Pentecost 88 When Thinking Becomes an Attitude

[HKHaugan]

Pentecost 88 When Thinking Becomes an Attitude

Suppose you woke up in a wilderness and didn’t know where you were? This happened to a friend of mine in college. Some of his drunken fraternity brothers crept into his room when he was asleep, tied him up in a big burlap sack, carted him out to a country road and dumped him there in the middle of the night. He was terrified but his survival instincts kicked in and he was able to find his way to a main highway, identify where he was and hitchhike back but was never able to sleep soundly after that. Later in life he’d have occasional blackouts. He never got over it.

When you start thinking spiritually you find the same condition is common in all human beings. When we are born and as we grow, get educated, learn relational adaptability and gain our bearings, we don’t think spiritually. We find ourselves still alone, still in a wilderness of invisible processes and not sure where we are headed or even why. We need a contact, a leader, someone we can trust with the best way to maneuver in this vast unknown and unsure environment in which we find ourselves.

Until we accept that our condition is spiritual we will spend what life we have in survival tactics and die alone. We can follow the world principles of success and still end up alone or we can be criminals and try and be ‘one-up’ on the world and come to the same end, alone. In between those, others live blindly in a kind of day-to-day acceptance, resignation and denial. The epitaph on the headstone will still be the same, ‘He died alone.’

God did not want us to end up in eternity alone, which is why He sent His Son Jesus. Jesus’ mission consisted of three basic objectives. First, He came to make us think spiritually before we did anything else. Second, He came to make us aware that He was the door to thinking spiritually. Third, He came to reveal the way we can do it. He starts us with belief in Him, spiritual lessons from His Word to build a spiritual trust relationship with Him and He provides the power to reshape our minds, hearts and souls by the presence of His Holy Spirit.

If we really consider what Jesus underwent coming into this world then we might appreciate more deeply his sacrifice for us. He was born just as we were, had to be nursed, weaned, educated and learn adaptability to his environment. He was tempted in every way as we are. He had to discover who He was, why He was here and what He had to do about it. He had to believe with His mind, trust with His heart and have faith in His Spirit. Jesus knew He was on a spiritual journey He didn’t have to take. He did it for us. His choices, decisions and actions were based on the Scripture and led by the Spirit.

The difference, and this is important, the difference between Jesus and us is that the Holy Spirit conceived Him so His immediate impulses were always spiritual. He thought spiritually, He believed spiritually and He acted spiritually. We, on the other hand, were not conceived by the Spirit. We were born separated from God, born in sin. Our first impulses are from sin; fearful, prideful and self-centered. So how are we to think, to make choices and decisions and to live a life that is real, fulfilling and never being alone again?

“Think of yourselves [in the NIV, “Have this attitude which was…] the way Christ Jesus thought of himself. He had equal status with God but didn't think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn't claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death—and the worst kind of death at that—a crucifixion (Philippians 2:5-8 Message Bible).”

Next, thinking Holy Spirit. Stay tuned…….