Page 43 Notice that the mind has something to do with discovering God’s moral will. Remember that under the New Covenant, the Law of God is written in our minds (Heb. 8:10). However, our minds need to be renewed. If we offer ourselves as a living sacrifice to the Lord, and we renew our minds, Paul says that we will know and approve the perfect will of God. As natural creatures, we have a certain way of thinking. We have a way of reasoning that we inherited from this world. The Lord’s thoughts are not man’s thoughts. In fact, they are directly opposed to the thinking of this present world. Yet as we renew our mind, we begin to think the way He thinks and our spiritual instincts become sharper. Our understanding and our judgment become shaped by the Lord’s mind. And His will becomes obvious to us. We become intuitively aware which actions are pleasing to Him and which are not. This is maturity. Again, I’m speaking of the moral will of God. Paul made mention of this process when he spoke to the Corinthians. He told them that because they were living like natural people in the world (unsaved people), they were spiritual babes and couldn’t understand the things of the Spirit. But the spiritually mature are those who are able to exercise spiritual discernment and judgment (1 Cor. 2:6-3:3). To put a finer point on it, instead of giving us orders and commands, the Lord desires for us to have a mind. ,Let this mind be
Hell is not the North Star. That is, divine wrath is not our guiding light. It does not set the direction for everything in the Christian faith like, say, the glory of God in the face of Christ. Neither is hell the faith-wheel which steers the ship, nor the wind that powers us along, nor the sails that capture the Spirit’s breeze. Yet hell is not incidental to this vessel we call the church. It’s our ballast, and we throw it overboard at great peril to ourselves and to everyone drowning far out at sea.
Kevin DeYoung