Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Vol 2:28 Being in Mission: Living Centered in Jesus – Loving God with all our mind

This is the last installment of six focusing on living centered in Jesus. As previously blogged, I stated that “to be missional is to have Christ Jesus as the center of our purpose, focus, and direction (heart), to have Jesus as the center of our spirituality and meaning making in our lives (soul), to have Jesus as the center of all our living and in all what we do (strength), and to have Jesus as the center for our thinking and speaking (mind).”

To be missional is to have Christ Jesus as the center of all our thinking and speaking.

I relate this perspective to loving God with all our mind.

What does it mean to think and speak Jesus? One thing it does not mean is that we use Jesus’ name in every sentence or conversation – but rather that our thinking and speaking is centered in what Jesus would think and talk about, not so much content-wise, but the manner in which he addresses God’s desire for the wholeness of all humanity and creation.

A couple of years ago during Lent, the congregation I serve focused on Anabaptist spirituality using a resource by David Augsburger entitled, Dissident Discipleship: A Spirituality of Self-Surrender, Love of God, and Love of Neighbor. The first practice that Augsburger identified was the practice of Radical Attachment. He expressed that “radical attachment to Jesus is not believing something about Jesus (a pietistic experience), or believing in Jesus (a conversionist experience), but believing Jesus (in discipleship) and believing what Jesus believed (in imitation)” (p. 23).

To think and speak like Jesus has to do with believing Jesus and believing what Jesus believed. Jesus is more than the object of our faith – in which it could be argued that we set the tone of what or how we believe (in Jesus). To believe Jesus – to not only listen to him, but to be influenced by him, and to believe what Jesus believed – to be shaped by his belief in God, his mission, his love for humanity, his worldview, is to be transformed in all that we are and do – also transforming how we think and speak.

Do we think and speak in ways that place the agenda of our lives ahead of others, even ahead of God’s missional agenda for the world? If so, then we are thinking and speaking in ways which are not centered in Jesus. To think and speak centered in Christ is, in no matter what we do because all life is not wrapped up in Sunday worship, is to have the eyes of Christ – to grow noticing what Jesus noticed when Jesus took notice of people and situations all around him. It is also to have the ears of Christ – to grow hearing what Jesus heard and how Jesus heard as he gave attention to the people that he encountered. It is to have the mind of Christ – growing thinking about how God’s reign addresses and engages normal everyday events. It is to have the speech of Christ – speaking in ways that give voice to God’s passion for humanity, in ways that reveal the presence and concern of God in a broken and in need of healing world.

To think and speak centered in Jesus is to live being very conscious of the presence of God, through the Spirit of God, in every aspect of our living. Even though life is about caring for ourselves, our families, etc., it is not merely about us – we have been called out of the world to be a new human community demonstrating the purposes and mission of God in the world – living in such a way that we demonstrate God’s relationship with us and we with God, and living noticing and naming what God notices, expressing and extending the compassion, grace, and hospitality of God in every encounter we have.

To think and speak centered in Jesus is to realize that we are always on the lookout for where God is showing up. It is living an intensely God-aware life which shapes our worldview, our thinking, and our speaking.

I think this is what Paul was alluding to in his letter to the Church in Rome when he talked about “being transformed by the renewing of your mind,” a transforming that reframes us in ways that we no longer conform to the pattern of this world (cf. Romans 12: 2) – in everything, including our thinking and speaking

This Christ-centered way of thinking and speaking is also expressed in Paul’s letter to the Church in Colosse – “set you minds on things above, not earthly things. For you died and your life is now hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:2).

Thinking and speaking centered in Christ changes the way we are and changes the way we are with others. May we be open to love the Lord with all our mind, being ones who are grasped by the Spirit of God to think and speak in such ways in the world that we express what and the way Jesus expressed hope and grace to a world in need of shalom.

No comments:

Post a Comment