The Mind Of Christ

By Oswald Chambers

    When a man is born from above by the Holy Spirit he is regenerated, but he has not the mind of Christ. You do not form the mind of Christ without an effort. Salvation is the gift of the sovereign grace of God; forming the mind of Christ on the basis of that salvation is my work. I have to begin to look at things as He did.

    It works like this – I come up against external circumstances and the Holy Spirit brings to my conscious mind something Jesus said. Will I obey it? Will I form the mind of Christ in that particular? There is a calm deliberation about the injunctions in the Sermon on the Mount. We are not asked to obey them until the Holy Spirit brings them to our remembrance. When He does, the question is, will I exercise the disposition given me in regeneration and react in my actual life according to the mind of Christ?

    The Apostle Paul does not leave it in a vague way. He tells us the characteristic of the mind of Christ we are to form – the mind of Christ in downright, genuine humility. That is, I have not to dwell to such an extent on the marvelous revelation that I am a Son of God through the redemption and forget that in my actual life I have to form His mind, "who, being in the form of God...humbled Himself."

    The majority of us are thankful for the massive gift of salvation, but we do not do anything toward working it out. That is the difficult bit, and the bit the majority of us fail in because we have not been taught that that is what we have to do. Consequently there is a gap between our religious profession and our actual practical living. In my actual life I live below the belief which I profess. We can do nothing toward our salvation, but we can work out what God works in, and the emphasis all through the New Testament is that God gives us sufficient energy to do it if we will. "For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure."

    The great factor in Christian experience is the one our Lord continually brought out – the reception of the Holy Spirit who does in us what He did for us, and slowly and surely our natural life is transformed into a spiritual life through obedience.