At the heart of our spiritual journey is a deep need to know God and know His will.
- What am supposed to do?
- Where should we go?
- How should I deal with this?
Often we look to others in our community for wisdom. We read our Bible and other books. We pray and contemplate the choices before us. Yet we often find ourselves wresting with these questions without the security of actually knowing what God wants us to do in that particular situation.
You can know God’s will for specific items, but you must first have your mind transformed.
‘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—his good, pleasing and perfect will. ‘ Romans 12:2
The patterns of this world are spiritual, emotional, physical, and cognitive habits that dig channels in our behavior. The world digs channels that lead often to destruction and death.
An example can be the way we have learned from our family to deal, or not deal, with conflict. When a difficult situation arrises we may retreat, avoid, and hide from the situation. This type of pattern will not resolve the situation it only serves to pull us out of something emotionally uncomfortable and often leads to greater problems.
When our mind is ‘transformed’ it is reshaped with new channels carved out that resemble the mind of Christ. This produces new habits, reactions, and even outcomes. But more than that, the new mind allows us as individuals and as a community to test and approve the will of God.
In other words as we are are transformed we can hear better, more clearly, more often, the whispers of God’s Spirit.