Body of Christ Mind of Christ

I'd like to start out by reading Romans chapter 12, verses 4 and 5. For as in one body we have many members, and all the members do not have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. Now when we read a passage like that, we have to ask ourselves, does this really apply to us? Are we one body in Christ, not just as a theoretical truth, but as a functioning fact? Do we function as one body in Christ? Do we function as members one of another? What is it that causes an assembly of believers in Jesus to become a body, His body, that functions as His body? If we take the first disciples as an example, we could say that for a good number of years, in the beginning there, a few years, as they were traveling around with Jesus, they were gathered around Jesus, they worked together, they ministered together, and yet they were not functioning as a body. They were drawn together, they were really drawn by their love to Jesus.

That's the one thing they had in common. So because they loved Him, they held together around Him, but they didn't really have a lot of time for each other. They were arguing about who was the greatest, and there was competition, and there was politics, and there were all kinds of strange human, normal human things going on between them.

They were really a collection of individuals gathered around Jesus. Then one day, after Jesus was no longer with them in flesh, these people were visited by something that suddenly formed them into a body, the body of Christ, and they began to function as His body. They began to, in fact, function as members one of another.

It was like suddenly they thought of themselves as married, committed, one flesh. And as the hundred and twenty grew to several hundred, and then thousands, they were still one. For all the problems they had, and they had plenty of them, they still were members and knew themselves and functioned as members one of another.

They became the body of Christ on the day that they received the mind of Christ. When their minds were informed by His mind, they began then to function as His body. And that really began at a specific point.

Reading from Acts chapter 2, the little episode at the beginning, at Pentecost, Acts 2, 1. When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place, and suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.

Now, what came out of their mouths, what they began to speak, gave evidence that they had a new mind. They spoke of God because their minds were filled with God. Their bodies were alive with the life of God because their minds were full of God.

The Holy Spirit is the member of the Godhead who imparts the mind of Christ to His followers. So what does it mean to be filled with the Holy Spirit? To be filled with the Holy Spirit simply means that the Holy Spirit now has your mind, so that He rules your thoughts and your willing. When the Holy Spirit has my mind, then my body becomes a temple of the Holy Spirit because it's ruled by the mind of Christ.

Reading from Romans, and you'll notice how often Paul refers, and I'm only taking a few passages compared with all the ones we could find, Romans 8, 5, For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh. Those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.

So that if the mind is submitted to the Spirit and ruled by the Spirit, by the mind of Christ, then I can't help but function as part of the body of Christ. When the people of the body are submitted to the mind of Christ, they will absolutely function as members one of another. They will have to.

Then skipping into Romans 12, a few verses ahead of the passage we read before. 12. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind that you may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God.

For by the grace given to me, I bid everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith which God has assigned him. For as in one body we have many members, and all the members do not have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ and individually members one of another. So that if our minds are renewed by the Spirit and we are thinking soberly, according to the measure of faith God has given us, not more highly than we ought to think, we will fit in.

Ruled by the mind of Christ, we will function as the body of Christ. Now the Holy Spirit is at work among us as he's working in many other places. Perform us into the body of Christ by giving us, more clearly than we've ever experienced or known before, the mind of Christ.

So we take that passage that Kathy read earlier from Philippians 2.5. Have this mind among yourselves which you have in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not have equality with God, a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being formed in the fashion of man, in the likeness of man. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on the cross. Wherefore God is also highly exalted in him, giving him a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, things on earth, things under the earth.

And every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. The mind of Christ is the mind that empties itself of its glory, humbles itself to serve, and obeys God even unto death, even death on the cross. When that mind rules us, then we can't be any other than the body of Christ.

If you want to know what the mind of Christ is really like, all you have to do is follow Jesus from Good Friday to Palm Sunday. Taking a part of the passage that Fred read, and just refreshing ourselves on this, Matthew 21.6. The disciples went and did as Jesus directed them. And they brought the ash and the coal, and put their garments on them, and he sat there on.

Most of the crowd spread their garments on the road. Others cut down branches from the trees and spread them on the road. And the crowds that went before him and that followed him shouted, Hosanna to the Son of David.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest. And when he entered the Jerusalem, all the city was stirred, saying, Who is this? And the crowd said, This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee.

Now if it had been we who, if we had been on that donkey, and these people had been putting their coats down for us to ride over in palm branches and shouting Hosanna to us, we would have been strongly tempted to capitalize on that. You know, to make that pay off for us. Take that marvelous momentum and now use it to ride to some kind of power.

But his mind was not like our mind. Instead of riding this popularity to a throne, to a successful revolution, to riches, to power, to a name before men, Jesus, instead of that, submits to the Father's will and goes straight to a cross. Everything Jesus does that week, every step he takes, pleases the Father and offends men.

And if you read the book of Matthew from Matthew 21 to the end of the book, you can see how this unfolds. He begins, after he comes into Jerusalem, by cleansing the temple, by driving the money changers out of his father's house. And then, in Matthew 22 and 23, he begins to really offend the scribes and the Pharisees and the Sadducees.

He absolutely brings scathing words to them, talking about them and right to their face, calling them hypocrites, because they've been really defiling the Father's name. Then he takes his disciples and begins to teach them and prepare them, in Matthew 24 and 25, to be alert for the coming of the Father's kingdom. Then he has a Seder meal with his disciples.

Then he goes out to Gethsemane for his final draft of strength from the Father as he prays. And in his prayer, he submits to the Father's will. Not my will, your will, Father.

And then he goes to the cross to lay down his life for us, the ultimate work of the Father's love. Have this mind in you. Have the mind of Christ, and you will absolutely function as the body of Christ.

Now, the Spirit of the Lord is working among us, working among us to impart that mind to us, helping to give it to us, if we'll only receive it. And he's giving us the mind of Christ in three specific ways. First of all, he's giving us a mind that empties itself of its glory.

Secondly, he's giving us a mind that humbles itself and serves. And thirdly, he's giving us a mind that obeys God unto death, even death on a cross. We don't have that kind of mind.

None of us has that mind. That has to come to us as a gift from God. First, he gives us a mind that empties itself of its glory.

For by the grace given to me, I bid everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith God has assigned him. And when we think with sober judgment, according to the measure of faith God has assigned him, we can't do anything but come down. He was the Son of God.

He was in the form of God. But he didn't grasp on to that. He didn't hold on to that form, that divine form.

He emptied himself of it and came down and became one of us. Now the same Spirit that guided the Son in this dizzying plunge from glory to where we are wants to bring us into his mind by guiding us in a plunge from the heights of our vanity down to reality. In Jesus' case, he had glory to give up.

He had glory. But we don't. The only glory we have is our vanity.

But we have to give that up in order to come down to where we can have some freedom, where it can be real. In other words, for the glory of God, if I'm going to be ruled by the glory of God in my thinking, in my willing, in my acting, then I have to get rid of the glory of Bieber, which is vanity. If we're going to live by faith and act by faith, then we have to push the vanity out of the way.

So he said, by the grace given to me, I bid every one of you, everyone among you, he says, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith which God has assigned him. Because if we think with that kind of sober judgment, according to the measure of faith God has given us, we have to come down to reality. And when we come down to that, we're free.

And most of us have to keep, all of us have to keep coming down every day. But every time we come down to the reality, out of our cloudy heights of vanity, we have great freedom and tremendous relief. And then we can really function.

Secondly, the Spirit is giving us the mind that humbles itself and serves. Not one of us has the mind of a servant. Every one of us has the mind of the first Adam.

First Adam, Eve comes up to him and says, here, eat some of this. It'll make you as God, knowing good and evil. And Adam says, that's just what I've been looking for.

I've always wanted to be like God. Give me some of that. And he eats.

And what we're talking about now, see, is this desire to be God. Desire to eat of that tree of knowledge so I can have power over somebody else. And so what we do is puff ourselves up, and then we stand in judgment over God and man.

And we criticize and we analyze and we judge and we condemn and we sneer and we belittle in our thoughts. Even as Carol was reading that prayer, that's not just Carol, that's all of us. That's what we do.

Jesus died on the cross to wash all that stuff out of us with his blood. Then he sends us the Spirit in order to give us the mind of the second Adam, who is the Lord himself. And the mind of the second Adam is the mind of a servant.

We can't live as servants unless we think as servants. It goes both ways. It's also true that we will never think as servants unless we start getting down and washing feet.

And so Jesus imparts to us the mind of a servant by doing what he did on the night of the Last Supper, John chapter 13, verse 2. During supper, when the devil had put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, to betray him, Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, that he had come from God and was going to God, rose from supper, laid aside his garments, symbolizing his glory, girded himself with a towel. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with the towel with which he was girded. Jesus knew who he was.

He knew where he came from and where he was going. He had come from God, he was going back to God, but he was here for one reason, and he knew what that was. He was here to serve.

And this act of foot washing was a revelation of his mind. It was a disclosure of really everything he had done from the day he was born and before that. And it was also a revelation of exactly what he's going to do the next day on the cross.

Now he wants to give this mind to us. Here, take it, receive it, is what he says to us today. And he says to us very much what he said to the disciples.

When he had washed their feet and taken his garments and resumed his place, he said to them, Do you know what I've done to you? You call me teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example that you should do as I have done to you.

Truly, truly, I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master, nor is he who is sent greater than he who sent him. If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them. Blessed are you if you do them.

You know, many of us have a downfall, the need for humility and the need to be servants. We know it, we could write books about it. Blessed are you if you do it.

We don't really have the mind of Christ until we get down and start washing feet. And so in whatever way that takes shape in each of our lives, the Lord is giving us opportunities, even today, to wash feet. To be a servant.

Drive somebody someplace. Help them with some chore that needs to be done, you know, in some way. Give them a little refreshment, a little relief.

That's what foot washing was and is. God will show us. And as we get down and wash each other's feet, you know, instead of worrying, well, I mean, are you a healer or do you have the gift of prophecy? You know, start by washing feet.

And prophecy and healing and all the rest will fall into place. But every one of us is to be an expert foot washer, first and foremost. Finally, the Spirit of the Lord is giving us a mind which obeys God even to death, even death on a cross.

And in 1 John 3, 16, it says, By this we know love, because he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. Now, the mind that lays down its life is the mind that gives instead of takes. That spends itself instead of forever, conserves itself.

The mind that gets up every day and offers itself as a living sacrifice. The mind that greets God every day with a prayer, not my will, your will, oh God. And the proof that that mind is being formed in me is, what do I do when these people that I've been laying down my life for spit in my face? What do I do when these people call me a hypocrite? When they turn and walk away from me, after all I've done for them, and they never even say thank you.

If I get bent out of shape, if I'm offended, this is a sure sign that my service has not been to them but to myself. I've been building my own little religious kingdom. I've been playing some kind of spiritual politics here.

If I can handle all that and keep right on going, this is a sign that I'm beginning to learn to die to myself. I'm beginning to take on the mind of Christ. Whenever we talk about the Holy Spirit, we have to talk about this.

The Holy Spirit disconnected from the mind of Christ is no longer the Holy Spirit. And so, one more time from Romans 12, 4 and 5. For as in one body we have many members, and all the members do not have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ and individually members one of another. We are that body and we function as that body when each of us submits to the mind of Christ.

The Holy Spirit grooves over this clock, every one of us right now, and yearns, yearns to give us that mind. Are we willing to submit to that mind? The mind that empties itself of its glory, the mind that humbles itself and washes feet, the mind that obeys God even if it means our death, the death of our ego or the death of our very body. If we're willing to submit to that mind, the Holy Spirit will bring that mind into us today and he will work wonders within us, beginning at this moment.

Let's just wait upon the Spirit of God in silence and let him just speak to our hearts in silence.