Your Mind is a Vital Part of Your Spiritual Makeup

Albert Einstein said, “The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination”.  Indeed, knowledge can be had, but it is the imagination that brings new ideas into existence resulting in new inventions.  Even Christian spiritual maturity depends on the transformation of the mind; failure to transform one’s mind means living as a carnal Christian.  For Paul, the mind set on the things of the flesh is death but the mind set on the things of the Spirit is life and joy (Romans 8). 

Answers to our prayers depend on our ability to ask and imagine according to what God has prepared for us (Ephesians 3).  Therefore, the state of our mind is a crucial component of our spiritual growth and intellectual maturity.  We need to constantly pay attention to what our mind is set upon; there are certain stimuli that will either help our mind to think on the things of the Spirit or prevent it from doing so (Philippians 4).

According to Victor Frankl, there is hope for those who find themselves in some kind of mental bondage due to the constant exposer to evil stimuli.  He says that “between stimulus and response there is a space.  In that space is our power to choose our response.  In our response lies our growth and our freedom”.   One does not need to give in to the mental bondage, there appears to be some space between the stimulus and the actual acting of the brain upon the received stimulus.  Frankl does not just speak as a psychologist from academia; rather, he speaks as a person who had the firsthand experience of this theory being experimented in his own personal life.  He survived the holocaust primarily because of his ability to imagine a world other than the world he was in; he was in a painful world of holocaust ad Gas Chambers, but that world could not prevent him to enter the beautiful world of love and hope.  He found the space between his tormentors inserting needles under his nails and the pain reaching his mind for him to feel it.  As his tormentors begin the torture, Frankl would already be living in the world of fond memory of his loving wife or the hope of travelling around the world telling the university students about the evil of Nazism.   Eventually, Frankl had the victory over his tormentors, but he also saw how failure to imagine a different world; many of his inmates were overwhelmed by evil and gave up living all together.

William James is another psychologist who saw the power of one’s imagination and attitude.  He said, “The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes”.  The age old proverb, “whatever a man thinks, so shall he be” rings true in every generation and it is so true even for our Christian life; attitudes make huge difference in our success or failure.

Jesus said, “behold, I stand at the door and knock.  If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me” (Rev. 3:20).  Jesus does not barge into the room of our heart; he knocks and waits for our responses.  There is a space between Jesus knocking and our opening of the door.  What we do between these two events determines the kind of life we will have. 

Even for prayer, Paul tells us that our imagination plays vital role in helping us to ask from God.  “God is able to do more than we can ask or imagine” says Paul.  Before we begin to ask God in prayer, there has to be imagination, and according to psalmist, we must have godly desires.  The Lord has promised to fulfill our desires if we delight in him.  Therefore, godly desires and imaginations need to be in our hearts and mind before we actually begin to pray.  The trouble with many of us is that we lack the ability to imagine God’s answer to our prayers.  We just pray without having a clear picture of what we are asking.  Even when we have desires, they turn out to be selfish desires of which James warns.  But godly desires and creative imaginations are part of spiritual maturity.  When we imagine something in line with God’s word, the process of forming/verbalizing our prayers begins; we have clear idea of what we are asking from God.  When our prayers are verbalized, God promises to answer them all (John 15).  So, it is important for us to make a note that our mind is a vital part of our spiritual makeup and we must do all we can to transform our thinking so that we can experience the total transformation in our life by setting our minds on the things of the Spirit.