Losing Our Mind to Gain His

Conversion is a deep work—a heart work. It goes throughout the man, throughout the mind, throughout the members, throughout the entire life.
~Joseph Alleine (1634-1663)

Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking, for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh no longer for human passions but for the will of God. For the time that is past suffices for doing what the Gentiles want to do, living in sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry. With respect to this they are surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery, and they malign you; but they will give account to Him who is ready to judge the living and the dead. For this is why the gospel was preached even to those who are dead, that though judged in the flesh the way people are, they might live in the spirit the way God does.
~ from 1 Peter 4

Oh beloved, it is true. We pick and choose those things which we want to surrender to G_d. Some things seem so easy. They are the sexy sins that looks so good going into the garbage. We toss our chemicals and images and actions and accouterments away. And yes – we do indeed gain freedom in Him as they become part of the past in our lives.

And then there are other things in our lives that we tend to come up to the edge on, and halt altogether. We say…

It is too crazy.
There is no reason for this.
I cannot give this up.

But He wants everything. And He will not stop in our lives until our only Life is Him. Read the passage friends. He does not just want us to give up the horrible actions of our past. He wants us to give up the things that drive these actions. 

He wants our senses. 
He wants our passions. 
He wants our minds.

And for many of us, we come to this place, and we simply say to Him, “come no further.” And He does indeed yield to us. For the great Love with which He Loves us will not force us into surrender. He will wait, and simply mourn for our pain (and often protect us from hurting others) as we hold the fullness of joy and strength in Him at arm’s length.

We are often afraid to live this new life of total surrender because we are worried about what other people will think about us. For truly, to turn our thinking over to Him is utterly foolish in the eyes of most people. They will even go so far as to say we should be classified as having some sort of mental disorder. However, what most of the world misses is a profound truth. 

G_d does not have a brain. 

Rather, He is the Author and Creator of all wisdom and knowledge. And along with Authoring these higher-order things in the spirit, He Designed and created a stunningly incredible bio-mechanical (albeit lower-order) machine that can capture and process this truth and use it in the physical world we inhabit.

Can we see it? G_d knows how to use our brains better than we do. He Designed them. He knit them together in our heads while we were in the womb. So, most surely – as we die to our own willingness to develop our own ideas on how to solve our own problems and live our own lives – we find that the One who first Loved us, then saved us, is most able to renew and inform our minds as well.

Said simply, we only become totally free from sin when we have presented all our members and various faculties to Him. And only in becoming totally free, can we begin to live the life of pervasive victory He promises us in His Word. 

So yes, this is the gospel. And it will usually fall on both deaf and dead ears. However, this is the message against which we will be judged. Did we abandon all hope in ourselves and cast all of our selves on Christ? Or, did we reserve the right to try and stand on our own thinking and action against the inapproachable Light and perfection of who He is?

However, for those who yield to His great Love and great work on our behalf, there comes a joy and peace and clarity and fullness and strength which this fool of a writer has been trying (for years) to put on paper… and still my mind and fingers have not even touched the edges of the goodness which wells up within my heart. 

Oh beloved, to know Him is already eternal Life. And there will be a day when He begins to reveal His mind to us on all the matters that matter. Surely, there will be things which He must withhold – for infinite council will never be comprehended by a finite being. Regardless, The Kingdom is gonna be really good, when we can all sit down and see how God brought us all through it all. Jesus – really Jesus! – is going sit right there with us and tell us the story. 

Blessings readers. He is so good to us!