“Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5 KJV).
We know we have a mind, and we know Christ has a mind. Spiritual growth requires us to have the Mind of Christ. The mind cannot be the brain, for we cannot all have the Brain of Christ. The Mind of Christ must be something that every Christian can possess that will make them like Christ. Every Christian has the Spirit of Christ, but in order for them to live the Life of Christ they must develop or form the Mind of Christ.
What is the mind? We know the mind is not the brain. The brain is a medium the mind uses to express itself publicly. The Holy Spirit has a mind that expresses His thoughts and that He uses when He intercedes for the saints (Romans 8:27). So the mind is not something physical but something spiritual.
The mind is the heart of man; the inner man; the spiritual part of our being. It is the source of our intellectual activities (Is. 10:7; Pro. 23:7), the switchboard communicating messages from the conscience (1 Sam. 24:5; Job 27:6), the source of sin (Jer. 7:24, 11:8, 16:12), the repository and directive center of thought, will, feeling, and conscience. The right spirit was the clean heart (Ps. 51:10), practically synonymous with a “pure mind” (2 Peter 3:1).
The mind is also called the nous, the responsible intellect. Bullinger writes that this word means “The organ of mental perception and apprehension, the organ of conscious life, and the organ of the consciousness preceding the act, or recognizing and judging the fact. It is generally the organ of thinking and knowledge, i.e., contemplation.” (The “organ” Bullinger is referring to is not a physical organ of the body like the brain but a spiritual organ of the spirit like the conscience.) We should therefore think of man in terms of mental and moral energy rather than in material concepts only.
The mind has an eye (Lk. 11:34) and we can have a “mindset,” a thought form, a set way of seeing things and thinking about God, ourselves, and the world. We must give up this old mindset and by the renewing of our minds (Rom. 12:1, 2) come to have the Mindset of Christ. The Mind of Christ is identical to all truth and our thought process must be molded by truth if we’re to have the Mind of Christ.
