Conformed

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Rom 12:2)

The Super Bowl is coming up shortly. This is the result of the playoffs, when the best teams in the NFL battle to to determine who is best, and this week the final 2 teams standing will play to crown a champion. Out of 341 million people in the US, there are less than 2,000 players in the NFL, so they are really the best of the best. They get there by hard work and as in any sport repetitive practice so that the very fundamentals of the sport are relegated to their unconscious mind. You may have heard the term muscle memory – that is when you’ve practiced something so many times that your body knows how to do it well with little mental input. For most of us, we experience this when we drive – we’ve done it so much that you’re able to have conversations or spend your driving time on other things. But remember when you first started to drive? It felt like you were doing 50 things at once! Now, many of us end up at our destination without really remembering the drive as we spend that time behind the wheel thinking of other things.

Renewing our mind is kind of the same thing. We should be thinking so much on the things of God that we develop a “holy instinct” – our hearts and minds will automatically respond the way God would desire us to because we have that spiritual “muscle memory” woven into our hearts.

A. W. Tozer, when speaking of the Bible, once said “Read it much, read it often, brood over it, think over it, meditate over it—meditate on the Word of God day and night. When you are awake at night, think of a helpful verse When you get up in the morning, no matter how you feel, think of a verse and make the Word of God the important element in your day. .

Another pastor put it like this: “Meditate, muse, what does that mean? It is not enough to recall what God does, but must also think through as to the significance. Those two steps are the complete process, and that is the important thing. Many Christians faint at the second step. They do the first, they think about what God has done in their life or in another person’s life, or in the past, such as the resurrection or some other event of history. But then they expect some kind of an automatic reaction to occur. They feel just to think about the event should do something for them. But it isn’t like that. “I will meditate on them. I will muse on them. I will think them through.”

There is need to ask, “What does this mean? How does it affect me? What is the significance of this event?”