1Where do wars and fightings among you come from? Don’t they come from your pleasures that war in your members? 2You lust, and don’t have. You murder and covet, and can’t obtain. You fight and make war. You don’t have, because you don’t ask. 3You ask, and don’t receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures. 4You adulterers and adulteresses, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. 5Or do you think that the Scripture says in vain, “The Spirit who lives in us yearns jealously”? 6But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” 7Be subject therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners. Purify your hearts, you double-minded. 9Lament, mourn, and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. 10Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he will exalt you.
11Don’t speak against one another, brothers. He who speaks against a brother and judges his brother, speaks against the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. 12Only one is the lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge another?
13Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow let’s go into this city and spend a year there, trade, and make a profit.” 14Yet you don’t know what your life will be like tomorrow. For what is your life? For you are a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. 15For you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will both live, and do this or that.” 16But now you glory in your boasting. All such boasting is evil. 17To him therefore who knows to do good and doesn’t do it, to him it is sin.
Having the Mind of Christ
Kneeling in Humility Before Christ
Paul tells us to have “this in your mind which was also in Christ Jesus.” And then, he begins to explain just exactly what kind of mind Jesus had. We must remember that scripture teaches us that Jesus was both fully God and fully man. This doesn’t mean Jesus stopped being God for a time period or anything like that. I have heard Dr. H. Wayne House (creator of the House Visual Study Bible) say something like, “It is amazing to contemplate that while Jesus was lying in the cradle, looking up into Mary’s eyes, He was a human baby in every way. He would grow up and need to learn how to feed Himself, clothe Himself, etc., and yet, as He lay there, as God, He was holding the entire universe together.” So the human Jesus chose for a time period to lay aside all the benefits of being a deity. In doing so, He adopted the role of a servant. He adopted the form of a human being. And as a human, he submitted Himself to the cruelties of mankind, allowing Himself to be put to death on a cross.
Paul says we are to have that kind of mind as believers. This means that we, too, must be willing to give up ourselves for others. Jesus Himself stated it when He said, “13 Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13 WEB) Paul is challenging each of us to do something that is not natural. We are interested in self above all else, but Paul tells us that to have the mind of Christ, we must get our eyes off of self and put them on Christ. In doing so, we will be able to “esteem others above self.” He says this in the verses right before the challenge of having the mind of Christ. “3 doing nothing through rivalry or through conceit, but in humility, each counting others better than himself; 4 each of you not just looking to his own things, but each of you also to the things of others.”(v.3-4 WEB) Reader, at this point, you might be thinking, “well, all of this sounds very ideal, but how can I really do this in my life.”
The key to it all is humility. James tells us that God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. (James 4:6). Ask the Lord today to help you get your eyes off of yourself. It begins with not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less. That’s not a complete definition of humility, but it is a good start. We are born ego-centric. That means our minds default to a position that puts us in the middle of things, focusing on “me and mine.” Part of taking up our cross daily and following Jesus is asking Him, through the transformation of our minds, to give us true humility that looks out for the benefit of others. With a transformed mind, we can shift our focus away from every thought, concern, and effort about ourselves. When we put our own agenda on hold, even for a few minutes in our day, we are laying down our life for a friend. That’s a wonderful thing to do. In doing so, you are having the “mind of Christ.”