Your thoughts are not insignificant. Over time, the things you allow to shape your mind help shape the person you become.
On this edition of Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah, David concludes his message You Are Not What You Think You Are, But What You Think, You Are! – Part 2, examining what Scripture teaches about developing a mind devoted to Christ.
David rejects the idea that Christians must choose between intellectual study and heartfelt faith. Loving God involves the whole person — heart, soul and mind. Studying Scripture should engage the heart, while worship should also engage thoughtful understanding
You’ve heard the saying, you are what you eat. There’s an equally true expression about the mind. What you think is what you become. Today on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah helps you implement a healthy change of mindset to provide a positive outlook and a fulfilling future. Listen as David concludes his special message, you are not what you think you are, but what you think you are.
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you are. And that’s exactly true, isn’t it? As you think about things, you become what you think about. And if you want to move in a new direction, you have to change your mind about what’s happening. And I hope you’ve listened carefully to what we’ve said so far from this proverb in Proverbs 23, verse 7. I hope you will stay with us as we finish up our discussions today on you’re not what you think you are, but what you think you are. This is the last day in the month of August, and the last time I’ll be able to tell you about our resource for the month. We’ll have a brand new resource tomorrow, but today you can still get your copy of God’s Heart for Israel. Oh, do I want you to have this book. I hope you will make it possible to have this book in your home and to read it carefully and make sure you’re lined up the way you should be when it comes to this nation, which is the apple of God’s eye. This nation is God’s nation. These are God’s people. And we need to be careful that we don’t get on the wrong side of Israel. We may not like everything that’s gone down over there, and surely it’s not perfect like any nation’s not perfect. But the Bible gives us pretty clear direction about how we should line up with Israel. And I’ve written about it in this book, and I want you to have it. It’s yours for the asking when you send a gift of any size today. This is the last day. This book will be available in this way, and we want to make sure you have your copy. So be sure and ask for it when you send your gift today. We are talking about how we think. And what does the Bible say about that? The Bible has a lot to say about our mind. The Bible tells us that we are to seek to have the mind of Christ. Proverbs says, let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus. Do we have the mind of Christ? Are we developing the right kind of thinking? Here’s more of that from the book of Proverbs as we take part two of You Are Not What You Think You Are, But What You Think You Are.
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Benjamin Warfield, who was a great scholar who taught for 34 years at Princeton Seminary, he pleaded with his students never to exchange the mind for the heart or the heart for the mind. This is the greatest statement I’ve ever read about this controversy. He said, sometimes we hear it said that 10 minutes on your knees will give you a truer, deeper, more operative knowledge of God than 10 hours over your books. Why should you turn from God when you turn to your books or feel that you must turn from your books in order to turn to God? Put your heart into your studies. Do not merely occupy your mind with them, but put your heart into them. They will bring you daily and hourly into the very presence of God. What a great instruction for students. The Bible says that when we study, we should put our heart into it. And when we worship, we should put our mind into it. That we should not play this game of the dichotomy which says it’s the heart versus the mind. It’s both. Listen again to the commandment. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind. In other words, with all that you are. You’re to love the Lord your God. That’s the priority of a devoted mind. But then there’s the priority of a dedicated mind. Did you ever read these verses from Philippians and Corinthians? Philippians 2, 5, let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus. Or who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him, but we have the mind of Christ. To have the mind of Christ does not mean that we are infallible and we start playing God. To have the mind of Christ means to look at life through the Savior’s point of view, looking at life through his values and the desires in his mind. It means to think God’s thoughts and not think as the world thinks. Now stop again and think with me about the power of your mind. The dizzying potential of the human mind reaches its apex in the possibility of possessing the mind of Christ through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. A possibility affirmed by Paul when he said, “‘We have the mind of Christ.'” No computer will ever be able to think God’s thoughts, nor will any device ever be able to know the heart of God or do his works, but the mystery which resides between our ears has this capacity. It was created for this very purpose to have the mind of Christ, a dedicated mind. What about the third one, the priority of a disciplined mind? 1 Peter 1.13. Therefore, gird up the loins of your mind and be sober and rest your hope fully upon the grace that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. And 2 Corinthians 10, 5 puts it this way, casting down arguments in every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. The disciplined mind. First of all, 1 Peter says we’re to gird up the loins of our minds. When soldiers would go to war, they would take their long flowing robes and tuck their robes into the belt that went around them so that the robe wouldn’t get in the way of their ability to move quickly. in the battle. And Peter uses that to give us a picture of how we’re to deal with our minds. It’s all about focus. We’re to get rid of the extraneous things, the things that get in our way, and focus our minds. Be proactive about the use of your mind. Don’t be just kind of mindless, just letting whatever happen. But remember, the screen of your mind is totally under your control, and there are choices you can make. And the Bible says you’re to bring every thought in the captivity unto Christ. That seems like an unreasonable and impossible task. But let us not be discouraged by the fact that it is a goal that is very high, but let it motivate us to say that as much as it’s possible for me, I’m going to have a controlling interest in what crosses my mind. I’m not going to feed my mind with things that will be destructive to me or will not be positive or beneficial to me. Oswald Chambers wrote, God will not make me think like Jesus. I have to do it by myself. I have to bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. Let me just stop for a moment and say, In this culture, when we are bombarded by so many impulses from so many different places, this is much more difficult than it’s ever been in any culture in the history of the world. And it is not something that will happen naturally. It will take action on our part, discipline on our part. I don’t know if you remember this. When I was growing up, this really dates me, but I remember when television kind of came along. My father was a pastor. My father was really concerned about TV, even though the one we had was so small, you had to be almost sitting right on top of it to see it, and it was all fuzzy, I remember that. Every time a commercial came on, especially if it was a beer commercial or a cigarette commercial, my father would get up and either turn the channel or turn the volume down. We didn’t have remote controls back then. But as time went along and things got a little bit more relaxed, we who were the children, we became the remote controls. Dad would say, turn that off.
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Turn that off.
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Come on, turn it off. He didn’t want that stuff going through our mind. He didn’t want us to be impacted by the commercials that were on TV that he thought could be hurtful to us. Now, how many of you know we’ve come a long way from that? I mean, the commercials we’ve got on TV right now are not fit for anybody to see, some of them. let alone children. I’ve always been impressed with my kids. We have them at our house a lot and I never have talked to them about this, but they are so protective over what our grandchildren are allowed to watch on TV. And sometimes I’m watching a mystery or something and they’ll come in and Don will say, you got to turn that off. We don’t want kids to be watching mysteries at their age. That’s kind of a picture of how we have to function with our minds, isn’t it? We have to decide. You know, obviously the internet is a real big problem today. You’d be better off not to have the internet than to be brought into some of the filth that is available on the internet. You’d be better off, if that’s an issue with you, just to disconnect it and say, I don’t need it. But what the Bible is saying is that if we’re going to have a mind that’s devoted to God, it’s going to have to have some discipline behind it. You can’t just float along and let stuff happen. You’ve got to stop and say, this mind that I have, that God has given me, is the most incredible thing that he’s given me beside my salvation. And it is worth spending some moments and thoughts about how you’re going to program that mind as you go forward. The priority of a disciplined mind. Notice number four, the priority of a determined mind. Colossians 3, 2. Set your mind, it says, on things above, not on things on the earth. This is just a further development of the previous principle. We discipline our minds by an act of determination. We have the power to set our minds. We train our minds to think Christianly. And in many instances, we can determine not only what enters our mind, but what is not allowed to enter our mind. Thinking Christianly is more than just that. Thinking Christianly is the substance and spirit of what it means for the follower of Christ to grow in the mind of Christ. Think about this for a moment. Isn’t it absurd to affirm that Jesus Christ is the Lord of all, that he’s Alpha and Omega, our creator, our redeemer, our judge, the source and guide and goal of all there is, and then not allowing him to be Lord over our minds and our thinking. We as evangelicals, we get all excited about all the new things in the gospel, the new birth, the new people, new powers. But we’ve got to go back and put in the missing component, and that is a new mind. Nowhere is the lordship of Christ and the power of gospel more needed today than in the renewing power of the Christian mind. Do you know that you can be a Christian? going to heaven, absolutely forgiven. And if you don’t take initiative, you can be a Christian with a secular mind that sees everything as the world sees it, even though Jesus Christ is living in your heart. I would say that the vast majority of evangelicals tend toward that as opposed to devoting their minds to the Lord Jesus Christ. Then there’s the priority of a discerning mind, number five. In Philippians 4.8, we see that word again. Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are of a good report, if there is any virtue, if there is anything praiseworthy, meditate or think on these things. Now, put that verse in context. Paul is trying to help people who are struggling with anxiety and worry. He’s already told them that one of the things they need to do in order to overcome that is to pray. And he tells them that if they will pray, God will hear them, and he will answer them. But he doesn’t end with the prayer. He says after you pray, there’s one more thing you need to do, and that is you need to get involved in what you allow to happen in your mind. And he gives them a list of characteristics that should be the judge on the kind of things we try to think about. And you can go through them. You’ve seen them before. I’ve preached on them before. It is simply saying, according to Paul, worry and anxiety can be exchanged for the peace of God through the powerful process of thinking the right thoughts. Read this any way you like. It cannot be teaching us anything else that if we meditate on the right things, it gives us the best opportunity to overcome the evil things that the enemy would come to distract us. Now, let me tell you what not to do. If you have a problem thinking wrong thoughts, you don’t say, well, I’m not going to think about that anymore. I’m not going to think about that anymore. I am not going to think about that anymore. So what are you doing? You’re thinking about it anymore. You’re laughing because you know I’m exactly right. The best way to get rid of bad thoughts is to replace them with good thoughts, to flush them out with good thoughts. If you ever have seen anybody go through dialysis, This is a good picture of it. They take the blood that has not been purified by an effective kidney, and they run it through a machine, and they purify that blood, and they run it back into the human body. The Bible tells us that the way we deal with evil thoughts and difficult thoughts and anxious thoughts is to replace them with the thoughts that are judged by the principles of the Word of God. And then finally, the last one, and this is the one I get most excited about because it’s the what-do-you-do-now one. It’s the priority of a developing mind, Romans 12, 2. Listen to this. 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 perfect will of God. What is the renewing of your mind? Paul says that by the renewing of our minds, we are transformed. That when we take this seriously, the way that we allow our mind to be programmed will be the difference between whether we are conformed to the world, pressed into the mold of the world, or we are transformed to live beyond the world. The renewing of our minds. The Holy Spirit has chosen to achieve the transformation of the believer through the process of renewing his mind. When I talk about transformation, I mean growth in godliness. It doesn’t happen without the mind. In other words, the outer transformation of what we become is affected by the inner transformation of our mind. This means that the Holy Spirit uses the word of God to transform us by changing the way we think through the input of the scripture. That’s what David meant in the Psalms when he said, thy word have I hidden in my heart. that I might not sin against thee. In other words, David said, the way I keep from sinning is I have filled my mental computer with the word of God, and I allow that word of God to stay there in my mind, to dwell in my mind, and it is that which keeps me from doing things that I do not desire to do. In his letter to the Ephesians and the Colossians, Paul speaks about this renewing process. In Ephesians 4, he talks about being renewed in the spirit of your mind. And in Colossians chapter 3, he talks about the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of him who created him. Now listen, if we cooperate and we choose to cooperate with the Holy Spirit and we say, Lord God, I’m going to read your word today and use your word to change me, to transform me, to renew me, to be renewed means that you jettison some old thoughts and replace them with some new ones. You renew your mind. The way you used to think before you became a Christian is not sufficient for the Christian walk. You need a new way of thinking. And how do you gain that new way of thinking? You gain the new way of thinking through the renewal process that comes when you input God’s Word into your heart and mind. The only way to prevent the outward shape of our life from being fashioned by the world is to take care that the inward spirit of our being is being transformed by the renewing of our mind. I’ve tried to think, is there any other way for this to happen? And I can’t imagine that there is. You say, I want to be a better Christian. I want to walk with the Lord. I want to have a more godly life. That’s a goal that we all have. Well, the way that works is not by coming to church, although I’m glad you do that. It’s not by going to a discipleship class or even getting in a small group. The way you are changed according to the word of God, you are transformed through the renewing of your mind, which comes from the word of God. So we read in Colossians 3, 16, let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom and teaching and admonishing one another. Our minds are far more important, you see, than we are often led to believe. And today we have learned that God’s priority for our mind is that it be devoted and dedicated to him, disciplined and determined and discerning about what it does in our life. And we’ve discovered that there’s a process that God uses to accomplish all of this. It is the very developing and renewing of our mind every day being changed because of the word of God that is being absorbed into our inner being.
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Isn’t that the way it is?
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You’ve got to pump God’s Word into your heart. You say, well, how do you do that? Well, friends, if you don’t get it, we’ve got so many tools now that we’ve never had before, don’t we? You can listen to the Word of God. You can read the Word of God in all kinds of different translations and paraphrases. You can memorize the Word of God in all kinds of memory programs available. Over the Internet, you can find ways to take the Word of God and constantly be pouring it through your mind and your heart. That’s what God expects us to do. And he tells us that if we allow that process to happen, it will begin to change the way that we think and the way that we function. We will literally be coming more and more into the mind of Christ through the renewing of the Word of God. We do some traveling in the fall between Sundays. I don’t know which hotel room we were in, but I remember that turned on the rescue from Chile. You know, that got a lot of airtime, and it was played on a lot of stations, every network. I found out there were 2,500 journalists in Chile to cover this event. And we were all captivated by the rescue of this group of 33 miners who seemed to have been entombed in the earth. And one of the stories that came out of this dramatic event is that of a relationship between Marcelo Liva, a Baptist pastor, and Jose Henriquez, one of the miners. Henricus was an encouragement to his co-workers as they struggled to stay positive during confinement. As an evangelical Christian, he held daily Bible studies down in the cavern for the miners as rescue efforts were developing up on the surface. When Henricus requested an evangelical pastor to aid the miners and their families at the site, Marcelo of Valinar Baptist Church in Valinar, Chile, was contacted, and he arrived at Camp Esperanzo, which means hope in Spanish. As the crews were planning the imminent rescue, Marcelo read from Henricus’ letter to him that was dated October the 6th, Dear Pastor Marcelo, I thank you for each and every one of your words of encouragement directed to the 33 of us. Tomorrow I will be reading your letter, which will certainly be a blessing. Thank you for writing in hopes that the Lord fulfills his purpose in us as well as in you on the outside. Well, Pastor, may God continue to bless you. We will be seeing each other soon. Until then, please excuse my handwriting, Jose Henriquez. marcelo sent his final handwritten response to henricus october the 11th in the paloma the name given to the device that was used to transport little objects between the mine chamber and the surface i found out that the word paloma means pigeon or dove in spanish so they had a carrier pigeon that took the messages down to the mine marcelo said i encouraged him for the remaining days of confinement recalling what he wrote he said this is what i said to him I told him that he should remember the promises of the Lord, to have hope and confidence, and that he would also convey to the other 32 minors the message that the same God who guarded them is the one who’s going to guide them in the rescue. And so the anxiety can be dissipated with prayer and with confidence in God. Now, the news doesn’t report any of this. This was in the Baptist news. And there’s more to it. There was a conversion that took place in the mine because of what was happening around them. I don’t know about you. When I watched the Chilean miners being rescued, I had to ask myself the question, what would I do if I had been entombed in a dark mine for 60-some days? Wouldn’t you be going crazy? Anybody here have claustrophobia? What kept them from losing their minds down there? Well, I don’t know everything, but I know one thing. I know one of the reasons was their minds were filled with hope and encouragement from an outside source. And that is what God wants to do for us, isn’t it? He wants to encourage us. He wants to fill our mind. What is the reason for the renewing of the mind? To fill our mind with the kind of truth that will help us in the cave that we are living in today, in the craziness of our generation, in the problems that we face. How do we do it? I mean, sometimes don’t you look at people and say, I’m surprised they don’t go crazy.
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There’s someone up there.
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who sent down truth to us through the Paloma. And he didn’t send down just a little message. He sent down the whole deal. Everything he wants us to know while we’re living on this earth. And men and women, I want to encourage you. This is not about the obligation to read the Bible. This is about the privilege and opportunity to so program your mind with God’s truth that no matter what happens, you have the mind of Christ. You have a devoted mind to God, and you’re ready to face whatever happens. People ask me all the time, what do you think is going to happen? And you know what my answer is? I do not have a clue. I’ve written some prophecy books, and I can give you some broad strokes of where we’re going. But what’s going to happen in two weeks? What’s going to happen in the year after that? I don’t know. But what I do know is this. If I have the mind of Christ, and I program my mind with God’s truth, I’m ready for whatever happens. And I’m going to make myself even more disciplined in that going forward. And I just want to challenge you to do that. Not because it’s an obligation. If you don’t do it, I’ll never know. But if you do it, you’re going to find that God does some wonderful things in your life. You’re going to start doing things and you think, I don’t even know why I did that. Well, you did it because your mind was reprogrammed and now your mind is thinking the way God wants it to think. And I challenge you today. How many of you listening to this message say, Pastor Jeremiah, I get it. Say this, I get it, I get it. All right, now that you got it, go do it, all right? All right, amen.
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Amen. Hey, thank you for joining us today for this edition of Turning Point and for all of the time we’ve spent together in the book of Proverbs. I’m a little bit sad that we’re leaving that book now, but we have something brand new coming up, and you don’t want to miss tomorrow as we continue teaching the Word of God here at Turning Point. It’s our number one purpose. Our only reason for being in existence is to teach the Scripture, and I hope you’ll be a part of it from now. Every moment that you have that’s available, we look forward to helping you fill your mind with God’s truth and God’s Word. Don’t forget to pray for us. We count on that. And thank you for your generosity. Once again, when you send a gift of any size today, We’ll send you, as our way of saying thank you, this 100-plus page gift book called God’s Heart for Israel. This book is yours for the asking when you send your gift to us during the month of August. It’s our way of expressing our gratitude for your investment in this ministry. Have a great day, friends. God bless you. I’m David Jeremiah.
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Today’s message originated from Shadow Mountain Community Church and senior pastor, Dr. David Jeremiah. Drop us a note to let us know how God is using this ministry in your life. Write to Turning Point, PO Box 3838, San Diego, California, 92163. Visiting our website at davidjeremiah.org slash radio. That’s davidjeremiah.org slash radio. Or by calling 800-947-1993. Ask for your copy of David’s new book, God’s Heart for Israel. It’s yours for a gift of any amount. You can also download the free Turning Point mobile app for your smartphone or tablet, or search in your app store for Turning Point Ministries to access our content. Visit davidjeremiah.org slash radio for details. This is David Michael Jeremiah. Join us tomorrow as we begin the new series, Jonah the Runaway Prophet on Turning Point.
