Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered outside the gate. Therefore, let us go forth to him outside the camp, bearing his reproach. For we have no continuing city here, but we seek one to come.
Select a thought to read by choosing a collection, the month, and then the day:
“Should it be according to your mind?”
Job 34:33
“Let this mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus.”
Paul, in Philippians 2:5
When we grow in grace, we learn that our heavenly Father is far better and wiser than we knew. We see ever more clearly that His ways are foreign to our natural minds and that God is far different from what we first imagined Him to be. If God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, and His ways are not our ways, and if His thoughts and ways are as much superior to ours as heaven is above earth (Isa. 55:8–9), then God cannot be the God we first think He is, and His ways cannot be what we first think they are. What this means is that if anyone hopes ever to know God, he must first be willing to forsake his own ideas about God and he must prepare himself to be surprised by what he learns about his heavenly Father.
Jesus warned us, “That which is highly esteemed among men is an abomination in the sight of God” (Lk. 16:15). Nevertheless, the carnal mind that all of us have, or have had, clings to the fiction that we know God simply because . . . well, simply because we think we know Him.
If anyone forsakes his own ways and his own thoughts, and “returns to the Lord, then God will have mercy on him, for He will abundantly pardon” (Isa. 55:7). In other words, all that God asks us to do is to trust His thoughts instead of our own and live in His way instead of our own way. And to do that is only to admit that life is not “according to our mind,” but according to His.