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When you think about your mind, what comes to mind? How would you describe your mind? What has shaped you mentally? What controls your headspace? Do you know what influences your thinking? It is not just how God made you, but there are outside influences. People, worldviews, culture, memories, and life circumstances form the content of your mind. That which shapes your mind also manages your mind. Because we are not self-reliant, independent beings, we subject our minds to these external developers.
Only the Lord is independent and self-sufficient enough to transcend sublunary shaping influences. He is never under the control of anything other than Himself because there is nothing more powerful than God. We are the dependent ones, which leaves us vulnerable to powerful external influences. The good news is that our imminent vulnerabilities do not leave us without hope because Christ is the great power who destroys strongholds and brings every evil thing under His authority (2 Corinthians 10:3-5; 1 John 4:4).
Thus, we have choices. We can determine what type of subordinate mind we want. There is the mind of Adam, and there is the mind of Christ. Of course, between these two, there is the hybrid mind, which is a unique mixture of Adam and Christ. When the new believer receives the mind of Christ at his new birth, it does not decouple him from his former manner of life, which I’m calling the hybrid mind. He hopes to gradually put off that deceitful, troubling mind and renew it more and more into the mind of Christ.
To put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness (Ephesians 4:22-24).
They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity (Ephesians 4:18-19).
The mind of Adam is totally depraved. There is no nook or cranny of mental real estate that the deceitfulness of sin has not corrupted (Ephesians 4:22). Have you ever been inside a dark room? I’m talking about a completely dark room. No light exists. I have. You cannot see your hand in front of your face. It reminds me of what the Lord told Moses when plaguing Egypt.
And the LORD said unto Moses, “Stretch out your hand toward heaven, that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, a darkness to be felt” (Exodus 10:21).
The dark mind is under a similar plague of painful felt hopelessness and helplessness.
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, [who did] nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility counted others more significant than Himself. He looked not only to His interests but also to the interests of others (from Philippians 2:3-8).
The antithetical alternative to the dark mind is the God-given spiritual one (1 Corinthians 2:14). This mind replaces the mind of Adam with the mind of Christ. The last Adam defeats the first Adam. One of the benefits of this spiritual takeover is a new mind that comes from a regenerative and transformative work that only God can grant (cf. John 3:7; Romans 12:1-2; 2 Corinthians 5:17; Galatians 2:20; Ephesians 4:23-24). The Lord is the new shaping influence (potter) of the jar of clay (Isaiah 64:8; 2 Corinthians 4:7).
The regenerated person subjects their mind to the Lord (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). Father God begins a long and drawn-out process of restorative work in those re-born from above (Ephesians 2:10). This new, efficacious work is progressive sanctification. This incremental process unfolds into a beautiful vessel that reflects the image of Christ (2 Corinthians 3:18). Because God’s work in us is progressive and incremental, His Spirit does not entirely rule the new, spiritual mind. The Christian’s life is a mixed bag of good and bad fruit.
Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. (v. 22) But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things, there is no law. And those who belong to
Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit (Galatians 5:19-21a, 22-25).
If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him. But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways (James 1:5-8).
The battle between good and evil continues to rage in our minds (Romans 7:21-25; 2 Corinthians 10:3-6). All Christians struggle with Adamic baggage—our former manner of life. When James talked about this dilemma, he called it double-mindedness—a Christian wavering somewhere between light and darkness. One day, you are up; the next day, you are down. Like a leaf in the wind, tossed by its whims, two competing masters control the unstable person (Matthew 6:24).
You might never know what you will get from the hybrid person if you’re unsure who controls their minds. The aim is to be steadily morphing into the person of Christ. To morph does not refer to an outward appearance of Christ but to taking on the internal qualities of Christ. Becoming transformed into Christ is not—so much—a behavioral exercise as an inner change of the mind’s primary shaping influence.
Every Christian wants to relinquish their control center to the person and work of Jesus Christ as illuminated, enabled, and empowered by the Spirit of God and guided by the Word of God. The farther you go in this process of Christlikeness, the more stable you will become. The desire to reposition and restructure our minds to Christlikeness is counterintuitive to the independent, self-reliant spirit of the Adamic person and the Zeitgeist of this age.
We are moving from our old selves to the mind of Christ, maturing to where we are functioning primarily on the redemptive side of our hybrid state. This grace gift is why we have the Bible. God’s Word will change our minds in every good way. The Bible’s goal is not primarily to make us better theologians—those who study God—but to help us apply our study of God into practical day-to-day living that spreads His fame while considering others more significant than ourselves (Philippians 2:3-4).
Suppose you have the mind of Christ (salvation), and you’re regularly transforming into His mind (sanctification). If so, just like Jesus, you will be the beneficiary of a huge amount of Spirit-illuminated and Spirit-empowered other-centered awareness. Jesus was constantly discerning others to learn how He could best serve them (John 2:24-25). His constant surveillance of His sphere of influence positioned Him to help them mature into Christlikeness (John 11:14-15).
He counted the interests of others more significant than His own. The word interests in Philippians 2:4 carries the idea of “fill in the blank.” It means you should know others so well that you can place any interest in that space—an interest that would serve them in becoming more like Christ. You do this as a student of God and others. When your mind becomes so saturated with the interests of God and the interests of others, you will have Christ’s mind.
We need others to have the mind of Christ. We need them for two reasons: so we can serve them and because we cannot have victory over sin without them—the body of Christ. One of the Adamic deceptions is to value isolation over community. People who struggle the most are the most isolated from others. When Adam sinned, his first action was to distance himself from God and His help.
If you want the mind of Christ to be your mental default, you must immerse yourself in the lives of other people, and I’m not talking about your favorite social media outlet. It would be best if you had a practical place to be Jesus to others, and that community would guard you against falling back into those Adamic tendencies.
Lord, work so deeply in my heart that I’m freed from the bondage of self-centeredness and given the disposition to look not only to my own interests but also to the interests of others. – John Piper
What kind of mind do you have? If you have not been born again, you have the mind of Adam. If you have been born again, you have a combination of Adam’s mind and the mind of Christ. To determine how you rank on this hybrid scale, you need to analyze your unselfish versus selfish mind war. Here are a few questions I hope will aid you as you think about your mental progression. Perhaps you would find this exercise more beneficial if you shared it with a friend.
Rick launched the Life Over Coffee global training network in 2008 to bring hope and help for you and others by creating resources that spark conversations for transformation. His primary responsibilities are resource creation and leadership development, which he does through speaking, writing, podcasting, and educating.
In 1990 he earned a BA in Theology and, in 1991, a BS in Education. In 1993, he received his ordination into Christian ministry, and in 2000 he graduated with an MA in Counseling from The Master’s University. In 2006 he was recognized as a Fellow of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors (ACBC).
