The Christlike mind counts for nothing what the world holds dear and holds as all-important what the world counts for nothing. I have been a Christian for nearly half a century, but I have a long way to go. When I am faced with a decision of any kind, if I examine my heart and mind, I nearly always find many characteristics of the unrenewed mind and only faint suggestions of the renewed…
If I am to love the Lord my God with all my mind, there will not be room in it for carnality, for pride, for anxiety, for the love of myself. How can the mind be filled with the love of the Lord and have space left over for things like that?
When I uncover them, I can only pray, “Lord, forgive me. I offer to You again my body as a living sacrifice, asking You to accept it as an act of worship and to continue Your holy work of transforming my mind from within, that I may more worthily glorify You. For Jesus’s sake.”
Throughout our earthly lives, it is always at the point of need—that moment of crisis—when we cast about for some solution or answer or even some escape—that the opportunity is offered to us to choose. We will accept either the solutions, answers, and escapes that the world offers (and there are always plenty of those), or the radical alternative shown to the mind attuned to Christ’s. The ways of the world exalt themselves against God. They sometimes look rational and appealing to the most earnest disciple, but Christ says to us then what He said to His disciples long ago, when many of them had already given up in disgust, “Do you also want to leave me?” If we answer as Peter did, “Lord, to whom shall we go? Your words are words of eternal life,” our rebel thoughts are captured once more. The way of holiness is again visible. The disciple steps forward through the narrow gate.
**Excerpt originally published in Discipline, The Glad Surrender, p. 78-79.