Renewing Your Mind

“But be transformed by the renewal of your mind…” -Romans 12:2

Many of the truths that are taught in Scripture are truths balanced in a delicate tension. For instance, we have been redeemed from the curse of sin and death through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Yet when we read what Paul says in Romans 8, we learn that the entire creation is still eagerly awaiting the consummation of that redemption. So there is a sense in which we have already been redeemed and yet we are still waiting for it. Scripture is filled with this kind of already/not yet tensions. For that reason, we must be careful in the way that we approach the subject of sanctification in the life of believers. The temptation is to do away with the tension and overemphasize some aspect of sanctification to the neglect of other aspects. In Romans 12:2, Paul tells us that we are not to conform to this world. Does that mean that we have to be peculiar, a novelty of some sort? Some people seem to think that not being conformed to this world means we become a freak side-show. What Paul has in mind, however, is the transformation of our values and goals. This idea is brought out by the imperative for us to be transformed by “the renewal of your mind.” We do not seek transformation by sitting around and waiting to suddenly be hit with renewed, godly desires. We renew our minds with truth and our affections follow.

One of the tensions is that we are constantly being renewed but are not yet renewed. It can be a difficult thing to understand how we are brought from darkness into light and still sometimes act as though we were still in darkness. In Romans 7, Paul describes his inner conflict of not doing what he really wants to do (in his spiritual desires) and doing what he does not want to do (in obeying the desires of the flesh). And this where we find the tension. Although we have been delivered from sin and are free not to obey it, we still live in a body that is totally depraved and affected by sin. This does not just mean that we still sin and do bad things. Total depravity means that sin has affected and continues to affect every aspect of our lives. Our minds, our emotions, our will all have been scarred by sin. In Ephesians 2, Paul says that prior to conversion, we all lived “carrying out the desires of the body and of the mind, and were by nature the children of wrath.” It’s true that God has saved us and filled us with new desires to serve Him and to please Him with our lives. If you do not have those desires, chances are you were never converted. It is equally true, however, that we are still plagued with worldly desires and emotions. That’s why Paul tells us to renew our minds.

The awful truth that we come to realize is that we can never trust ourselves. Even in our holiest moments, we are scarred and afflicted with sin. In Romans 10:2, Paul says of the Jews that they have “a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.” Although they seem to have emotions and zeal that we would usually define as good and right, Paul says that it is useless because it is not after knowledge. Our emotions can never be fully trusted. Sin has affected us in such a way that it becomes almost impossible to feel right about things in life. It is not only our actions that are affected by sin, but our desires. The problem of sin is that it produces an unholy heart with unholy emotions. The only hope that we have is to change the way that we think about things, measuring all of our thoughts and emotions by the Word of God. Psalm 119 is a beautiful chapter in which the Psalmist praises the value and worth of the Word of God. His only hope for living in a way pleasing to God is in God’s Word. There is an unmistakable connection throughout the chapter between knowing God’s Word and delighting in it.

Although our solution to the transformation of our desires is to think Biblically, the opposite is true of how we naturally think. There is a deep tie between our desires and how we choose to think. In Romans 1, Paul tells us that men knew God as God. The problem was not in their knowledge, the problem was in their desires. Verse 21 says, “For although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks to Him.” They saw God for who He was, but they did not delight in His being God. We were not thankful for His goodness and splendor. So what happened? We exchanged the glory of God for other things. We knew the truth, but we did not like it. So we adopted another version of reality we liked better. Man can never be rid of his affections or his need to worship things. We are made to enjoy and to worship things. Sin distorts our worship, and we set our affections on idols, which were never meant to bear the weight of deity. Sin operates in such a way that it works through our unholy affections to make us willing to believe a lie rather than the truth. It’s not that we did not know God. We just didn’t want to recognize Him as God. So we made a dark exchange. Our minds follow and justify what our hearts desire.

This is why Paul talks about our transformation in this way. Sin has affected us all in such a deep way that we can no longer really fully on our emotions, because our emotions will often cloud our thinking. Our minds become slaves to our desires, working feverishly to construct any version of truth that will justify our desires to our conscience. Paul’s command for us is to seek renewal in God’s Word. We are to think and meditate on God’s truth, not to be slaves to our hearts. And what we find as we come to understand and accept God’s truth is that our emotions follow. That is part of conversion. God changes our hearts so that things previously unpalatable to our hearts become the source of our delight. That is how we are to transform our lives and not be conformed to the values and ways of this world. It is not outwardly through behavior modification and sheer will-power. It is through changing us at the fundamental heart level. We think rightly about God and find that we begin to feel rightly.