The Mind of Christ

The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. "For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?" But we have the mind of Christ.
1 Corinthians 2:15-16

The spiritual person is to judge all things. Another translation says 'appraises all things' meaning we assign value or worth to all things. I don’t see us as believers doing this consistently. We rarely appraise things that would require it, probably because we don’t want have to question ourselves and possibly give up something that we’re doing.

We don’t want our activities to be drawn into question as long as they are not overtly acts of sin. But we incorrectly define sin, it is not this act or that act; it is the condition of our hearts that enables our laziness and apathy, among other things.

I have heard some justify (and I have done the same in my heart) that a particular activity is not explicitly forbidden in the Bible and there’s no harm in it, therefore anyone forbidding it to me must be overly puritanical or legalistic. But the Puritans understood better the things of God than our generation, and Paul tells us otherwise in saying that we are to appraise all things.

How are we to appraise these things if God gives us no specific instruction? Paul answers that question with one of the more amazing answers given in God’s word. We have the mind of Christ! Think first of what an amazing and useful gift that is. Now stop and think of the enormous responsibility that this puts on us.

We have no excuse; if we have been called and redeemed by Christ then He has given us the ability see things from his perspective. And we must appraise all things through that perspective and not our own fallible and sinful point-of-view. With God’s grace and the mind of Christ this is possible and expected.

Spoiled Little Daddy's Girl

I am a spoiled snot-nosed daddy’s girl. Well, not literally, but I'll explain. I knew a girl who once got a sports car along with her driver’s permit. She thought she was entitled to it and she didn’t truly understand the freedom and blessing that came with the car. So she didn’t bother to learn how to operate the vehicle, or abide by the traffic laws or how to maneuver the city streets.

Within months she wrecked the car. It wasn’t totaled, but this justified her father into purchasing a newer and better vehicle. He bought her an SUV in order to make her safer and to place every other St. Paul driver in greater danger. She wrecked the SUV shortly after. This trend continued until she graduated high school and I never heard a word about her again. Even though she never learned how to drive and she abused the gifts she was given, her privilege of the freedom found within an automobile was never questioned.

I thought this girl was ridiculous and that she made a fool of her parents who continued to give to her in spite of her arrogance and ignorance. She knew what a car was and that she had one, but had no idea how to use that gift and what responsibilities it demanded from her.

Here I am, years older, and I am just now realizing how much I have in common with that girl. God has poured out abundant grace on me. He has pulled me from my path of destruction and given me the greatest fathomable gift: life with Him. I know that I have His compassion and grace and I can tell you what that means, but I have neglected to learn and deepen my understanding of that grace. I have taken it for granted. I have wrecked it repeatedly, but yet He gives even more.

I have understood grace with my mind, but not with my heart. If you want to know if someone understands grace in their mind, simply ask them what it means and you can know by their answer. If you want to know if someone understands grace in their heart, observe them. Their actions will show their understanding. How do they respond to sin? How do they respond to the grace they claim to know?

Do they repent, but still find themselves drawn in their previous sin which grace has wiped clean? If they do, they don’t have a deep enough understanding of grace in their heart.

I remember the first time I read Romans 6 about four years ago. I thought Paul was stating obvious facts and I wasn’t appropriately moved by what I read. Of course, we shouldn’t sin just because we are under grace! But Paul understood me better than I did. He was getting at something much deeper than an intellectual acknowledgement of grace and sin. He knew that the heart was more difficult to teach than the mind.

I have abused God’s grace with frightening alacrity. I have spit upon the gifts he has poured upon me. My actions prove that I don’t understand grace the way I should, because my response has not been to love God in gratitude. My response has been to take that grace and celebrate my freedom by abusing it, much in the same way the teenage girl did with the cars her dad gave her.

But God is not some wealthy neglectful father. He wants us to understand His gift and He has given us His word for that purpose. He wants us to use that gift in a way that others will see and then turn to Him for the same gift. Our actions will evidence our understanding of grace and sin, and my actions have indicted me.

Depravity and the Mavs

I have finally seen it. I have seen the lowest, most humiliating and shallow point that our society can reach. Well, I’m sure that we can and have gone much lower, but this is the lowest I have witnessed first-hand in recent memory. As I diverted myself last week for a few hours to watch a greatly competitive basketball game between the Mavericks and the Phoenix Suns, I witnessed new depths to our depravity as a society.

As has become popular at most sporting events these days, there were confused and scantily-clad young women doing something that I cannot call dancing in between whistles. I would categorize these young women as prostitutes, as they are being paid for nothing more than to stimulate the lust in the hearts of men. I understand this may come across as harsh, and assuredly they do not view themselves in this manner, but I cannot see this any other way. However, I might think more highly of prostitution on a street corner as opposed to this type of prostitution because this is done solely for the reason keeping our attention during a 60-second timeout, but I digress…

Now, I try my best to keep my eyes fixed on the floor or in the opposite direction when these young women prance to the court, but depravity has a diabolical way of bringing other depravity to the surface. As I glanced up from the roster in my hand about midway through the fourth quarter, my eyes witnessed one of the most pathetic sights that I can ever recall. The Mavericks have what are called MAAniacs. These are the exact physical opposites of the young dancing women, all done for the sake of humor. They are a group of mostly middle-aged, very overweight men with not a lot to do otherwise. Evidently nothing could be more humorous in Dallas than these men. Then add in a midget and we have non-stop laughs and entertainment for the entire evening. The best way I can describe this group to you is to picture in your head the combined epitome of sloth and gluttony and pull that across 40 years.

So now on the court, I stared as if watching a train wreck, and I see the dozen falsely attractive prostitutes doing a semi-clothed strip tease and they are surrounded by the dozen aging obese couch potatoes and a midget who are doing their best to imitate that strip tease, and all of this done to worthless music and to 14,000 cheering and laughing fans whose cheers and laughs get heartier when the fat men shake their rear in the air.

One of the saddest parts of this observation is that, if I’m on honest, on another night, perhaps I’m one of the laughing fans and in my mind I’m eerily aware of that fact. But last night I couldn’t laugh, I was saddened and angry. I was saddened by observing what these people were ignorantly flaunting, I was more saddened by observing how the crowd was so pleased to have them make subhuman spectacles of themselves, and I was angered by the fact that the producers of this debauchery is what they thought we paid to see, and I was more angered by the fact that they were right.

Please keep in mind; this is that Dallas in the home of the mega-church, and its smack in the middle of the Bible belt. This is not New York or Hollywood. How can we have so much knowledge and awareness of Christ surrounding us and yet still praise such debauchery? What is it in us that makes become like dogs that will bark at anything? How can we be blind to the way we seek to consume in anyway we can? How can we forget that we are humans and not dogs? The answer is not as much that that we are blind to our consumption as we are content with it. We know that we are humans but choose willingly to equate ourselves with the dogs.

Outside of perhaps Steve Nash in between dance routines, there is not one creative act going on. The music is that of consumption and not creativity, the clothing (or lack thereof) on the young women is that of consumption and not of beauty, the dancing is not of artistic expression but of consumption, all of this is consuming the women in the stands as they take note of what they need to strive for to gain the attention of a man, the obese men with bellies hanging out and over have seemingly known nothing outside of consumption their whole lives and this is obvious to any observer, the men in the stands consume further as they laugh not because of true comedy (which can be creative) but mostly because they have found someone they are in their minds clearly superior to and that is hilarious, and I need not comment on the midget. This is something truly pathetic and sad. It is worth grieving over.