Living Stones – Friday, September 22, 2017
High-minded
I Corinthians 2:16
… we have the mind of Christ.
In our culture, when we say that someone is “high-minded” we are suggesting that they are trying to think and operate on a plane above their natural level; they may be poor, for example, but be thinking and trying to operate like those who are rich. When we say people are high-minded we are often wondering what could possibly have them trying to operate well beyond what we know are their capabilities. We view negatively someone who we think is high-minded.
The scripture we are contemplating seems to be calling on us, as Christians, to be high-minded. We are not high-minded in that negative and pretentious sense. We are to be high-minded because we are not merely operating with this ‘natural’ mind that we have with its limitations and failings, instead, we are high-minded because we have the mind of Christ himself.
In this section of the letter to the church at Corinth the Apostle Paul is making the point that the Christian is expected to think, speak and operate at a level above the rest of those around us because we have the advantage of the presence of the Holy Spirit in us.
Often when we are discussing the presence and power of the Holy Spirit in our lives we are discussing the demonstrative gifts of the Holy Spirit especially the spoken gifts like preaching, prophesy, and the word of knowledge and the gifts of power like healing and the working of miracles. However, we are to understand that the presence of the Holy Spirit must be demonstrated in every aspect of our lives including our thinking.
The whole context establishes that the very Gospel of Jesus Christ which we present is something beyond the capacity of the ordinary to understand. He writes that, “we speak wisdom among those who are mature, yet not the wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing.” He goes on to say that we have this wisdom, and we are able to speak it to people at every level because “we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God.”
The Spirit of God, the Spirit that in now in us, lets us know some things that those around us, who lack the Spirit, would not know and wouldn’t even understand.
By verse 14 the real difference in our thinking versus the thinking of those around is plainly stated. We shouldn’t go quoting this to people who don’t know Christ, but we should understand it and let it form the basis of how we think and engage with those around us. Here is what verse 14 of this second chapter of the first letter to Corinth says, “the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”
We are high-minded! We have the mind of Christ Himself. We have the Spirit of God revealing spiritual things to us, so that the “things we also speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches” and we have the capacity to do an amazing thing, we can “comparing spiritual things with spiritual.”
Understand that what goes on in our heads should be so different from what goes on in the heads of those who don’t know Christ. Submit your life to the Spirit of Christ and become “high-minded.” While in our culture, like we said, the term is often used in a negative sense, technically, according to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, it means – marked by elevated principles.
Elevate your thinking to the level of the available wisdom of God himself.
Think of these things:
- When considering the things going on around you are you able to see beyond the activities themselves to the spirits at work in the lives of people?
- Would you say that you are able to discern things in the spirit?
- Can you identify any way in which your thinking differs from the thinking of other because of your knowledge of the scriptures and the presence of the spirit of God in your life?
Prayer focus:
Pray today that God would fill you with the Holy Spirit and enable you to discern the spiritual things going on around you.
In His Grace
Pastor Alex