You Just Think
You Are the Thinker
By John Gavazzoni
I would give credit to the article that got me to thinking about the subject of this article, but I can't remember whose it was, or by what source it came to my attention. It was a long time ago. It really got me to thinking about how we ought not to presume we are the thinker always when thoughts occur to us. Is it necessarily true that to have a thought means that we ourselves are the thinker of the thought? Might it simply be that a connection has occurred between our brain and that of another, and even alien, adversarial, thinker? I'm beginning to consider that those times when we, ourselves, are truly thinking thoughts are quite rare.
For a believer, of course, any thought at the spiritual level, is only our thought as shared with us by the Holy Spirit. Within the gift of the Holy Spirit is the gift of Christ's thinking, and as a gift, it is ours, but He's the source. We are given to be attuned to the very thinking of Jesus, and as He comes alongside us as our Paraclete, we are caused to think His thoughts. We are then, thinking together, joined to Him as one Spirit. ("He that is joined to the Lord is one Spirit.") Jesus saw what the Father was doing, and He did the same. Jesus was tuned into what the Father was thinking and speaking, and He thought those very thoughts, spoke in turn the words of those thoughts and expressed only those thoughts from the Father.
We have, Paul said, the mind of Christ. Our flesh has the mind of the adversary, whatever you conceive that adversary to be. I long ago quit believing that the "devil" is some non-corporal being who sends like-beings, demons, and/or unclean spirits, to whisper thoughts into my brain. But alien, adversarial thinkers and thinking do exist, and our fleshly mind is tuned into what "they" are thinking. "They" love to fool us into thinking we're the thinkers of "their" thoughts. Just what could be the source of such a mental condition, if there is not an individual devil and individual demons?
Well, we live in, we're submerged into, a veritable soup of thoughts. All kind of stuff occurs to us mentally from within an all-enveloping, existential atmosphere. As children of God, our native atmosphere is God, in whom we live and move and have our being. But we've been subjected to another atmosphere that, though lying within the sphere of Himself, but not affecting His Being, it distorts, for us, God's thinking. Now we're into a dimension of theology that while offering answers, also raises questions re: those answers. No escape from that fact. But we can make spiritual progress in our thinking if we don't give into that spirit of grandiosity that insists on conceptually resolving all those arising questions.
It seems to me that the difference between thinking and living by thoughts that are ours in union with Christ, and thoughts that don't belong to us, has to do with the difference between God being very personal to us...and uniquely so for every person...sharing Himself with us, or being subjected to a collective cacophony of existential mental confusion. (strange it is, how those most confused are also fully confident that they think clearly) The fleshly mind hears from a collective. The spiritual mind hears from One. What the New Testament calls, in the Greek, the "kosmos" (the world's orderly arrangement or dominant and dominating system) runs according to a collective mind. The individual is lost within that collective. He thinks the collective's thinking is his thinking.
The expression, "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ" still has meaning for me as it did way back over 66 years ago when I first met the Lord personally. The risen Christ became alive to me. He made Himself known to me personally. His Word, the Word that He is, became the centrally living dynamic of my life. My thoughts changed from those of a teenage gang member to those of a disciple, who could say, as that disciple of old, "Lord, to whom else shall we go, only You have the words of eonian life." I've never known in my 83 years on this earth, a time when we have been more assaulted by the lying, manipulating, devious, cunning collective mind than we are now. It's nothing less than a miracle to be lifted above that contentious mind, to think the thoughts of God.
I have been saying it a lot of late: it is normative for a believer to be well-endowed with that skepticism that is integral to the anointing we all have from God. God deliver us from our fleshly gullibility. Having the spirit of our mind renewed involves thinking. How much do you really think...you, not the collective? For you Star Trek fans, we are not the Borg. "We know that the Son of God has come, and has given us an understanding that we might know Him who is true, and we are in Him who is true, even in His Son, Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eonian life." Savor those words of St. John as translated from the Greek by my dear friend, Jonathan Mitchell as he has rendered exquisitely the fine nuances of the Greek:
...yet we have seen and thus know that God's Son has arrived and is continuously here, and He has given thorough understanding (comprehension; faculty of thought; intelligence; intellectual capacity; input throughout the mind) to the end that we would constantly know [other MSS: so that we constantly know] by experience the True One (or: the true, the real and the genuine), and we constantly exist within and in union with the True One (or: in the real [situation]; in the midst of Reality): within His Son, Jesus Christ This One is the True (Real; Genuine) God, and Life pertaining to and having the qualities of the Age (or: life having its source in the Age [of Messiah]; eonian life, Life of, for and on through, the ages). (Jn. 5: 20 JMT)