Reflection: reLENT Series: reTHINK (March 26, 2014)

Lent Midweek 4

Romans 12:1-8; Matthew 15:1-20

“Why don’t you use the brains God gave you” isn't a particularly kind way of making a point, but it makes the point. Many of our difficulties, troubles, and dilemmas can be avoided or minimized if we “use the brains God gave us” before acting. But few people have the brains — or, more precisely, the mind — that God has given. Instead, most of us rely on thinking that has been shaped by the world. Actually, we can’t help but think this way. Even before we’re born we are endlessly bombarded with influences that conform our minds to worldly views and understandings of life. Our values, ethics, priorities, sense of fairness, etc. are driven by the world. The language, culture, traditions, and worldviews of our families, friends, and neighbors are highly influential in what we think about life, our purpose, what is desirable, and even who God is and how we should relate to Him.

Because our thinking about all matters of life has been so heavily influenced and shaped by the world, God’s Word calls us to “stop being conformed to this world” in order to live our new lives in Christ. Such a call would be pointless if the Lord did not also provide us with the means for thinking about things in a new and different way. In His grace and mercy, He has empowered us to rethink everything by being “transformed by the renewal of [our] minds” through the His life-giving and life-changing Word.

Unfortunately, much of what our culture promotes as Christian thinking isn't
transformed at all. The most prevalent and popular ideas about being and living as followers of Jesus have been distorted by worldly thinking, priorities, and objectives. When we approach the Christian life in this way we not only continue to be conformed to the world, we end up trying to conform Jesus and His teachings to our world as well. Like the Pharisees of long ago, we have “made void the Word of God” in our attempts to think and live in worldly ways while claiming to belong to Christ. His call to end such thinking and to be transformed by His Word is His nicer way of telling us that we should “use the brains I gave you”  — or, more to the point, use the minds that He’s transformed to rethink our values, priorities, perspectives, etc. It’s a call to rethink everything, because our minds, like our lives, are now new in Christ.

Click to listen to the sermon "reTHINK" (or right-click to download the MP3 file).