"And be renewed in the spirit of your mind."
- Ephesians 4:23
From a natural stand point, the majority of our thinking comes from patterns of thought developed over many years. Our soul unconsciously works off of a built-in involuntary response mechanism. Patterns of thought naturally want to kick in like a triggered mechanism is set off by certain stimuli. We don't even have to think about some things. Our trained behavior decides matters for us before we even realize it. For instance, a person whose trained behavior is based upon a fear of spiders might jump back over the simplest thing as a piece of black lent on the floor, because in their mind that is how they are programmed to think.
Much of what we think to be spontaneous thinking is actually trained patterns of thought, thoughts that are so indelibly printed in our conscious thinking that they create unalterable tendencies. It takes the power of the Holy Spirit to break us out of these patterns so that we are not so easily controlled by our involuntary response. When we give the Holy Spirit his rightful place in our thinking then he empowers us to think on a totally different wave length.
When the true workings of transformation begin to take place there will be a noticeable change in everything that we do from our thoughts, our actions, our desires, even our ambitions. Everything will become radically influenced! One of the ways we know that we are becoming transformed is that there will come a heightened sense of conviction and commitment toward the word. We will begin to make ourselves more accountable to it because the aim of transformation is to enter into the perfect will of God.
There is one thing that is certain, when you begin to let God's word alter your patterns of thought you will not need to have someone constantly encouraging you to maintain your walk with God. No one will have to remind you to be faithful. You won't have to be talked into a life of prayer or prodded to want to do God's will. Your commitment level will become as natural to you as breathing. The alteration of your inner response mechanism will start to coincide with the nature of God. In other words, you will willingly become engaged in God's way of doing things, and the only thing that will matter to you most is to satisfy the heart of God with the choices you make each and every day.
"God doesn't just want us to have an enlightened intellect. He wants us to have an elevated intellect!"
Paul wrote to the church at Colosse and said, "For this cause we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to desire that ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding" (Col 1:9). When we are praying to be filled with the knowledge of God's will we will never arrive at absolute knowledge. In other words, we will never know everything God knows about the fullness of his plan. But what we can count on is that our "capacity" to know, at whatever level we are at in our journey to transformation, will enable us to process that knowledge so that we can walk out his will for our lives. It's all about a step by step process toward change.
All knowledge is fragmented information. In other words, to know any truth does not necessarily mean we know it in an absolute sense of the word. There are levels of knowledge that take us from a single truth to truth that is more accurate and more complete. God is the only one who has the complete truth on any subject and as we grow in our knowledge of God's will, we will be able to gather together these fragments of information in such a way that we begin to see the big picture.
Think of the knowledge of his will as flowing particles of information. The Greek meaning for "understanding" is the ability to capture these flowing particles to where they come together and form an image. It's just like trying to put a jigsaw puzzle together without knowing exactly what it is supposed to look like. The more the pieces you gather the more you see what it is you are building toward. Spiritual understanding is when the Holy Spirit helps you capture these particles of information until you see what God wants to do in your life. That's why Paul said, "Be renewed in the spirit of your mind" (Eph. 4:23). There is a part of your mind that can think spiritual once it is renewed. When that occurs, not only will you be able to connect the dots to the will of God, but your pattern of thought will rise to a whole new level of thinking.
There is a way to journey beyond our limited mentality. We can retrain our thought processes so that we think with a spiritual mind and not just our natural mind. We can arrive at something far, far better than what we have always settled for. Everything that involves "spiritual" requires that we touch a much higher realm of thinking than what we are accustomed to. God doesn't just want us to have an enlightened intellect. He wants us to have an elevated intellect! He wants us to think higher than what we are limited to think in our own ability, because that is where divine possibilities are born.*
