Transformed: The Mind of Christ - Week 1: April 12, 2026

Laura VanSickle-Deavours

Transcript

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Well, in my early 20s, I was a graduate student at Whedon College in clinical psychology. And I can only remember the names of two books that I read, had to read during my two years there. One of them I loved, but that's not the one I'm going to talk about. I'm going to talk about the one I didn't like. It was called Telling Yourself the Truth. And in this book, the authors proposed that if we could just change our thinking, then our emotions will change, our behaviors will change, our mental illnesses and wounds emotionally can be healed. And though there's a lot of truth, that changing your thinking can have a whole lot of positive impact in all those areas, I knew from my own experience that changing my thinking wasn't enough. And it made me frustrated that these authors were saying that just do this and you can have all that. So as one who grew up in a Christian home, in my own mental health struggles through adolescence and early adulthood, I worked really hard to have the right thinking. And according to my Christian beliefs that I'd grown up with, but a lot of what I knew up here didn't translate to down here and what I felt. So I'm going to give you guys some examples and see if you can identify with any of these. These are just a few of the ways this can look. So for me, I knew I was created in God's image. I knew I was God's precious creation, but I did not always feel that way about myself. There were ways I felt not good about myself, especially in my appearance at that point in life, and in other ways. And I often would look to others for approval, even though I knew God was the one that ultimately I needed approval from. My actions didn't always follow what I knew up here. Have you ever had the thought, like I know I'm supposed to love my enemies, I'm gonna pray for them, I'm gonna do all the right things, but something not good happens to that person or persons, and you kind of feel some joy in your heart. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Another one, maybe you know the Bible, you know, God is taking care of people and provided for them. You personally know people that this has happened to, but you struggle with anxiety anyway. And you question is is, you know, I I know, I know that you'll do this, but I feel really anxious. So today, as we open the series, Transform the Mind of Christ, our hope and prayer for you all is that we will expand our toolboxes beyond the good practice of telling ourselves the truth. I'm not saying that's a bad practice, it's good. It's just not everything. And that we will consider together the complex interconnections between mind and heart and body that give us additional transformation, tools for transformation to becoming more Christ-like. So let's start by reading one of our theme passages for this series. We're gonna read it in two versions. The first one is Romans 12, 1 to 2 in the NIV. Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is, good, pleasing, and perfect will. And then in the voiced version, brothers and sisters, in light of all I have shared with you about God's mercies, I urge you to offer your bodies as a living and holy sacrifice to God, a sacred offering that brings him pleasure. This is your reasonable, essential worship. Do not allow this world to mold you into its own image. Instead, be transformed from the inside out by renewing your mind. As a result, you will be able to discern what God wills and whatever God finds good, pleasing, and complete. I love that the Greek word used for transformation in Romans 12.2 means to literally change form, like a metamorphosis of a caterpillar to a butterfly. It's the same word used in Jesus' transfiguration, where it describes Jesus' face transforming to shining like the sun, his clothes being bright white. The same word is used in 2 Corinthians 3.18 to describe how we're being transformed to reflect God's radiant glory, just like we are mirrors, reflecting that back. For those of us like myself that have been in the church a long time, I think it can be really easy to miss the radicalness of what God is offering to us in transformation and calling us to. And I'm not suggesting that after this series you're gonna walk away with your faces shining and our clothes shining, though that would be really cool. Um, in mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis describes transformation as follows He will make the feeblest and filthy of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly, though of course on a smaller scale, his own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful, but that is what we are in for. And keep in mind that we are transforming not always just in one direction. Um, it's not our only option isn't to grow more like God, right? We can grow in the other direction, further away from reflecting God's image, which is a little less comfortable for me to think about. Um, C.S. Lewis also says in Mere Christianity, every time you make a choice, you are turning a part of you, the part that chooses, into something a little different than it was before. And taking your life as a whole with all its innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning the central thing into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature, either into a creature that is in harmony with God and with other creatures and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God and with its fellow creatures and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven, to be the other kind means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing towards one or the other. So there's some thoughts on transformation. Now we're going to talk about the mind. The Jews of the Hebrew scriptures of the Old Testament and early Christians had a more holistic understanding of humans, not separating mind and heart and body in the ways that we have in much more recent years. During the age of the Enlightenment, which is like the 1700s, 18th century, there was a split between thinking, feeling, and our body. And reason and science were much more highly valued over emotion, subconscious processes, any other ways of knowing. And this value on reason and science is still really foundational in Western society. And again, that's not a bad thing. It's just not all that there is there. In the era we are in now, we are acknowledging more that there are limits to reason. Reason is not maybe absolute truth and not the only way of knowing. Interestingly, research on the brain is now supporting the concept of the mind as a very intricately connected system involving thinking, emotions, the body, and more. And mental health practices are starting to treat some of these other areas of the mind and finding great success. So we are moving back towards a more holistic understanding of the mind, just as in biblical times. The Bible also makes it clear that God is not fully knowable or understandable by our human brains. There are more verses, but just a couple. Isaiah 55, 8 to 9 says, For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. First Corinthians 1 25 says, For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom. We also see not logical or not rational ways of connecting with and knowing God in the Bible and human history. Examples are dreams, God speaking to people through dreams, God bringing a message to an angel, God speaking in an audible voice, God and Jesus doing miraculous things that science cannot explain. We see how Jesus came in ways to the people in the New Testament that were not, did not make sense. Nobody expected the king, the Messiah, to be born into a peasant family in a barn-like setting, and nobody expected him to die a criminal's death on a cross. So if God is beyond knowing by our rational minds, connects with us in ways that aren't always rationally understandable, and acts in ways that don't always make sense to us in our human minds, this might suggest that there are other domains or areas of the mind beyond just our logical thinking that God uses. And perhaps that means there are additional areas where we need transformation and additional paths to transformation to have the mind of Christ, which is good news for anybody like me that was like, just changing the way I think isn't enough. So back to this broader conceptualization of the mind. Dr. Dan Siegel is a renowned psychiatrist, author, and educator, and he has described nine domains of the mind that need to be integrated for optimal health. I'm going to briefly go over these and highlight how these might suggest ways that we can more fully put ourselves in the position for the Holy Spirit to transform us into Christ-likeness. And then the next four weeks, we will go over some of these in more detail. Not all of them. It's more than one sermon series here. So the first one is consciousness. We have a capacity to be aware. It's going to show you four different areas. We've got our five senses. We have the capacity as humans to use our five senses to be aware of the world around us. If you go around the spoke, then interconnectedness. That's the interpersonal. We have an ability to be aware of other people around us, the dynamics between us, the dynamics between other people. Then mental activities, we have an ability to be aware of our own thoughts, our own feelings, what's going on in our own heads, and then the interior of the body, our bodily sensations. We have an ability to be aware in those areas. So Siegel and research backs this up, says that this area of consciousness, mindfulness or awareness is essential for change, and that we can experience change just by using this one area. And so if you've heard of mindfulness practices, which has been big the last decade or so, they fall in this category. So if we desire to recognize our own sin, to hear from God, to receive God's love, to be a vessel that's transmitting God's love to the people around us, we need all these areas of awareness. Week three of this series, we're going to focus on this brain domain and the importance of using our ability to pay attention or be mindful for transformation. The next is our brains are bilateral. It calls us the horizontal domain of the brain. We have a lobe on the left and the right, and you can see that artistically illustrated on that slide. The one on the right side has a heavy responsibility for visual spatial orientation. So that's me, and I can tell where I am in space compared to you guys out there. I'm able to notice that this is three-dimensional and I don't want to walk off of it, right? It's really important. It also nonverbal communication, emotions, assessing our surroundings, are we safe or not in our surroundings, and our relational attachments. And the lobe on the left has more responsibilities in speech, logical and linear thought, sequencing and problem solving. So for ultimate functioning, we need both sides to work together. Dr. Kurt Thompson is a Christian psychiatrist, and in the book The Anatomy of the Soul, he says a left brain mode of mental operation that encounters the world in a logical linear fashion is absolutely necessary and good, but it has crescendoed over the last 400 years to dominate our cultural way of thinking to the extent that other equally important ways of perceiving the world, namely those related to the right brain, are relatively unappreciated. Research is important and helpful, but it is not to be worshipped. Left brain mental processing disregards the right brain emotional elements of trust that are necessary for life to thrive. When I know that I know something because I can logically prove it, I step away from trust. When I no longer trust, I am not open to being known, to relationship, and to love. We have focused much on having, and I say we, I'm thinking of the evangelical stream of Christianity, which highly has influenced the Wesleyan church, not evangelical as we think of it today, but that historical stream. We've focused a lot on having the right theology, the right way of thinking, which is good and important, but there's more. We've learned to read our Bibles, do inductive Bible studies, how to pray with words to God. And those are all left brain activities. And so there's so much more that we can access on the right side of our brain. And we need practices that help us to transform both the right and the left side of our brain. Then there's the vertical brain. We're going to listen to a quick description and a little video here that Dan Siegel uses to describe a model of the brain from bottom to top. So let's watch that. Anyone ever relate to having flipped your lid before? I know I have. So it seems pretty important that to be transformed to be like Jesus, we don't see many uh Jesus flipping his lid. Um I'm not gonna go there. Um it seems that if we want to regulate our brain and to to be able to have that uppermost part of our brain online and connected with the others, um we want to be able to have tools that help us with this. And notice that the spinal cord reaches out, I think the spinal cord is going down your arm to the rest of your body, both to receive information, um, to send it up to the brain, as well as the brain sending information to the rest of our body. We even have brain cells in our gut, in our heart. Is that crazy or what? We're just learning more about that. Um, but thinking about things like what does it communicate to our brain when uh John uh Benda often has us do the blessing? He has us hold out our hands. Are we more open to receiving when our hands are out like this than when we're like this? What does it mean to hold a certain posture in prayer? Um, you know, to kneel or to bow in prayer? What does it mean to hold your hands up in praising God? Do we access more of an ability to connect with God in that? Um, so we're going to be looking in the next week, actually, um of this series. We're going to look at that connection between body and brain and how can we use our bodies to be transformed to be more like the mind of Christ. Interpersonally, our brains are made to develop in an interpersonal context. We call these attachment relationships with our primary caretaker. Do you know that by the time a child is five and a half years old, 90% of their brain is developed? I was thinking of that with regard to college students and thinking that's really kind of depressing that you're working so, so hard and you've already got 90% of it done. Um but those attachment relationships influence all of the rest of the interactions we have in life. No surprise, given that we are created in God's image, we also have a God that is very relational. And one of the most obvious areas where humanity needs transformation is in our interpersonal relationships, right? Let's look at the world and how countries and the powers that be disagree with each other in our communities, with our neighbors, in our families. So we need practices that help open ourselves up to be fully and vulnerably known by God and to personally know God, practices that help us accept God's love for us and then let that love flow through to other people, practices that help us to trust God and have faith rather than just looking for certainty, always needing to know exactly why and where are we going and all the answers. Week four, we are going to focus on the interpersonal domain of the brain and corresponding paths of transformation. The fifth area is we are storytellers. One of the articles I read in preparing for this said, we love stories so much we tell them to ourselves all night long in our dreams. Just like memory, stories that we tell ourselves are impacted by both conscious and unconscious or subconscious factors. Our early experiences in life, especially with our caretakers and our attachment relationships, significantly impact the stories we tell ourselves as well as ongoing experiences in life. So if we grow up in an abusive environment, we might have a narrative running that you can't trust people. Don't ask for help. People are out to hurt you. If something bad happens with another person, it was malicious. They meant to do it. If you grew up in a relatively good enough, loving environment, none of them are perfect, but you know. Our narratives are more likely to be that people are generally trustworthy. It's good to ask for help, that you should give people the benefit of the doubt, because the other person probably didn't mean it. And there's everything in between, right? That's these are the extremes. Jesus and God are also storytellers. Week five, we are going to explore what it might mean to pay attention to the stories that you tell yourself about your life, and then to see does my narrative fit into God's narrative? And if not, what disciplines might help you find your story in God's big story? The next four are areas we will not go into in a lot of detail, but but this is all connected. So I'm just briefly going to talk about these, and there could be spiritual disciplines for these as well. Memory, as humans, we have a capacity to remember. Some of what we remember is conscious, some of it's not. States, the brain is able to create different networks for different relationships, different environments, context. You ever notice like your behaviors one way in one environment and another way in another environment? We need transformation across context, environments, and relationships. So we're reflecting the mind of Christ in all of those. Temporal means we can reflect on past and future. We're aware that we had a beginning, we will have an end. Transpirational is integrating all of the previous eight aspects. And I think this is really interesting. Says that a result of transformational or transpirational integration is quote the feeling that joining with others to give back to the world is as natural as taking care of oneself. That kind of sounds like a Christian value, doesn't it? We love ourselves well, we accept God's love, then we want to give back. So the entire point of transformation is love. We have to keep that in mind. We are transformed by love. As was read in our call to worship earlier today, Ephesians 2, 4 to 5 says, but God, with the unfathomable richness of his love and mercy, focused on us, united us with the anointed one, and infused our lifeless souls with life. That sounds like transformation. Even though we were buried under mountains of sin and saved us by grace. If the driver of transformation for you is guilt, obligation, a sense of needing to check all the boxes, do the right thing, and need to somehow summon up all the grit and power you can to transform yourself, you will ultimately be profoundly disappointed and discouraged, or self-deceived and settling for far less than what God has for you. We are also transformed for the purpose of love. 1 John 4, 7 and 8 says, My beloved friends, let us continue to love each other since love comes from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. The person who refuses to love doesn't know the first thing about God because God is love. So you can't know him if you don't love. If the end goal for transformation is just to be your best self, to be happy, healthy, then we're missing the whole point of why God wants to transform us. It's not just for us, it's not just for our families, the people we like and love, it's for everybody. Over the next four weeks, we will explore four domains of our embodied minds and identify paths of transformation to each. So week one will be the mind-body connection, two, mindfulness and attention, three, actually, it's one ahead because I didn't count today's in here, but um interpersonal nature of our minds and then the storytelling nature of our minds. And each week we will identify possible barriers to transformation. The first barrier for this week is if you have too narrow of a definition of mind, like I did early on in my Christian walk, and was just trying to change the way I was thinking. And I want to encourage you that a remedy for this is to stick with this sermon series, be willing to try some spiritual disciplines that involved areas of the mind that are underutilized for you spiritually, and to be willing to be a little bit uncomfortable. Change is uncomfortable. And so uh we're gonna talk in a few minutes about curiosity and how this can be a remedy for discomfort and to help us move through something that's new. The tools that put us in a position to have the mind of Christ, you've probably heard spiritual exercises or spiritual disciplines. If you have a negative um feeling about discipline or exercise, um, we could call them tools for transformation, um, TFTs. We want you to keep in mind that you can only be transformed by the work of the Holy Spirit in you. It's not about doing it on your own power or directing your own transformation. Instead, these are tools that put us in a position for the Holy Spirit to move and work in us and through us. A dear friend of mine and mentor, Linda Richardson, uses this metaphor. If the Holy Spirit were a ski lift, we can think of spiritual disciplines at tools that help us get in the right position. So that when that ski lift comes along, right? You gotta, I haven't done this in a long time, but you gotta show you a line, you gotta get up to the line, and then you gotta bend down just the right way, and then you need to pay attention so you know when it's coming. Well, spiritual disciplines or tools for transformation help us get ready so when the Holy Spirit comes around, we don't miss it and we're ready, and we we can can take advantage of the Holy Spirit's movement and readiness to transform us. We are also going to practice a spiritual discipline together each week in the service, and I encourage you to try this out, practice it at home as well. Um, this class that I'm going to be teaching, we are going to be sharing about what we talked about last week, the previous week. So next week we'll talk about this week and what was it like for us? We'll just kind of have a discussion. What was it like to practice the tool for transformation that we do in service here in just a few minutes? Was it a positive experience? Was it uncomfortable? Um, and then I will teach you another uh tool for transformation and we'll practice that together. So today we're going to talk about curiosity, less judging, more wondering, less jumping to conclusions, and more listening and asking questions, less criticism, more wonder, awe, and beholding the marvel of life. That's by Gene Wise. I added less seeing through the lens of our own assumptions, biases, foregone conclusions, and more looking with fresh eyes. So we're just going to take a moment, actually, about five minutes here, to practice curiosity in a form that if you're familiar with Ignatian's exam, it's kind of like an exam. If you want to know more about that, come to class next week. If you want to use your journal to write any thoughts down, to write any of these questions down so you can practice them at home. If drawing helps you connect with God, you could draw in there. I'm going to read a question, and then we'll have about a minute silence. And I want you to just uh sit with God as you ponder this question, and then I'll move to the next. There are four questions, and then I'll pray for us and we'll be done. So, our first question over the past seven days, in what ways have my choices, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors moved me closer to becoming a glorious being who reflects God's dazzling glory? Just sit with that and with God. Our next question. Over the past seven days, in what ways have my choices, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors moved me further away from reflecting God's glory? Is it with that with curiosity, not judgment? Curiosity. Next question is who will I become if I continue living as I have for the past seven days? Notice how you feel, what your thoughts are, how that feels in your body. Last question. He loves you so much. And for love, you want to love others through you. Where do you hear an invitation for transformation? All right. Thank you for being willing to practice that. And would encourage you, you don't have to go through all those questions, but it's a great practice to just ask how am I transforming to be more like you, Jesus? How am I transforming away from you? Where are you inviting me to transform? If you could practice that in your week. Some people like to do it at the end of the day or the end of their week and reflect on their week. Just gonna pray for us now. Jesus, I pray that you would lead us all into transformation by your love for the purpose of loving your world. I pray that grace would abound in each of us, that you would protect us from self-condemnation and judgment, but instead to see how you, in your great love for us, want to give us this gift of transforming us to be more like you. And I pray that you would give us each a great desire for transformation, to have the holistic mind of Christ, and that you would be preparing us to love others well. I pray this in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.