RENEWAL – YOUR MIND AND YOUR SPIRIT

RENEWAL-YOUR MIND AND YOUR SPIRIT

Rom.12:1,2 – Therefore I urge you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.

Renewal is a powerful Bible word. It means to renew, make young. It refers to the new reality of present salvation. The new wine of Mk. 2:22 represents the unheard of element in the person and message of Jesus. Renewal happens in our lives when we begin to yield our lives to the Holy Spirit. He is the ever present One, ‘I am’, and He brings us into the place of constantly being made new. This renewal effects our mind and our inner man, our spirit. Cooperating with the Holy Spirit in our personal lives changes everything, He literally makes all things new in us. Here is how Jerome describes this renewal.

“We are not being renewed in our thinking process apart from the renewal of our spirits. Nor are we renewed in our spirits without thinking. We are being jointly renewed “in the spirit of our mind[s].” Hence as we sing psalms in the spirit, so we also sing them in our thoughts. As we pray in the spirit, so we also pray in our thoughts. The renewal of “the spirit of our mind[s]” means that when the thought is clear and pure . . . then the spirit is rightly joined to it. They are so coupled as if by a cohesive glue that we no longer speak simply of spirit but of “the spirit of our mind[s].”

I love this quote from Jerome, he beautifully connects the everyday part of our lives with the spiritual. He describes renewal in a similar way that Paul did. Jerome said to sing Psalms in the Spirit and to sing Psalms in our minds. Paul said to sing with our understanding (our minds) and sing with the Spirit. This is a beautiful description of how we cooperate with the Holy Spirit on a daily and practical basis so that His work of renewal can take place in our lives. So transformation, total renovation, is happening in us. Jesus is making all things new in our minds and in our spirits.