Renewing you mind means you actually had to have one, right?

So, in working on my BSF lesson for this past week (Rom 12:1,2) I got to answer the beloved question – what is the therefore, there for. I didn’t make it far, as I began to look back over the first 11 chapters in preparation of my answer, before I was profoundly struck by the relationship between the instruction to renew my mind in chapter 12 and the non-renewed mind described in chapter 1 (28-32). And, just in case you've forgotten, we need to renew our minds because 1) they are fallen just like all the rest of creation, so they just don’t work like they were intended to and 2) what ability we do have has been affected by our lack of willingness to acknowledge God, to the point where we may call good evil and evil good. Theologically interesting though it was, what I felt was an overwhelming sense of gratitude as I remembered the past and compared it to my present thought life.

While pondering the next entry in “how such a thing as a halfmom ever came into being”, the coincident timing of the Bible study was not lost on me for this truly is the next part of the story. Remember that we left me a broken and yielded mess, but what next? Ch 1 (vs29-31) gives an interesting description of fallen minds and with the resulting actions. Many years later (26.5 to be exact), the list of descriptors continues to make me uncomfortable: greed, envy, strife, deceit, malice, gossip, slander, insolent, arrogant, boastful, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful, because I was all, and more.

As I voraciously began to read the New Testament, my thinking began to clear and my conscience began to work overtime. I thought it was like a light switch; I had been turned off and now I was turned on, all bright and light and shiny. Somehow I missed the shiny tombstone lesson, not understanding that cleaning up from the outside in without some inside out happening only serves to make the insides worse. I missed the dimmer switch lesson too, otherwise referred to as “don’t tear out the good plants by trying to jerk out the weed roots before the soil is ready”.