This Holy Week as we contemplate our Lord’s sacrifice at Calvary on that first Good Friday, we pray among other things that we all may more fully realize the import of Romans 12:1-2. As surely as the Lord Jesus Christ offered His body as the ultimate living sacrifice to atone for our sins, all in accordance to the will of the Father,  He calls upon us as His followers, by the mercies of God the Father, to present our bodies (everything we are, mind, body soul and spirit) as a living sacrifice to Almighty God as well. How? By living lives holy and pleasing to Him and thereby demonstrating our love and worship for Him. The parallel to the cross of Christ is so clear. We are to mortify / slay our flesh ... crucify our flesh daily ... and thus present ourselves a living sacrifice to God, holy and acceptable.

Christ’s temptation and agony in the Garden was an intense spiritual struggle which involved every aspect of Christ’s being, including His mind as well as His Spirit.  At the end of this struggle, the Lord resolves Himself with those powerful words “...nevertheless, not My will by Thy will be done, Father”. In similar fashion, we are encouraged in Romans 12:2 to not be conformed to this world, but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds, so that we may prove/discern exactly what is the good, pleasing and perfect will of God for our lives. This is what picking up our cross daily truly means.

I believe the following account from Robert J. Morgan’s book, One Hundred Bible Verses Everyone Should Know by Heart, with regards to Romans 12:2 is particularly on point, not only with regard to our Lord’s intense struggles with temptation in His battles with Satan, but with regard to our own personal struggles with the world, the flesh and the devil. Here is Morgan’s account. 

Dr. Martin Luther King once told of riding the bus across town every day to attend high school. In those days blacks were required to sit at the backs of buses while whites sat in the front. Even if there weren’t any white people on the bus, blacks still could not sit in the front. If all the “black seats” were occupied, riders had to stand over the empty seats reserved for whites. “I would end up having to go to the back of that bus with my body,” said Dr. King, “but every time I got on that bus I left my mind up on the front seat. And I said to myself, ‘One of these days, I am going to put my body up there where my mind is.’” 

Dr. King was stating an essential, inviolable rule in life. Our bodies usually end up where our minds are. Our brains are a complex aspect of God’s creation, and our minds are the fountainhead of our lives. “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he” (Prov. 23:7, KJV). Marcus Aurelius wrote: “The most important things in life are the thoughts you choose to think.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson added, “A man is what he thinks about all day long.” 

Every temptation comes to us via our thoughts, making the mind the battleground of the soul.  

When we come to Christ, a change begins in our minds and thinking. We – our personalities and everything about us– are transformed by the renewing of our thoughts. The Greek word “transformed” is metamorpho, from which we get our word metamorphosis. We experience an inner metamorphosis as our minds are renewed by God’s Spirit and His word. The Phillips Version put it like this: “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mold, but let God remold your minds from within, so that you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good, meets all His demands, and moves toward the goal of true maturity.” 

Morgan next lists some key Bible texts about the mind, which are very interesting to contemplate in light of the intense mind struggle that our Savior had with Satan in the Garden hours before the cross, as well as the struggles we face in our own lives.  Here they are. 

  • Test me, Lord ... examine my heart and mind. (Ps. 26:2)
  • Give me an undivided mind to fear your Name. (Ps. 86:11)
  • You will keep in perfect peace the mind that is dependent on you. (Is. 26:3)
  • Set your minds on what is above, not on what is on the earth. (Col. 3:2)
  • You are being renewed in the spirit of your minds. (Eph. 4:23)
  • Love the Lord your God ... with all your mind. (Matt. 22:37) 

Morgan then ends his account with the following quote from James Montgomery Boice: 

[Transformation] happens by the renewing of our minds, and the way our minds become renewed is by the study of the lifegiving and renewing word of God.

Isn’t it interesting to contemplate that the Lord thwarted Satan’s first assault early on in His ministry in His temptations in the wilderness by directly and accurately quoting back to Satan various passages of Scripture. I have no doubt that in His prayerful time of agony in the garden and His struggle with the power of evil, it was the words of the Father that strengthened His soul as well.

I pray that as we contemplate our Lord’s sacrifice for us on the cross which we remember this coming Good Friday, that it will also cause us to more deeply rely upon the truths of God’s word and enable us to successfully thwart the attacks of the evil one every day of our lives as we crucify our own flesh for His glory and according to His will. Soli Deo Gloria!