Dying to Self (Reverse Your Thinking)

We're living in a fast-paced, me-first culture that desires instant gratification. We're so programmed to this self-centered mentality that we begin to see this idea surface even in the Christian life. # in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Religion & Spirituality > Christian Books.
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Paul would not call Plato, Aristotle, or Socrates stupid. These men were Gentiles of great standing and of brilliant intellect. Nevertheless, their beliefs and philosophies were futile. They were futile because they failed to produce anything of lasting or eternal value. The premises on which we base our thoughts determine what the results of our thinking will be. For example, the unbeliever as a rule thinks that life ends with death.

Consequently, suffering is avoided and pleasure is pursued see 1 Corinthians The Christian believes that real life begins with faith in Christ and never ends. The believer in Christ understands that he or she has been chosen for salvation for a purpose, to bring glory to God.

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Consequently, all that is done should be to His glory 1 Corinthians The unbeliever sees all of life revolving around his own personal interests, and so self-interest is always the focus and servanthood is viewed with contempt. It is no wonder, therefore, that the mind set on the flesh is vastly different from the mind set on the Spirit see Romans 8: After describing the mental condition of heathen Gentiles, Paul presses on to disclose the causes of their mental dullness. Their thinking is futile because they are ignorant. Neither does ignorance seem to refer to what one does not know. It may be brilliant ignorance, but when compared with the truth of God, it is ignorance.

The mind of man and the heart of man are closely inter-twined. Hardness of heart keeps one from seeing things as they really are. The mental condition of fallen Gentiles ultimately works itself out in the moral lives of these unbelievers. Men who are excluded from the life of God do not reflect the righteousness of God in their conduct.

Those who are mentally blind become morally callused. They lose any sensitivity to what is right or wrong. Consequently, they give themselves over to the pursuit of fleshly pleasure. But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God 2 Timothy 3: Such men are not merely overcome by strong fleshly passions, they actively engage in the pursuit of these passions.

They do not dabble in sin, they immerse themselves in it. They pursue the satisfaction of their fleshly appetites with a passion. They are greedy for fleshly pleasure. They can never get enough of it. They are, we would say, addicted to the pursuit of satisfying their fleshly urges. Paul has already begun the transition from the mental decay of the Gentiles to their moral decadence. He is already turning from the Christian and the world to the Christian and the flesh, from external temptation to internal temptation. I believe that Paul is referring to the conversion experience of the Ephesian saints in verse Paul may not even be attempting to distinguish between evangelism and discipleship here, but rather is only seeking to show the continuity between his teaching in this epistle and that which they had already received.

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It most certainly is not the normal way of referring to conversion today. Paul assumes otherwise, perhaps because some of those to whom Paul was writing came to faith directly or indirectly through his ministry at Ephesus see Acts Coming to Christ, as Paul believed and practiced, was not just an experience. It was learning Christ. Is Christ only a man, or is He also God?

The difference is of great importance, and it is only from learning the doctrines of Christ in the Scriptures that we will know the answer. I wonder how biblical our evangelism is, compared to that which we find in the Scriptures. When Jesus evangelized, He taught.

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Everywhere we find Jesus speaking in the gospels, He taught. There is a reason why faith in Christ and learning are closely related. This is explained in verse Jesus is not just a teacher; He is even more than the teacher. Jesus is the truth: Jesus is the truth. To come to Him in faith is to come from death to life, from condemnation to justification, from sin to sanctification, and from ignorance to true wisdom.

You cannot come to faith in Jesus Christ without changing your thinking. This is what true repentance is all about—changing your mind, and coming to see things as God does. And so it is that Paul links evangelism and discipleship. Coming to Christ by faith is the result of learning about Him see Romans Our relationship to the world and to our own flesh is simply the outworking of the gospel which we should already have learned in coming to Christ. If, as may be the case today, some have not learned these general things of which Paul speaks in verses , then the gospel has not been fully or faithfully proclaimed.

In the first verses of Ephesians chapter 2, Paul described the unbeliever as being subject to the world, the flesh, and the devil. In most instances, the devil exercises control over lost men by means of the external pressure of the world and corresponding internal inclinations of the flesh.

But here Paul is dealing with our manner of life in principle, in general terms. Our fleshly behavior is the outgrowth, the expression, of our inner fleshly nature, just as Christian conduct is the outgrowth and expression of the inner man, created and empowered by the Holy Spirit:. Paul persists in emphasizing the continuity between our conversion to Christ and our conduct in Christ, which should be evident in our manner of life.

Are we to continue in sin that grace might increase? How shall we who died to sin still live in it? In Christ, our old man has been crucified, put to death.


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In our daily conduct, we should crucify the flesh daily, and put aside the conduct which springs forth from fleshly desires. In Christ we were made alive, raised from the dead and seated with Him in the heavenlies see Ephesians 2: We should therefore walk in newness of life, manifesting the work of the Spirit of God in and through us.

It is by His power that we are both motivated and enabled to live in a way that pleases God:. Lust promises pleasure, but it ultimately produces death see Romans 6: Deceit is lustful in that it never seems to be satisfied, it always wants more victims see Proverbs 1: Jesus warned of the danger of attempting to remove evil, rather than replacing it see Luke While the old nature is continually being corrupted by the lusts of deceit, the new nature is renewing us, in accordance with the nature of God and His righteousness and truth.

The old nature is being corrupted, the new is being renewed. The old is deceitful, the new deals in truth. The old is sinful, the new is righteous. The old is driven by lusts, the new by the character and purposes of God. Christ did not save us in order that we may live any way that we choose. He saved us to live godly lives, and thus to live in a way that is radically different from our lifestyle as unbelievers. Our conduct, as Paul has indicated in verse 1 of chapter 4 is to conduct ourselves in a manner that is worthy of our calling in Christ.

The conduct which God requires of Christians should not come as a surprise to them after they have been saved. The gospel, as preached by John the Baptist, Jesus, and the apostles, called men to repentance as well as to faith in Christ. Men were required to turn from their sin to Christ, and it was clear that this meant a new way of life. It is as though we fear that men will be receive Christ if they know what is involved.

The irony is that the gospel, the true gospel, is the power of God unto salvation. We then rely more on our cleverness and deceit than on the power of the Holy Spirit to convince and convert lost sinners. When we share our faith, let us tell it like it is. God is sovereign in the salvation and spiritual growth of those whom He has chosen.

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Let us not leave this text with a passive view of our spiritual life. God has made every provision for our sanctification, and we are to obediently make use of them, for His glory and for our good. It is almost impossible to overestimate the importance of the truths conveyed in the passage before us. While the verses which follow it will spell out specific conduct which befits the Christian, this text speaks of the basis for our conduct in general terms.

It is our commitment to the general exhortations of this passage which will greatly affect our compliance with the commands that follow. The Christian lifestyle will not be lived out by those with a pagan mindset. It is the Christian mindset of our text which works itself out in the conduct which befits our calling in Christ. Our pagan culture believes that the past is the key to the present. What we think and how we act, we are told, is the result of our past.

It is only by understanding our past that we can live as we should in the present. In other words, the past controls the present. The Bible reverses this. Paul teaches us that our thinking and conduct in the past was the outworking of our unregenerate thinking. Paul insists that we refuse to allow our past to control us in the present. Instead, Paul teaches us that what we now are, in Christ, is what should override and overrule our past thinking and behavior.

Could the rats have been in a similar conscious state immediately before death? The short answer is that we don't know because correlation isn't the same as causation. As tempting as it is to draw a link between these surges in neural activity and consciousness, we face two barriers in doing so.

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The first problem is that we don't know whether rats experience consciousness in the same way we do — or at all — so we don't know what this activity profile means. Second, even if rats are conscious, we can't conclude from their brain activity alone that these bursts of activity reflect consciousness.

To do so would be to assume that gamma activity is exclusively associated with consciousness it isn't , and to fall prey to a logical fallacy known as reverse inference. Borjigin and colleagues are careful to avoid this trap — at no point in their paper do they argue that their rats experienced NDEs. Still, just why the brain should put on such a show immediately before death is a mystery.

Does it reflect an attempt to make sense of highly unusual internal signals? Is it a coping mechanism for stress? The researchers were careful to rule out pain as an explanation for their findings — they found the same bursts of activity when death was induced painlessly using carbon dioxide rather than cardiac arrest.

To answer these questions we will probably need to run similar studies in humans. One approach would be to record EEG in patients during death. Would you volunteer for such a study on your deathbed? Another approach may be to induce similar bursts of gamma activity in people while they are awake and test for heightened levels of consciousness. As Cardiff University neuroscientist Dr Dave McGonigle puts it, "Seeing if NDEs can be triggered by neurostimulation, using experiments that induce increased gamma synchrony in humans, might represent a way to go beyond correlation to causation.


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