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance. That's a profound analysis. There is a kind of ignorance that makes us sitting ducks for our passions. And by implication, there is a kind of knowledge or reversal of the former ignorance, which would free us from the bondage of passions that are holding us. I prayed for one hour last night after the service with people in those kinds of bondage. Who want free. They want a mind that is renewed enough that when the desires, and you fill in your besetting sin, when the desires come, there is enough of this, whatever it is, knowledge, or the this renewed mind that that desire is not triumphant. That's what we long for. We want to be freed from the power of passions that take us where we ought not and don't want to go at some level. So there is an analysis from 1 Peter 1, 13. Don't be conformed to passions of your former ignorance. Is that ignorance around, "Oh, I wish I could just linger here on the value of a certain kind of education." I poo-pooed education at the beginning, and you know I don't disbelieve in education. But a certain kind, stocking our children's minds and hearts with glorious sin-defeating, devil-defeating truth is a glorious calling, 80 new recruits that are needed this morning. Here's the second analysis or diagnosis from Ephesians 4, 17. Paul says, "You must no longer walk as the Gentiles in the futility of their minds, darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them." Three times now he's on the brain, he's on the mind, futility of the mind, darkened in understanding, ignorance that is in them, and then he could have stopped there, but he didn't. He took us below where Peter was to the deepest problem we have where he says, "Due to the hardness of their heart." Three mental analyses of our problem, futility of mind, darkened in understanding, ignorance that is in them, and then he traced it all down deeper to hardness, hardness of heart. Our hearts are brazen, they're stiff, they're hard, rather than humble and teachable and lowly and receptive and servant-like and willing to be owned by God, led by God, shaped by God. He says, "No, no, no, that's the way we are by nature, stiff-necked, hard, impenitent." Okay, now we turn to the remedy. Let me start with the role of the Holy Spirit on the remedy. The reason, even though the Holy Spirit is not mentioned in verse 2, I feel obliged to bring him in here is because of this. That noun, renewal in verse 2, be transformed in the renewal of your mind. That noun occurs one other place in the entire Greek Bible. Old Testament Greek, New Testament Greek, this noun occurs one other place. That's a remarkable thing, it surprised me. It really tied us 3, 5. It goes like this, "God saved us not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to His own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit." So the one other place where this word in Paul's writings occurs, in reading the whole Bible, is in relation to the Holy Spirit. It says, "In the renewal of your mind," chapter 12, verse 2 of Romans, "and He says, 'Renewal in the Holy Spirit, by the Holy Spirit in Titus 3, 5.' So I know that the renewal of my mind happens by the agency and the work and the grace and the mercy and the power of the Holy Spirit doing something in me, or to me, or for me, and that's what we need to know what that is." Now to set the stage for what that is and how He does it and how you participate in His doing it so that when you leave here in a few minutes, you won't be left with, "Well, I hope He does it to me, but I don't know how to participate in this." I go to 2 Corinthians 3, 18. This is probably the most important text on illuminating the how of the renewal of the mind and the transformation of life. 2 Corinthians 3, 18 says, "We all with unveiled face," so now, "of veiled," that used to be there, hardening us and leaving us in our hardness, "with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord," not the Olympics, not the hurricane, "but the glory of the Lord," beholding it, seeing it, "with the veil lifted," are being transformed into the same image that we behold. Beholding is becoming. Seeing is becoming, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to the other. This comes from the Lord who is the Spirit, and there's the link with the Holy Spirit. So Paul says the key to the renewed mind is to have the veil lifted and see Him for what He really is in the infinite value and worth and beauty of all of His perfections and glory so that the Olympics pale, the hurricane in its power, pales in comparison to the brightness, the blaze, and the wind, the Spirit of Jesus Christ. Now, that's what's got to happen. We have to set our gaze firmly on Him until we are changed by Him. Now, how does the Holy Spirit do that? He comes in two directions. He must come in two directions, not just one direction. The first direction the Holy Spirit must come is from outside toward me. By bringing me in His providential power over the circumstances of my life, He must bring me an exposure to Christ in His glory that usually happens in the gospel. Because just a few verses later in 2 Corinthians, it says, "The God of this world has blinded the minds, the veil has been lifted, but the devil was blinding the minds of unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ." So if you ask, "Where can I see the glory of Christ?" The answer of Paul is in the gospel, in the message of the incarnation of the infinite eternal Word, Jesus Christ, His perfect life, His lamb-like submission to His Father's will, His horrific beating and crucifixion and death, His mighty resurrection and triumph over death and hell and Satan, His ascension and intercession at the Father's right hand, that cluster of glorious events is worth your steady gaze for the next 75 years. And if you gaze steadily at it day and night, you will be changed. And one of the evidences that you can detect right now in your own life for how resistant the human mind is to this is how little effort you give to that gaze. Right? 10 minutes, when was the last time you read a rich, solid, Bible-saturated exposition of the glory of Christ, or even wanted to? You have the notion, we have the notion, it's just going to happen. Or if it doesn't, it doesn't matter. I'm just going to watch television. That's what you'll be like. You will be what you watch, garbage in, garbage out. So tremble, tremble with me. So that's the first direction the Holy Spirit must move, and I'm praying He's going to do that. I hope He's doing it in this message right now. He got you here, that's the first thing. The Holy Spirit put these words in my mouth, I believe, He's most of them, maybe not all of them. I hope not all of them. But most of them, the true ones He put there, and that's coming to you from the outside. Now something else has got to happen, right? Because if He only does the external thing and bring you into exposure to Christ's exalting truth, you'll hate it. You just push it away, because this heart down here is hard, and this mind has got its mind set against the authority of God, and if all the Holy Spirit does is bring you this message or this book, we'll push it away. So the second thing He has to do is work from the inside out by giving us a broken heart, a humble heart, shattering the hardness. It's our only hope is if the Holy Spirit will shatter our resistance, shatter our rebellion, shatter that mindset which is so antagonistic to God's authority and God's beauty and God's glory and makes us love our own so much, He's got to shatter that. So put the two together like this. The renewal of the Holy Spirit is a renewal of mine as the Holy Spirit first brings us Christ-exalting truth from outside and brings us truth-embracing humility from inside. If you only have the Christ-exalting truth from outside, you'll hate it and resist it. If you only have truth-embracing humility from inside and there's no Christ being presented you to embrace, what will you grab onto? It won't be there, which is why the Holy Spirit always magnifies the Son in the two directions. He brings us the Son to see and then He works within liberating us from our old passions of our former ignorance that we love now. Suddenly, this is how you got saved, is it not? If not either analyzed more deeply or reconsider, didn't you get saved by somewhere along the way your indifference to or your hostility to Christ melted? And he became attractive, needed, precious, a treasure and not an offense. You didn't stumble over him anymore. You didn't push him away as foolishness anymore. He became wisdom to you in power and beauty and glory. You could not but say, "I take you to myself, where else would I turn? I now have a Savior, I have a Lord, I have a treasure." That's the way you got saved. So I close, listen to rich expositions of the gospel of the glory of Christ, read your Bible from cover to cover a lot in search of the revelation of the glory of Jesus. Read and ponder Bible-saturated Christ-exalting writings, meditate, form the habit of meditating on the perfections of Christ and pray, pray, pray that in all of that, your mind would be renewed and with the renewed mind your life would be transformed and the transformation, as verse 1 says, would become your spiritual service of worship and that worship would put Christ on display in the world and we together would be a city set on a hill that the world would look at and give glory to our Father who is in heaven. Thank you for listening to this resource from DesiringGod.org. If you found it helpful, we encourage you to enjoy and share from thousands of resources on our site, including books, sermons, articles and more, available free of charge. 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Any effort to renew our minds must follow the Holy Spirit’s initiatives and enabling. The renewal of our minds is first and decisively his work — not ours.