Back in the Eighties, Steve Martin starred in "The Man With Two Brains", a story about a famous doctor and his attempt to preserve the brain of the woman he came to love while getting rid of the woman he had recently married. The woman he recently married did not love him and was only after his money. She is killed by a mysterious serial killer. The doctor is able through a series of events to transplant the brain of the woman he loves into the dead body of the gold-digger wife.
Strange as this implausible story may seem, there is a ring of truth in it found in Romans. The Lord, through the Holy Spirit is seeking a Bride--a body of people that He can eternally fellowship with in perfection. But human kind, tainted and destroyed by sin is really dead to Him. No one can hear or understand his ways, and everyone is compelled to obey their sinful ways and reject Him. The consequence of this is certain death. This is why God intervened.
Ro 8:3 For what the law was not able to do because it was feeble through the flesh, God, sending his Son in the image of the evil flesh, and as an offering for sin, gave his decision against sin in the flesh:
Ro 8:4 So that what was ordered by the law might be done in us, who are living, not in the way of the flesh, but in the way of the Spirit.
Paul has been laying a foundation in all of Romans to get to this chapter--We are new people because we have the Spirit of God in us. The Spirit of God makes all the difference and makes us totally new and different from what we were originally. I am going to do a couple of posts on what that means but lets start with what Romans 8 says about our minds.
Ro 8:5 For those who are living in the way of the flesh give their minds to the things of the flesh, but those who go in the way of the Spirit, to the things of the Spirit.
Ro 8:6 For the mind of the flesh is death, but the mind of the Spirit is life and peace:
Ro 8:7 Because the mind of the flesh is opposite to God; it is not under the law of God, and is not able to be:
Ro 8:8 So that those who are in the flesh are not able to give pleasure to God.
We are like a man with two brains, but instead of being in jars, they are in our own mind. We were born with a mind that makes decisions and evaluations based on what it can see and know by observation and experience, subject to our own unbridled physical desires and emotions. Everyone has this mind, it is called the mind of the flesh.
This mind is incapable of understanding, obeying or enjoying God. It is focused on pleasing itself.
When we become born again, we get God's spirit inside us. Because God's Spirit knows God's mind, we have a new mind too, one that knows his life and peace, his whole nature. The Spirit actually knows everything about God and lives inside us to guide us. We have a new "brain" that keeps us close to God and walking with Him the way He intended.
The only difficulty is that we retain the choice to use either mind. We can slip back and forth, from misery and defeat to glory and peace. And the mind that we feed is the mind that grows stronger.
More on Roman's 8 later, but remember--if you are a Christian---you have two brains!
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