Minds of Clay

One morning recently I was reading Isaiah 55 when verse 9 rather leapt out and punched me on the nose. You see, the day before I’d heard myself speaking in a meeting, and as I spoke I was internally questioning whether anything, anything at all that I was saying was even remotely close to God’s heart. Blah, blah, blah, I listened to myself, blah, blah, blah. I seemed pretty confident and coherent but hardly touched by the divine; Hmmmm. And then verse nine the following morning from the World Boxing Council:

As the heavens are higher than the earth

So are my ways higher than your ways

And my thoughts than your thoughts

God may be close, Christ is with us even until the end of the age, but that distance between the divine mind and the human effort sometimes seems to have closed so little, and on my good days I see it in myself first and in others second. Then on the phone that afternoon I heard myself talking again and reflected as I was talking on and on that if I was God I’d give myself a slap with Isaiah 55:9 too. Yes we carry our treasure in jars of clay, we speak with lips of clay and we think with minds of clay.

I can see why Paul writing to a badly behaving church in Corinth didn’t ask the church to simply abandon and shut down the spiritual gifts because of their misuse; to back away would be to exchange one form of diminished church for another. Paul’s plea to a church to eagerly desire the greater gifts is a call to abandon the low valleys and ravines of our thoughts and to ascend to the higher thoughts and ways of God. Our lower thoughts serve the church poorly and the world even worse.

It highlighted to me the need for the prophetic, the wise and the discerning to emerge prayerfully from Christian leaders and the Christian body. And those of you that know your 1 Corinthians will be pointing out that it’s all there in chapter two: none of us can say ‘we have the mind of Christ’ without the Spirit, the One who knows the thoughts of God. (I’m resisting finishing with ‘it is the pneumatic that changes the pathetic into the prophetic, although that might become a three point sermon at some future point.)