Sermon Info
Summary
Mental health is at an all-time low in our nation today. So many people suffer from hopelessness, fear, worry, uncertainty, and more. Yet, in the middle of all of this, there is a God who longs for us to be healthy mentally. This comes when we place our full faith in Jesus Christ, and He renews our minds for His glory. We move away from allowing the thoughts of this world to have dominion over our minds, and we take captive every thought. Even in this world, through Christ Jesus, we can truly experience His peace and share this with others. Let’s advance mentally today.
Content
Messages and Mental Health
Each of us spends our lives gathering images, thoughts, and ideas about the world around us and placing them in a box we carry around with us. Without even thinking about it, we collect bits and pieces of our experiences and interactions and they become a part of the way we process events in our lives. We all are constantly developing and refining our worldview—a lens through which we engage with reality—which has the power to shape our behavior.
Memorable compliments can stick with us for a while, but hurtful words may seem to never leave us. They can replay in our minds over and over again, tearing us down. A poor experience at a church can leave us feeling timid about ever opening up again. Messages we see in movies, television, and the media can change what we see as “normal” or “good.” Much like the things we eat affect our physical health, the messages and images we consume affect our mental health.
What messages influence how you see the world, yourself, and God? We would all do well to examine our collection of messages. We need to take each one out of the box individually, and test them against the lens of the Word of God. Some of these messages need to be discarded from our basket, and replaced with the truths which are missing. And some belong there, but we might need to remind ourselves exactly why they are there.
Set Your Minds on Things Above
The Apostle Paul writes, “Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.” We are called to a holistic dedication of our lives to Christ. He continues, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:1-2). In order to fully surrender our lives to God, we need to be conscious of our state of mind and patterns of thinking. How we feel and how we act are directly correlated to how we think.
A mind conformed to the pattern of this world is a heavy mind. If we allow ourselves to define our truth and mindset based on the current way of the culture around us, we become bound to its ebbs and flows like a caterpillar is bound to the earth by gravity. To paraphrase Shakespeare, “Heavy is the head that wears the crown,” and when conformed to the world, we accept the burden of kingship over ourselves… a burden we are unprepared for and were never meant to bear. But a mind transformed in the knowledge of Christ our King is freed from the earth like a butterfly, unshaken by the earthquakes of life. We can truly find freedom and peace of mind when we “Set [our] minds on things above, not on earthly things” (Colossians 3:2).
God Wants to Renew Your Mind
How, then, can our minds be renewed rather than conformed? In his book, Renovation of The Heart, Dallas Willard says, “Spiritual formation in Christ moves toward a total interchange of our ideas and images for His.” Whatever is in our minds, we must review and exchange with the things of God, so that we can begin to see through His eyes. God wants to renew our minds—we just need to meet him in the work. Like the stream of a creek, the power of renewal is always flowing from God to us, but we need to clear the way of sticks and other obstructions along the way.
We should be very cautious and wise about what we allow in our minds. Do you stop and ask yourself whether it is good to allow the images and themes of particular television shows and movies into your mind? What about in music and news media? A Christian doesn’t need to avoid these things entirely, but we should be wary and judicial of the effects messages which oppose Godly living have on our walk with Christ. Just like your body, your mind ultimately belongs to God, and should be treated well.
Let us increasingly fill our minds with edifying messages. Paul says, “And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into His image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Let us spend more time reading and reflecting upon God’s Word, discovering who God is and who He wants us to become. Let us replace the messages of the world with the Truth and the things of God so that our hurts can be healing and we can become more like Christ.
