You're listening to Mountain View Church Audio, Christ-centered teaching from the Wilderness City, Whitehorse, UConn. Here's this week's message. Hi, my name is Dagmar. I'm reading from Philippians chapter 4, verse 4 to 9. Rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I will say rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.
And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you. Today, we're wrapping up our preaching series looking at God's target for various aspects of our lives. Now, over the past five weeks, we've talked about God's target for our bodies, for our money, for our family, for our work, and for our friends. And today, we're going to be focusing on God's target for our minds. So before we begin, I want to give you a second to consider something. Is the mind simply the brain, or is it more than that? Oh, wait. Biblically, there is a connection between the mind and the heart.
Where one is inclined, the other is as well. Tim Keller, in his book, Preaching, Communicating Faith in the Age of Skepticism, said this, in the Bible, the heart is the seat of the mind, will, and emotions, all together. We can see this even right near the beginning, back in Noah's day. Genesis 6, 5, the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. Did you catch that? The intentions of the thoughts of his heart.
God is seeing something more here than just people having bad thoughts in their head. He's seeing corruption in the very hearts of humanity. It seems that what resides in the heart can have a very significant effect, not only on our mind, but on all of us and on all that surrounds us. There is a mind-heart connection that we see come up throughout the Bible. In Matthew, we see a Pharisee ask Jesus, which is the greatest commandment in the law? And in Matthew 22, verse 37, Jesus responds, and he said to him, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.
Jesus himself is confirming that God wants us to be fully engaged and invested in him. He doesn't say he wants just our mind or just our hearts. He wants both, and he connects them with our very soul. God wants all of who we are, mind, heart, and soul. Now let's go back to the mind and just focus there for a minute. Let's take a minute there and think about how all this plays out in ourselves, our minds. I have many thoughts.
I have so many thoughts. And they can somewhat be disorganized. In my head, sometimes it's like, you know those pictures of traffic that stress you out a little bit like this? Everything seems to be going in a general direction. Most of my thoughts are on point and heading in the right direction. But then there's always these ones that are trying to sneak in from the side and it's not really their turn. And then there's one going the wrong way completely. And it's just, it can get complicated. I know there are at least a few of you out there that can relate to this. And you too have many thoughts that don't always proceed in an organized fashion. Some of these thoughts, some of them just seem to show up just to annoy you.
they can show up for a second, make a little noise, and then they're gone. I can be doing something important, like being focused on work or school, then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a thought will just come crashing into my mind, and I'll be like, man, what's up with camels? They're like weird bumpy horses. And that's it. And the thought has made itself known, and it's gone. Now, that's a sort of a funny example of some of the stuff that can go on in your head, but sometimes you have bad thoughts show up. I could be doing the same work or school, totally focused, and then all of a sudden, in my head, out of nowhere, I'll be like, man, so-and-so is sure messing up their life.
Or, man, so-and-so was sure a jerk today. Or something like that. And that's it. Again, the thought has made itself known. It's gone. Never to be thought of again. Didn't really mean anything. It just showed up. And it doesn't always just stop at mean things either. All sorts of thoughts about bad or wicked things can enter our brains out of nowhere and then leave just as quickly. However, sometimes the thoughts stay. And that's dangerous. Even more unsettling is the fact that they may already live in you and be coming from some deep, dark corner of your heart. And though they take on the appearance of a fleeting idea,
they're actually representative of a spiritual heart condition that you may not even be aware that you have. In the Psalms, we see a moment where David is crying out to God about exactly this. He's aware of his sin and the corruption in his heart, and you can feel his frustration. And he takes this to the only one he knows can help. In Psalm 51.10, David cries out to the Lord, create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.
If there was one prayer that I would advise every person, including myself, to bring to the Lord every single day, it's this one. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Now, there are many different ideas and analogies and illustrations out there about how this mind-heart stuff works. And one that has stuck with me is the rule of 18 inches. I was talking to someone once about this, and they began talking about the rule of 18 inches. And I'm not sure where this originated or who to give credit to for it, but it's good, so I'm going to use it. It goes something like this. It's very simple.
But when a thought enters your brain, it's a real short 18-inch journey to your heart. If we let our bad thoughts make that journey, we're in trouble. I would put it this way. Thoughts can show up in your head as if they're simply there for a visit. Your heart is where they can take up residence. And they can do a ton of damage. Not just within you, but to everything around you. Now, we know now that modern scientific understanding states that it's not literally in the heart muscle that these things take place. And we also know that it's not like there's this lineup of thoughts waiting outside our ear.
for their turn to enter and then get into the brain and then either make the journey down to the heart or fly out the other ear, never to be heard from again. We know it doesn't work like that. But whether people over time have believed that thoughts originate in the mind, in the heart, or from outside of us, God has made sure that he's covered all of the ground with that greatest commandment that we saw in Matthew. When Jesus says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, he's making sure that no matter where humanity's understanding of anatomy is or philosophy at any given point in time, we understand that he means all of who we are should be focused on him. and he should be our center. In the book of Mark, Jesus explains that from within us comes that which defiles us. Talking about these thoughts that are inside. Jesus was eating with his disciples, and the ever-watchful Pharisees noticed that they had not washed their hands, which meant that they were unclean according to the ceremonial law, and eating food while in a state of uncleanliness defiled a person. So you'd have unclean hands, you'd grab the food, the food would then be defiled, you'd eat the food, you'd be defiled. Jesus uses this moment to show them that there's a much bigger problem that needs to be addressed than unclean hands, unclean hearts.
In Mark 7, 14 through 15, it says, and he called the people to him again and said to them, hear me, all of you, and understand. Now, Jesus doesn't say this all the time. So we know when he says this, hear me, all of you, and understand, he's saying every single one of you needs to hear this and you need to get it. He goes on to say, there's nothing outside of a person that by going into him can defile him, like food. But the things that come out of a person are what defile him. He goes on further to explain this in Mark 7, 20 through 23.
And he said, what comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of a man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within and they defile a person. That's quite the list. And if we look in ourselves, we can find some of those. Our human nature is flawed.
Now, if we look at this passage, Jesus tells us a lot about why we need God to be our center and the focus of our love of our minds and our hearts. Why we need a heart change, which is made possible by Jesus' sacrifice and resurrection. Now, he doesn't get into how he's going to redeem our corrupt minds and hearts in this passage, but he highlights the sinful and defiling state or defiled state that people are in. Humanity is sick. Corruption infects the human heart. It just does. And Jesus is the cure. Now, one must first show a person that they are indeed sick.
before presenting them with a cure. And Jesus is showing the people that on their own, they are, and we are, hopelessly ill. And they will remain that way, and so will we. We all need Jesus. Human nature desires to live without God. We think we're better off on our own without him. And we want to do what we want to do without being governed or directed, even by the one who created us and knows what's best for us. We think we know what's best for us. And we have this tendency to find comfort in what we know and what is familiar, however broken it is.
And we cling to that instead of opening ourselves up to God's great promise and submitting to his desires for us and his future for us. He has promised us a new life, an existence with him in us via the Holy Spirit and with him in eternity as a part of his family, adopted children of God. We're given freedom from all that binds us and chains us to sin and death. Now that is not to say that we will never struggle with sin while still in this life. We for sure will. But it does mean that we're no longer a slave to it. God promises hope.
fulfilled in him, in Jesus. And we cannot enjoy that while we still make ourselves and our desires the central target for our minds and our hearts, the center of our lives. He has something much better planned for us, but we can't see it. And we can convince ourselves that what we know is better and safer solely on the basis that it's more familiar than what God offers us. We can cling to what we know and what harms us because we cannot even imagine the good that awaits us. Now, one reason that this is so hard for us to let go of that which continues to harm us
is that we have an enemy. An enemy who's very clever and knows all too well how to best keep us bound and chained. Satan, the adversary, can keep us so caught up in ourselves that we completely ignore God. And even if we do hear God calling, we prioritize ourselves instead. In his book, Instruments in the Redeemer's Hand, author Paul David Tripp puts it this way. He says, sin not only makes us helpless rebels and idolaters, it also reduces us to fools.
We tend to love lies, to be self-deluded, and to be the strongest believers of our own empty arguments. We are susceptible to the enemy's tricks and temptations. We live for what is already in a state of decay and ignore what will remain forever. That last line, we live for what is already in a state of decay and ignore what will remain forever. When you really think about that, that hits hard. Eternal God is here right now in our present. He's outside of time and space, of course. He's not bound to a thing like the present, but that's where he meets us, in our present. And he's got open arms.
And so because of that, there's two places that the enemy wants to keep our minds and our hearts focused. Number one, the first one is in the past, in that which has already happened. And we can find ourselves overcome by our memories and our experiences. We can easily get lost or stuck in the past. See, trauma lives here. Pain lives here. Regret lives here. There are things that have happened to us or things that we've witnessed or even things that we have done that we cannot seem to move beyond. These can be crushing moments.
that completely change the trajectory of our lives or paralyze us in place. Things we never think we'll be able to recover from. Damage done to us or by us that seems to always be with us. And it comes with a very loud voice. And this voice can convince us of all sorts of things about ourselves. This voice uses our past failures as evidence to us and says, you have no worth. You're beyond redemption. You've always failed, so why even try? The same voice uses our past trauma as evidence against us and says things like,
you are not loved. You are irreparably damaged and cannot be healed. God must not even be here because if he is, how could this have happened to you? This voice is the voice of the enemy. He keeps us pinned down and stuck in the past so that we don't even have a hope that our future could be something better. If you're someone who is chained to your past, Satan wants you to sit here today, to sing the songs, to read the verses, hear all this stuff about God and his desire for you, and walk out that door without any of it having made a dent. Because you just can't believe that Jesus could want you.
The other place we can get stuck or lost is in our imaginations. And we can be completely overcome and overwhelmed by what hasn't even happened and may never happen. The second place that Satan wants to keep our focus and keep our minds and our hearts locked up is in a future that hasn't even happened yet. We can find ourselves overcome by our imaginations and what could go wrong. We tell ourselves stories of what the future holds for us. And it can so cripple us that we don't even have the will to get out of bed in the morning. Fear lives here. Anxiety lives here. Hopelessness lives here.
Our imaginations can run wild and knock us out before we even step into the ring. Again, that loud voice rings out from our heads and our hearts. You will be let down. You will fail. Why even bother trying? You know how it's going to go. By keeping us so focused on a future that seems so real and inevitable in our minds, Satan makes sure that we can't possibly respond to God in the present. We're too distracted and fearful of what comes next to find comfort in the fact that Jesus is here. When we're stuck in anxiety about the future, we are the center of our story. This is so sneaky.
Our imagination generally stars us, and everything revolves around us. We may not even realize this, and our worries may be disguised as worries about other people, like our family or friends. Our worries may seem like they're about their situations, but they're our worries. It is us focusing on us and unconsciously using others as a justification to do so. We are lost in our imaginations about things that have not even happened yet, things that we have zero control over, and yet we obsess and we fixate as if we can somehow control the future by thinking hard enough about it.
Now, if somehow you don't see the enemy using either your past or your future to keep your eyes from God, keep your mind from God and your heart from God, maybe he's just going to stick to the many distractions already built into your daily life and dominate your present. The enemy wants you to immediately go back to life being about you as soon as you walk out the church doors. You get into the car, the kids are screaming, radio's on, you're hungry, you're already thinking about the game tonight and then the work you have to do tomorrow, the deadlines at the end of the week and the lawn you need to mow and on and on and on. I guess now it's probably more appropriate to say the snow you need to shuttle. but you instantly go back to you and your own existence and responsibilities being the focus of your life. And everything is filtered through the lens of how it relates to you. The enemy loves this. What if we could walk out those doors or finish watching online and the focus of our lives still be God and continue to be God throughout the week? We would still have all the things that we need to attend to in our lives, but it would no longer be about us. In a movie, the tertiary characters' identities and purpose in the story, they come into focus as we learn how they relate to the main character. It's the same with life.
Our identity and purpose comes into focus when we begin to see how we relate to the main character, Jesus. If we walk away from church on Sunday morning thinking about how what the Bible says or what was preached will best fit into our lives, we've missed the point. It is idolatry to put ourselves at the center of the story. If we walk away thinking about how what the Bible says or what was preached shows us more about how we fit into Jesus' story, then we're right on track. This is his target for our mind and our hearts. Him.
We are created by him for him. Our lives are not about us. They are about him. The Bible is not about us. It is about him. I'm running a course right now called Christianity Explored. And the producers of the course explain that the aim of the course is to answer a few simple questions. Who is Jesus? What did he do? And how should we respond? That's it, folks. That's our target. Jesus is God who condescended to us to meet us where we're at in our lives, human existence. And he experienced everything as we do.
Our sin has separated us from God and we could not reach back to God on our own. We're hopelessly lost, condemned to eternal separation from him in hell as a result. But Jesus changed everything. He's fully God and fully man. He lived life fully as a man and did what we cannot do. He lived perfectly without sin. He's the only person not under condemnation and as such was the only one who didn't deserve death. Yet in his great love, he traded our sinful condemnation for his righteous innocence. He became the guilty before God.
so that we who believe and trust in him and repent could become righteous in God's eyes. Not because of anything that we did, but because of what he did for us. He took all of our sin on himself and paid for it in full, dying on the cross to pay the debt. He fulfilled the justice of God that day. God is just, and justice requires that sin be paid for. In Romans 6.23, Paul says, for the wages of sin is death. That means is what we earn for our sin, and every one of us has sin, is death. That is the price, the cost.
But it goes on to say, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus, our Lord, the opposite of death. Sin equals death. Okay, that formula stands. And sin did equal death that day. It was just our sin equaled his death instead of our own. And then on the third day, he defeated death itself and he rose to life, making a way for all of us to do so. He includes us in his death. It is as if we died that day too. And we are included in his resurrection.
That's what we're celebrating when we do things like baptism and communion. We're celebrating his inclusion of us in him. He ascended to heaven to prepare our place. And we have his assurance that our eternal future is secure and beautiful. And we are given the right to become children of God, adopted. It is his story, yet we get to be a part of it. But the glory belongs to God. Paul, in his letter to the church at Philippi, sums this up, sums up the target for our mind rather well. So we're going to close with this. Philippians 4, verses 4 through 9.
It says, rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I will say rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there's any excellence,
If there's anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things. And the God of peace will be with you. So think about it. Whatever is true, honorable, pure, just, lovely, commendable, excellent, praiseworthy, Jesus and his desire for us, the kingdom of God, encompasses all of these things. Keep your mind and your heart aimed at him. He is risen. He is on the throne and he is your target. Let's pray.
Father, thank you for this series. This has brought a lot of things to light that we look at in our own lives and we realize that we're not aiming in the right place with a lot of these things, Lord. And our minds and our hearts, we can be so distracted and sidelined. Lord, I pray you would just give us focus. I pray that deep inside of us, you would instill a desire to hit the target, instill a desire to focus on you so that we can know you, so that we can learn more about you, so that we can understand you and the relationship that you offer us. Lord, help us make you our priority because we need you to do that. Our human nature wants to look all over the place.
but you're the best place to look. Thank you, Lord, for giving us this message of hope in Jesus, this story that we get to be a part of, that isn't our story, but we're in it. We're included in it because of your love and your grace. I ask these things in Jesus' name. Amen. If you prayed to receive Jesus today or would like to connect with our church community, visit mountainview.church and click the connect link. If this podcast and radio ministry has been a blessing to you, please consider partnering with us or making a tax-deductible donation at mountainview.church.
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