May 29, 20228 min read

Have You Figured It Out Yet?

Updated: May 30, 2022

Does your mind incessantly rotate, keeping you up at night, yet yield you no solution and no peace?

The Bible says we have been given the mind of Christ and do hold the thoughts and purposes of His heart (1 Corinthians 2:16, AMPC).

Let’s remedy the discrepancy so that you may find rest today.

The original language of 1 Corinthians 2:16 might be paraphrased like this:

Who has known the Mind of God (that mere man can instruct and direct the Lord)? Rather, we have been given the gift of the Mind of Christ.

“Mind” or nous is used twice here—interconnected as one in the sense that, if you want to know what God thinks, look at how Christ navigated every thought between Heaven and earth (they are innumerable).

To think straight, with clarity and purpose, we have two tools:

1) God’s Word and 2) His Son.

We must apply both.

Human reason, without the Word of God as meditative food to ingest and digest, goes off course subtly but swiftly and soon manifests in negativity, anxiety and excessive reasoning—a mind that won’t quit and a discontented heart and soul. Contrary to this, there is faith. Faith is like medicine to the mind and peace to the heart—it calms a soul down, gives it a vision, and allows it contentment and purpose-driven energy (energeo—clean, running life). The [reverent] fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever (Psalm 19:9a). Christ was present in this same fallen world, but did not allow it to steal or corrode His faith. Let’s follow…

Jesus knew the Word of God, every Scripture. But, beyond knowing it like a scholar or Pharisee would, He believed it. Jesus believed the Word of God held supremacy over everything He saw, encountered or felt in the natural world. This belief was born when God spoke the world into existence and Christ was there (see John 1:1, Darby). Jesus’ take is the ONLY METHOD IN EXISTENCE which keeps the human heart soft, kind, loving, enduring (for a lifetime), and on course in a rocking, quaking, crying, fallen world. The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart (Psalm 19:8a).
Christ prayed. He believed in the spoken Word of God directly to Him—a RELATIONSHIP and DIALOGUE of the ultimate kind:

I am able to do nothing from Myself [independently, of My own accord—but only as I am taught by God and as I get His orders]. Even as I hear, I judge [I decide as I am bidden to decide. As the voice comes to Me, so I give a decision], and My judgment is right (just, righteous), because I do not seek or consult My own will [I have no desire to do what is pleasing to Myself, My own aim, My own purpose] but only the will and pleasure of the Father Who sent Me. ~ John 5:30, AMPC

Following God in this all-dependent manner requires dedication, a decision, discipline, humility to Lordship, and the utmost bravery over all spiritual and natural forces. You will have to think along holy lines beyond the mocking of the enemy and the paved, modern, off-course world. There is only One Voice to heed.

Faith in God is the only remedy to the torments of

chronic worry and frustration.

“Mind” or nous in 1 Corinthians 2:16 is pronounced like the hangman’s knot (noose) as…

For as he thinketh in his soul, so is he. ~ Proverbs 23:7, Darby

Your habitual mode of thought either keeps you or derails you.

A human mind, heart and soul can become bound and entangled, as with shipping rope, in a web of wrong thoughts, rendering that person immovable. Jesus says, “Let us go to the other side” of the water—you must be freed to move. You must have faith to walk. Your inner attitude, when in the dark it reflects the stars of heaven (those of great faith gone on before; angels watching now), is a map of navigation. There is no speech nor spoken word [from the stars]; their voice is not heard. Yet their voice [in evidence] goes out through all the earth (Psalm 19:3-4a).

You will arrive at the other side. Jesus is with you.

The battle over every human soul is real and it is continually occurring throughout a saint’s lifetime on the fallen earth. But there is protection and reward for those who diligently seek the Lord and follow in Christ’s wake. The ordinances of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold…they are sweeter also than honey and drippings from the honeycomb (Psalm 19:9b-10). Sail into your unchartered waters and know you are always in full-screen view, front and center, in Heaven. God watches your thoughts and your moves like a movie.

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, my [firm, impenetrable] Rock and my Redeemer. ~ Psalm 19:14

According to the original Hebrew, meditation (higgayon) can be negative or positive and manifests as murmuring or music (complaint or song).[1] What is in your heart bubbles up in one of these two ways as a cue or gage of the state of your soul. If in the negative mode, the soul needs maintenance, medicine, attention, time…in order to correct. This is called “waiting on the Lord” and Jesus “went off” to the mountain to pray, unapologetically. If He needed this, how much more do we today? The definition of meditation (higgayon) includes the term machination[2]: The act of planning or contriving a scheme for executing some purpose, particularly an evil purpose; an artful design formed with deliberation.[3] If we push our hearts, souls and minds into overdrive, continually running in hyper-performance mode, we neglect filling ourselves with the “fuel” of the Lord. When we treat ourselves like a machine and our strategy towards success as an idol, we can experience a breakdown. To prevent this, in mechanic-ease, we need an oil change! Exchange the soot of the world’s sin for the anointing oil of the Lord.

Live by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. We cannot with any confidence wait upon God but in and through a Mediator, for it is by his Son that God speaks to us and hears from us; all that passes between a just God and poor sinners must pass through the hands of that blessed “Days-man, who has laid his hand upon them both;” every prayer passes from us to God, and every mercy from God to us, by that hand. It is in the face of the Anointed that God looks upon us; and in the face of Jesus Christ that we behold the glory and grace of God shining. It is by Christ that we have access to God and success with him in prayer…[4] ~ Matthew Henry

The Plan of God is our success,

is our strategy, is our purpose.

But God has built us in such a way that

we cannot circumvent trust and accomplish it.

We will not have it all figured out by the time we leave this earth. So give your heart, soul and mind a break. Faith, belief and trust are interchangeable terms (pistis), but cannot be interchanged with anything else. Nothing else works. By Master Design, God created human beings to only function correctly by “relating to God” and “relating to Christ”.[5] There are no shortcuts, no quick fixes, no alternate routes. When we pray for “intangible assets” like grace, peace, belief, faith, trust, contentment, and rest, the “tangible” cures. It fades away into something rather insignificant.

We live in an upside-down place that is only navigable from the inside out, not the outside in. God is a Spirit.

The natural man does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God. For they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man judges all things, but he himself is not subject to anyone’s judgment. “For who has known the mind of the Lord, so as to instruct Him?” But we have the mind of Christ.

Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual, but as worldly—as infants in Christ. ~ 1 Corinthians 2:14-3:1, BSB

Are you spiritual or worldly? If spiritual, your mind will be at rest. If worldly, it will not keep quiet. That is the gage.

“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways,” declares the LORD. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so My ways are higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.” ~ Isaiah 55:8-9, BSB

We would initially think a graphic depiction of the human, finite mind in comparison to God’s mind would look something like this:

However, it does not. It looks like this:

We will not, this side of Heaven, have it all figured out. That is because God’s Mind has absolutely no limitations whatsoever. He wants us to trust Him in an extremely volatile and untrustworthy, temporal (subject to change) environment.

A great blessing enters our soul

when we stop being angry with this program of constant testing and accept God's decision

that we are worthy to be put to the test.

The diagrams above help us to understand God is Lord. There will be no way to completely understand God’s all-knowing (omniscient) Mind here, but we can TRUST Him, follow Christ's example, and keep in the Word of God. This is the only pathway to mental peace.

There are things that happen in relationships that test trust; likewise, in our relationship with God. Death, wars, rumors of wars, senseless evil, and other sins and corruptions happening around us does not mean the sincere Christian has failed. On the contrary, it means we are here for a reason. It was Billy Graham who said we have to make peace with the fact that Jesus Christ was on this earth and left it this way (or words to that effect). When we are living in a version of Revelation, Revelation becomes harder for us to read. Nevertheless, Jesus’s love is present throughout that Book, and He is here with us, loving us right now. There is no need to fear. We will overcome any obstacle between ourselves and God because, not only have we been given the mind of Christ, we have been given the gift of Faith. It is within your rights as a blood-bought Christian to use it, to be at peace, to be full of grace, and to let God take care of the battle-laden world and do the things that only God can do. He will use us, each one, to help His cause, but we must trust there is a very good reason for this:

His ways are above our ways.

In our Relationship with God, TRUST is required. It is not circumventable. Part of trust is not having everything figured out, not having everything defined, and being okay with that. The Mind of Christ is smart, fully reliant upon God as the Ultimate Problem Solver.

Trust God

&

Keep Going

God already has figured it out, from the foundations of the world you are standing in.

May God bless you.

Please prayerfully consider supporting this ministry to keep messages like this coming

to you and others on a regular basis.

Thank you.

Translations:

Darby: Public Domain.

References:

[1] Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon. 1902 Higgayon. Biblesoft, Inc. https://biblehub.com/hebrew/1902.htm [2] Strong's Exhaustive Concordance. 1902 Higgayon. NAS Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible with Hebrew-Aramaic and Greek Dictionaries. Copyright © 1981, 1998 by The Lockman Foundation. All rights reserved Lockman.org, Inc. https://biblehub.com/hebrew/1902.htm [3] Noah Webster. Machination. In American Dictionary of the English Language. Retrieved May 29, 2022. https://webstersdictionary1828.com/Dictionary/machination [4] Matthew Henry (1662-1714). (1955). The Secret of Communion with God: How to Begin the Day, Spend the Day, and End the Day with God. Solid Ground Christian Books: Birmingham, AL.

[5] NAS New Testament Greek Lexicon. Pistis. https://www.biblestudytools.com/lexicons/greek/nas/pistis.html

DAWN DYSON