The Divine Mind

Good morning, everyone.

And just excuse me for a minute while I enjoy the snow. I just love to see snow falling and to see a white ground in the wintertime.

It's interesting, the comments I get about snow. Most people seem to enjoy a winter without it, but I don't think a winter's complete without snow.

Takeaway from Sunday school that I just feel like I want to share is the three parties involved that both or all three were, I would say, well acquainted with the way, says that Felix was, and I am sure the Jews were, and I know Paul was. And the contrast of those three parties really struck me and made me look at myself and say, "So where am I in that?"

The Jews were acquainted with the way and spent an immense amount of energy fighting it and trying to destroy it.

Paul was well acquainted with the way because he was living in it and experiencing it. And Felix was acquainted with the way, and I feel like he had already decided that that wasn't for him, and he was trying to find a way not to fight it and not to live it.

And I feel like there's a lot of my life that I spent just trying to find that place, and there isn't a place like that.

In reality, Felix was choosing kind of to go along with the Jews but not taking responsibility for it, just letting them do it because in the end, his goal was to favor them. And that's just a challenge to me. There isn't a way around the way. You're either on it or you're against it. And I want my life to be on the way, and I hope that's your desire, your passion.

You can turn with me to Romans 11.

We'll start by reading a few verses here from verse 31 down into Romans 12, actually starting at 11:33. "Oh, the depths of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding out! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has become his counselor, or who has first given to him, and it shall be repaid to him? For of him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forevermore. Amen." I beseech you, brethren, I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.

And do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. For I say, through the grace given to me to everyone who is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly as God has dealt to each one a measure of faith.

For as we have many members in one body but all the members do not have the same function, so we, being many, are one body in Christ and individually members of one another."

I'm going to pick out two phrases in this passage, and then I'd like to read one more in Matthew.

In verse 34, it says, "For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has become his counselor," especially the phrase, "Who has known the mind of the Lord?" And then in chapter 12, verse 2, it says, "To be transformed by the renewing of your mind."

The title that I've chosen to give this is The Divine Mind, and I'd like to think about that a good bit this morning and how that affects us. In Matthew, actually, I'd like to turn to the one, I think, in Luke because I'm not sure if I know which chapter in Matthew. I think it's Luke 11.

I don't know. I'm not seeing it there either. I'll say it from memory because we all know it from memory. It's the first and great commandment that says, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength."

And especially thinking of the mind, there are three words that I will use interchangeably this morning, not because I think they're exactly the same, but I think there are places in the Bible where they seem to overlap. It is mind, heart, and spirit.

And we'll start by providing a description or maybe definition for the mind just to sort of pull our minds all together. The mind is an abstract thing. It's not something that you can feel, touch, smell. It's this kind of like an idea, but I will assure you it's a little more than an idea. I think we all get a hold of that a little bit.

It's the home of our thoughts. That's the easiest thing for me to think about. It's where we think. It's where our ideas and imaginations live. I also feel like it's the home of our fears, our loves, our hates.

It's also the home of our doubts, kind of the home of our confidence, and probably in many ways the home of our beliefs.

And when I think about it, I think of it somewhat as the reality and existence of our consciousness. Again, I'm just giving you a bit of a definition, a description, the best way I can put it together. Some of you may have a better understanding of the mind.

I also think of it as the me that I know. That sounds kind of redundant, but when I think about myself, usually I think about, "What am I thinking? What are the things that I hate, the things that I love? What are my ideas, my dreams, my imaginations?" And it makes me who I am.

Sometimes it's embarrassing. Sometimes I want to get proud about it.

I also think it's the me that you try to get to know to learn who I am. The more you can understand what I'm thinking, the more you feel like you know me, vice versa. The more I know what you're thinking, the more I feel like I know you.

And how do we get to know each other? Just a few basic ways. One is by listening. You listen to me talk, and so then you feel like you're learning to know me.

You also listen to others talk about me, and that fills you in on some information that you didn't have or you didn't think of. You watch my actions and my reactions, and that tells you more than some of the things that I say.

Sometimes it tells you whether what I say lines up with what I really do. And you also pay attention to other people's actions and reactions to me, and that fills you in on some more. And the more all of those dots line up, the more we feel confident that we know each other. If what I say and what I do, what other people say, and what other people react about me, if they all seem to fall in a nice line, you feel like you get a good handle on me.

That's how we get to know each other's mind. Well, what is the function of the mind? Well, thinking is a major one, processing, processing information, reasoning. It also helps us evaluate things, makes decisions. A lot of stuff goes in on our mind.

This one I wasn't quite sure what to do with, but I think it's at least a big part of our memory. Might start thinking about, "Well, is the mind and the brain the same thing?" I'll talk about that in just a minute. One of the things that I don't think the mind does, and I tried to think this about myself, I don't think it really generates a lot of new thoughts or ideas.

Most of that is because of the input, and we'll talk a little bit about that maybe when we talk about the brain. Another function of the mind that I feel like is very important is the function of worship.

I think our mind is a major involver in our worship, in our allegiance. Those are decisions that we make that happen in the mind. And again, I'm not saying this is solely the mind, but I feel like that's the center of it. There are a lot of things involved, and I'm not going to take time to do that.

Another function of the mind, this is one that I kind of learned in biology, is to act on the brain. The mind is an abstract thing. It's not tangible. Your brain is. You've never seen it. I've never seen it, but I think we're all sure that we have one.

We may question one another once in a while, but it's all said and done, we're all sure that we have a brain and that it's working 99.9% of the time. There's a few glitches once in a while, but what is a brain? Well, if you've ever seen one, I actually had the, I'll call it a privilege, of seeing a human brain. That's sort of weird to think that that was actually in somebody's skull and they walk around, but we took a class trip to Hershey Medical Center years ago, and the guy brought out several brains, a mouse brain, a cat brain, and a human brain, I think it was.

Amazing. And to think that all the confidence we put in that thing, the original term for brain, I understand, is the English translation would be mush.

Supposedly, in ancient days when they first discovered this thing, that's all they saw was mush, and they didn't really know much more about it, and so I think it has German roots. So that's what they called it, and it really is. It is soft and gushy.

That's why it's protected by a hard skull. It does a lot of things. It runs your body. There's a hundred trillion, I think, cells, and they click and clack together and make your hands move and eyebrows go up and down, and with them you run and walk and talk, and it's all going on in there.

But I tried to imagine a little bit what would a brain be without a mind, and then I quit. It doesn't work. We would be mere animals, and I can't really imagine that, and I don't know how animals function really.

There's something more to us. It seems like animals have a mind, but there is something acting on our mind all the time or on our brain all the time, and I think it's the mind. You can picture it as something that's up here or wherever you want to.

And the purpose, I'm going to put it this way, the purpose of your brain is kind of like a link between your mind and your body. So your mind acts on your brain, and then your brain tells your body what to do.

There's a verse in the Bible or a section of a verse in the Bible that says, "As a man thinks in his heart or as he thinks in his heart, so is he." Or you could think, "So he acts." The contact is about how people are acting and talking to each other. So what happens in our mind affects our brain, and it affects what comes out. And Jesus said, "So out of the abundance of the heart," and this is one of those places where I use it interchangeably, "the mouth speaks." So your mind conjures up something and tells your brain, and your brain signals your tongue and your lips and all that, and out it comes.

There you have it. Maybe just to illustrate it a little bit to try to give maybe a little tangible handle to this, our spirit, and here I'm going to separate the spirit and mind a little bit, is kind of like an electrical current or a charge. It's a buzz. I'm not sure what else to use. And maybe your soul with its emotions and all is the temperature. A lot of buzz, a lot of heat. Little buzz, kind of cool.

And then your mind is the operating system that gives all of this energy a context, a platform to work in. And then the mind gives a signal to the brain, or somehow they communicate, and the brain is kind of like the circuit board that takes this information and sends it to the right parts of your body, the machine. A lot of machines nowadays have circuit boards. Frustrating thing is if the circuit board goes out, your machine could be perfectly healthy, no problems, but it won't work, and you can't do anything about it because there's just little, it's kind of the way our brain is. If your brain quits working, your body's in trouble. You see people like that sometimes for physical reasons, sometimes mental reasons.

So that's just a little illustration of how I picture this working to base some of the things that we'll think about later on. The verse in Proverbs, which is hopefully going to be the theme verse of our Bible school this year, is, "Keep your heart with all diligence." And again, I'm going to overlap those words. Keep your mind, your heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life.

So in our heart, in our mind, where all this stuff goes on, that is what makes our life issue forth. So he says, "Guard that. Keep it."

2 Corinthians 10:4, Ephesians 6:12 are, I think, familiar verses about the battles that we face are not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers.

So though our battles have physical displays, physical outworkings, their causes are not physical. It really helped me to get a hold of that because it is so easy to get wrapped up in the flesh and blood part of a conflict, and we begin battening each other. These battles are triggered in our mind, heart, spirit, however you want to do it. That's where they start.

Every war, I tend to believe, is staged and fueled by a mind or by people's minds. Even the conflict we're seeing in our political field, it makes a lot more sense to me if I just forget about all the physical ways that they're at each other and think about there's things going on in these people's minds that put them in odds with each other. And then it begins to make, I'll call it, make sense. You begin to realize how dumb it is and how futile it is, and all the physical bantering they're doing isn't going to fix anything.

It's not going to go away. Killing men, destroying real estate is not what ends a war. We use those things to try to change somebody's mind so they'll quit fighting. The war ends when minds are changed.

Romans 7 takes on a little more reality to me looking at it that way. He talks about different things in there, and again, I'm not going to take time to look at that, but he talks about the war going on there between a law in my members, which I think is a physical thing, and a law in my mind, which he says, a sense to God's law.

And at the end of that passage, one of the things that I want to focus on through that is his frustration and his passion to be delivered from this body of death. There are wars that go on, Jen, just because we say they don't have physical sources doesn't mean the war isn't there. The wars are real. We're all fighting them.

But something has to happen in our mind before we can actually find deliverance. And chapter eight is about that deliverance. He says who the person is that gives us deliverance at the end of seven. He says, "I thank God it's through Jesus Christ."

And then in chapter eight, he says, "There is a law, a law of the Spirit that brings us deliverance and freedom from this," and we'll get to that a little bit later. I'm going to turn to 1 Corinthians chapter two and read a few verses there. You may follow along if you like.

1 Corinthians chapter two, starting at verse 11, "For what man knows the things of a man except the Spirit of the man which is in him?" And again, I'm overlapping these words a little bit. "Now we have received not the Spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God. These things we also speak, not in words which man's wisdom teaches, but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual.

But the spiritual man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, nor can he know them because they are spiritually discerned. But he who is spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is rightly judged by no one. For who has no in the mind of the Lord?" Here's that question that comes out of the Old Testament, actually, that he may instruct him, but we have the mind of Christ. That is a pretty awesome statement. And if I thought we had time and I thought it might help, I'd give you a couple minutes just to ponder that. What is Paul saying? We have the mind of Christ. He says, "Who has no in the mind of God that can instruct him?

We have the mind of Christ." What's he trying to tell us? Well, I would like to explore this divine mind, this mind of Christ, and Brother Marvin talked about it some last week, and I was sitting there thinking, "Now what am I going to do?" because I had already decided what I wanted to talk about, but he said at the end he didn't cover it all, so I felt a little space to jump in. I would like to explore this divine mind from three perspectives. One is creation, which is the physical world, and other is Christ. Interestingly enough, it's exploring God's mind through humanity and then through the church, which I'm going to call through adoption.

But first, there's one more thing about this whole subject that I would like to give you a picture of. Our physical bodies are each separate entities. Our physical bodies do not overlap. One of the laws of physics is two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. It's kind of a physical limitation.

So that the physical part of us doesn't really blend. Also, another fact is that every physical body here is operated by a separate mind. We all have a mind, I think, because we see things happen that we can't really describe just physically.

People come up with some really interesting ideas, and we can connect with that mind.

If I say, "Lance, would you please raise your hand?" Yeah, it works. So I had this idea in my mind that Lance raised his hand. It came out of my mouth, it went into his ears, and went into his mind, and then his hand went up. And I could do that for each of you.

So there's this whole connection, but we each have a separate mind. When I said, "Lance, raise your hand," Cedric didn't raise his. I mean, they're brothers. Why didn't his hand go up? Well, because his mind said, "This isn't for me."

In this reality lies a treasure of a fascinating phenomenon. These separate minds have the capacity to communicate, to blend, and to unite into a kind of one mind. It's interesting to me that when you get a group together to do something, you kind of have a group mind. I don't know if you've ever thought about it, but I experienced it in classrooms. So you get one group together, you have sort of a class mind. Just change a few people, not everybody, and the whole thing changes. So there's this blending that happens, and this is not just a fascinating phenomenon. It is an essential phenomenon.

Our existence is not fulfilled without it. If we live without it, we have a word for it. We call it loneliness. We just feel very incomplete. We do have many words to express this blending, this uniting. Words like team, club, community, society, neighborhood, family.

That's just a few of them. Those are words that, if you think about them, they describe not just an individual mind, but a group of people whose minds have some connection, and they work together. And we can maybe illustrate that this way a little bit. If I say, "Martin's garage, raise your hands." Is anyone here raise your hands? Martin's garage? Let's see a few. I could do that with Weaver Tire.

There are several different minds responding to this same thing, so it's a group thing. Our minds are blending.

And nature even has examples of this. This is what makes me not sure how animals operate, but the Bible talks about the locusts, or I think we could call it the grasshopper, how they move forward in ranks. That means they're not just individually moving forward. They're moving forward in kind of like lines. There's something together about the whole thing. You watch ants, and they're not just all doing their own thing.

You'll see one of them struggling with something, and you'll see a couple more come along, and then they'll work together to move this leaf or this twig. Bees manage a hive, and they're all out doing something different, but they're not particularly doing their own thing. They're functioning, and beekeepers say they communicate with each other. One bee will come back and tell the other bees where stuff is.

I don't know what he heard, but the bees got it across, and so there's kind of a social thing, social insects. And as a matter of fact, our whole universe functions, well, maybe I shouldn't stretch that big first. Our earth functions as an ecosystem where one thing affects another. There are symbiotic relationships where plants actually support each other. Without one, the other one would die.

Really, in our entire universe, nothing functions solo. It's all about things working together. And this blending of minds, especially in human beings, is facilitated by this thing of communication. We communicate in a lot of different ways. Talking, body motions, just things we do for each other. We communicate, and that blends our minds together. One example that I thought about up at work where this whole communication thing becomes very important is, so a customer comes into our showroom. I work at Blue Mountain Custom Furniture. A customer comes in, and he has an idea in his mind, and he walked in there because he wanted a piece of furniture, and he knew what he wanted basically for it to look like.

Might have been some details he had to work out, so he talks with the salesman, and so he communicates to the salesman his idea, and the salesman says, "Well, sorry about that part, but that won't work, or we can't do that, but we can do this." And so they blend their minds together, and they come up with a piece of furniture, hopefully, that both of them are seeing the same. Matter of fact, the salesman will draw it on a piece of paper and say, "Is this it?" and the customer says, "Well, yeah, maybe even a little bit better than what I had in my mind." So now they're together. You still don't have a piece of furniture.

So the salesman gives the paper to the craftsman back in the shop, and the craftsman looks at the paper, and everybody hopes that the picture he gets from that is the same as the customer had, so that when it all comes out, the customer looks at it and says, "Well, yeah."

So communication brought these minds together, and they all had the same picture of this piece of furniture. Doesn't mean they all agreed with that it was nice. Like the craftsman, I thought, "Why do they want this? It'd be a lot easier to do this," but he knows what the picture is, and so he can make it. And that happens with customers, I'm sure, that come into Martin's garage or Weaver Tire, or Marvin goes out, and they try to communicate the problem that they're having so that the mechanic fixes the same thing they want fixed and doesn't start working on something else.

Well, with all of that, let's go back to exploring the divine mind. God has communicated with us, Hebrews says, in a lot of ways. One of them I want to look at is this creation, whole physics that God created. In Genesis 1, we'll not turn to it again, but I like sometimes reading through that or thinking about it with an artist or an invention perspective, inventor's perspective. So God was thinking these things, and God has a mind. It's pretty obvious in the Bible. He does not have a physical body like you or I, but he can do things that you and I can't because he doesn't have a physical body. But he thought and spoke all of this into existence.

Can you imagine if you had that kind of ability to think of something and make it happen just by thinking? There's people that work at trying to do that. I don't think they get real far, and matter of fact, I'm glad they don't because we don't have a pure mind like God necessarily. But it is incredible to realize that the creation we see is a physical display of what was on God's mind.

I just love thinking about that and love looking at nature and thinking about, "So, wow, I wish I could make all the connections between what God was thinking when he made that and this reality that I see." So studying creation, to me, is one of the ways that I can connect with the mind of God, and it's amazing the things that I think God helps inspire in our minds as we study what he made and as we see how it works. I've been very, very inspired, very blessed, very convicted sometimes by the things that I learn from looking at nature.

And Romans makes that connection very real. It says, "The things that God created display his eternal power and Godhead." And I like to think about that. So how is this displaying God's eternal power, his Godhead? We'll talk about that in just a minute. Proverbs 8, Job 38 to 41 are places in the Bible where God's Spirit, or God himself, is actually talking about his creation. I love to read that. He says stuff about it that I wouldn't think of, and he says some things that he was thinking about. The one is in Job where he talks about the Leviathan or whatever that was, but God says some of the things that he thought about that.

He says, "Just let any man try to take him on. He'll never remember what happened." Whoa, interesting thought. So God had something in mind when he put all this in place to display who he was. As much as some men like to think that they control the climate or can control the climate or even affect the climate in permanent, drastic ways, well, I personally think they're just way too full of themselves.

It's not going to happen. Just take some of the small things, like a thunderstorm. You see them out there able to stop it? I mean, it might destroy their house, and they can't stop it. Even smaller things like hail, a lot of snow, a lot of rain, it just changes what we do, and they can't stop it. There'll be a flood, and they can't keep it from happening. They can put signs out and try to keep people out of it, but they cannot keep it from happening, let alone hurricanes several miles wide that go for hundreds of miles and just mop things up. They just get out of the way.

Volcanoes, earthquakes, just to name a few. Men cannot control God's creation. He's not even going to start. Even if all seven trillion of us got together to think this thing into happening, we still wouldn't control it. To me, that's a display of God's eternal power, his Godhead.

There's nothing we can do about it. Turn to Psalm 19, and this has been a really amazing psalm to me. For a long time, I couldn't figure out why it was just one psalm, and maybe I still don't know, but there's one thing that really blessed me about it being one particular psalm, and I wonder, I just wonder if David hadn't got a hold of something when he wrote this. I'm going to take the time to read it. It says, "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard.

Their line has gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them has he set a tabernacle for the sun, which is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber and rejoices as a strong man to run its race. Its rising is from one end of heaven, and it's circuit to the other end, and there is nothing hid from its heat.

The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart. The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever. The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold, sweeter also than honey in the honeycomb. Moreover, by them your servant is warned, and in keeping them there is great reward. Who can understand his errors? Cleanse me from secret faults. Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins. Let them not have dominion over me.

Then I shall be blameless, and I shall be innocent of the great transgression. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer." I'd always get to verse seven and feel like I'm just entering a whole new train of thought, but it struck me that those are things, those are things that when you look at creation and see how it works, you can actually pick them out.

These are things about the God who created it. These are not separate things from God. These things in this list from seven through nine aren't things God created. Those are things that are who God is, and because it's who he is, he put them in creation, and we can look and see that his law is perfect. When we cooperate with the laws of nature, life goes so much better.

When we look at the testimonies, we see that God is sure. His testimonies are sure. His statutes are right. The things he has set up, it's right. It's the way it works. When you follow them, we find that out. His commandments are pure. There's no ulterior motives in the directions that he gives us.

They don't hide some agenda that we suddenly realize, "Oh, we were taken advantage of." The fear of the Lord is clean. It doesn't have any dirt in it. It doesn't make us scared of things we shouldn't be afraid of. It's clean.

His judgments are true. They're right. When God says, "This is what that means," or, "This is what happened," it's a true judgment. It's a right judgment. We can trust in it, and when you look at nature, you can find that. You can find those things out. It just blessed me so much that these are who God is, and I can see that in creation, and I like David's response to it. He says, "This information is just sweeter than anything I can eat, and it helps me." I like what he says, "Keep back your servant from presumptuous sin."

When I study this and see how it works, it can help keep me from just doing the wrong thing. It can keep me on the right track. Then I can be blameless. Let my meditations be like yours. I really like that.

Steve Hawkins, supposedly, I guess, the smartest physicist that existed, made this comment, even though he's an atheist. Maybe he became an atheist after this. He said, "If we find the answer to why the universe exists, it would be the ultimate of human reason, for we would know the mind of God."

I thought, "Wow." I was amazed that he came up with that. What does God think about man? Well, I'm going to let you read a few passages yourself. I'll just mention them, but the one I like the best is Psalm 139. You can look at that two ways. It depends on your mind. Some people look at the first part as David trying to get away from God, and I think it fits, but I think it tells us how much God cares about us. We can try to run from him as far and fast as we can, and we will never get away. He cares about us way too much just to let us go, and David got a hold of that.

He says, "Wow, God, your thoughts about me, I can't even number them. If I pass out and wake up, it's still right there." God cares so much about us that he will not, he will not leave us, get away from us.

So that's God's mind as seen through a little window of creation. What about through Christ? How can we understand God's mind through Christ, through humanity? Again, I'm going to refer you to Genesis. When God created man and he saw this whole thing together, he said, "It's very good," but what did he tell man? He says, "I want you to be fruitful, fill the earth, and I want you to have dominion."

I look around now and say, "What was God thinking?" Well, it was different back then, I think. God invested. His mind was to invest in humanity, his ability, his authority to have dominion over the whole earth. That's what he was thinking. That's what was going on, and when man fell, something happened, and I would like to turn to Genesis 3 and just pick out a few things where God, we say God cursed.

God cursed him, and I believe he did. I think that's a good word for it, but what was God thinking when he did that? Was he just mad? Had he changed how he felt about humans and said, "Okay, if that's what you're going to be, then this is what I'm going to be"? Well, first of all, I don't even like to think that about God because God doesn't decide who he is based on who I am. That's one thing that I've had to tell myself. God does not change because of who I am. He's the same, so I don't think the whole picture changed about how God felt about man, but I think God did say, "This is what you did.

This is what's going to happen." He had already told them that, "If you eat of this tree, then you will die," and I think he explained maybe some of what that is. He told the serpent, "I will put enmity between you and your seed, you and the woman and her seed." God did it. God said, and he was thinking something when he did it, and you're going to go on your belly and all of that. To the woman, he says in verse 16, "I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception," so God, again, was consciously, specifically acting on something in his mind.

That conception one just jumped out at me this time when I was reading. He not only multiplied her sorrow, he multiplied her conception. Does that mean that they had more children after the fall than before? I wasn't quite sure what to do with that one. You can think about that, but he said, "In pain, you will bring forth children. Your desire will be for your husband," so God specifically is doing something here because they fell, and to the man, there isn't an "I will" phrase, but you can stick it in kind of neatly in verse 17. "Cursed is the ground for your sake." I think God did that. God did something to the ground, and now man was going to have to work a lot harder to get what he needed from it, and he said, "I'm doing it for your sake."

I think every one of these he was doing because he loved them, and he knew if he didn't, it was going to get really bad. It got really bad anyway, but he knew that this was a check that he could put on when it happened because he cared about them. And in chapter four, when Cain was thinking about his brother in a very unproductive way, God came to him and said, "So what's going on here? Your face doesn't look very good," and he told him. He said, "Let me read that in verse seven.

If you do well, will you not be accepted?" I think it was a blessing for me to hear God tell Cain that. Here, Cain had evil intent, and God still told him, "If you do what is right, I will accept you." God hadn't changed how he felt about humanity. He had to treat them a certain way because of the way they were acting, and when Cain did kill his brother, God continued to put a curse on them. He said, "It seems like he cursed the ground again just for Cain. It's not going to produce what it would."

Romans 7 is the end of Romans 7, is our cry to a God that cares. Who will deliver me from this body of death? We see when man fell, he spent the rest of time destroying himself, and Romans is a cry to a God that cares. Who can deliver me from this body of death? Well, again, I mentioned it gives a deliverance. It's in Christ. What did God tell us about what he was thinking when he sent Christ as a human being? We want to be delivered from this corrupt mind or this mind that is being fed by a corrupt body, if you want to look at it that way, that believes that my body will tell me what's best for me.

I need deliverance from that to a spiritual mind that believes that God, my Creator, knows what is best for me, and Romans 8 tells us how that works. If we listen to our body, we will die. If we listen to this spirit that God gives us, we will live. It's the way it was clear back at the beginning. That hasn't changed. The Gospel of John is probably my favorite Gospel for reading about the mind of Christ, how he was thinking.

He tells us so much, or there's so much that is recorded in the Gospel of John about how Jesus thought, and I'm just going to summarize it in just a real quick thing. You can read through it yourself. I get inspired every time I read it, and I think about it, so that's what Jesus was thinking, and I think God wants to reveal to us more and more how that is, but a verse in Luke, I think, gives us the foundation for what Jesus tells us in John, and I was kind of struck with the fact that these are the very first recorded words of Jesus. Does anyone know what they are?

The very first recorded words we have of Jesus in the Gospel.

I never thought of them this way, so I don't blame you for not coming up with it.

That's right. His mother and dad were looking for him, and they said, "What are you doing here?" and his reply was, "Don't you know that I must be about my father's business?" He didn't call it his business. He didn't say, "Oh, this was just a nice idea I had." He was on a mission. Even at 12, his mind, he had already given his mind to his father and says, "I'm going to do what you tell me," and when you read the rest of when you read the book of John, it's there time and time again. A few of them, starting in John chapter five, he says, "What my father does, I do."

In chapter seven, he says, "What my father teaches, I teach." Some of these are paraphrased a little bit. Chapter 12, he says, "If you're believing in me, you might as well believe in my father."

Another one in chapter 12, "If you've seen me, you've seen my father." Amazing. "If you hear me, you've heard my father." I think that's pretty incredible that Jesus, as a human being, could honestly say these things. "If you receive me, you've received my father. If you know me, you know my father." He was appalled that his disciples asked him, "So, all right, just show us the father once." "What?

Have I been with you so long?" and he had actually told them this other stuff before, and you're still saying, "Show me the father?" When you look at me, you're looking at the father. That's powerful, and when he prays before he dies, his prayer for us is that we can enter that same relationship. In John 17, "I want the people that believe on me, these people that have walked with me, to be one as you and I are one, Father, and not only them, but the people that believe on me because of them. I would like them. I want them to be one as you and I are one."

God's mind is that we are one with him, that we, just like Jesus and God, are one.

And what was Jesus thinking as he faced the end? I'll call it the cross, being forsaken by everyone, his disciples, and by his own words, even his father? What was he thinking as he approached that moment? And I would just like to read a few passages out of John for that. What was on his mind when all this was going on? John chapter 18 is the first one,

and in our mind, this is when things really started going downhill fast when he was in the garden, and he had prayed, and what was his prayer? "Not my will, but your will," that's what he was telling his father. Same thing he had said at 12.

So the soldiers come, and Peter says, "We can't have this," pulls out his sword and starts hacking away, and what did Jesus say? What was on his mind? Verse 11, "Put your sword into the sheath." Why? "Should I not drink the cup that my father has given me?"

That's real oneness with his father, even when it meant drinking a cup that he probably could have avoided. Verse 36, when Pilate says, "Am I a Jew? Your own nation's given you up." Well, what was Jesus thinking? They had. They're the ones that turned him in.

This is what he was on his mind. "My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would fight even the Jews," so this wasn't his kingdom.

This was a mess that he wasn't becoming a part of that way. He was listening to his father. He was on a mission. Verse 37, Pilate asks him, "So are you a king?" So Jesus is talking about a kingdom. "Are you a king?"

And I don't know, some Bibles have italicized words there. I like to take that one out. He says, "You say that I'm a king." My Bible has italicized rightly, and I'm not sure how that fits in, but I like the thought that it didn't matter to him whether he was a king or not. He says, "You say I'm a king," but he did say what he was there for. "For this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth." It didn't matter to him whether he was a king or not. He was here to bear witness to the truth. Truth for him was his father.

In the last one, chapter 19, verse 11, Pilate says, "So don't you know that I can let you go?" Again, what was Jesus thinking? "I wish you would." No? He said, "You don't have any power against me unless it is given you from above." Again, he's referring back to his father. "Whatever you do is power that you have been given from my father. You can't do anything to me that my father isn't part of."

Wow.

Marvin looked at Philippians chapter two, and again, you may turn there if you want to, but I'm just going to, again, go down over a few things. Paul says, "Let the mind," well, let me paraphrase it. "You should have the same mind that Jesus had." That's what he said, and this is what it was. It's the divine mind. He gave up his right, and it says about being robbery equal with God. He gave up his right to be in the form of God, whatever that is.