The Vicarious Self 10 ... Your Mind Matters!

“… full of Grace and truth.” (John 1:14)

When you read that Christ, like His Father, is “full of Grace and truth,” do you feel any preference for one of these over the other? Do you find the “Grace,” you see in Jesus especially heartwarming? Are you inspired by His affirmation of God’s favor? Does it give you a surge of hope to have this confirmation of the Father’s beneficence? Do you feel loved and worthwhile just knowing this? There’s no doubt about the difference between these two aspects of our Lord’s character. “Grace,” a “Matter of the Heart,” is a term of endearment. “Truth,” in contrast, is more the stuff of the mind. It’s about reasoning, grappling with hard questions of what is “right,” and “wrong.” If popular opinion means anything “Grace,” is, in fact, preferred. Jesus messages of love have broad appeal. His insistence that we must “forgive,” if we expect to be forgiven, is not so popular. Many simply overlook it, celebrating the mercy that welcomes them and folks with shortcomings like their own, while descrying the foibles of others, demanding their exclusion from the Heavenly community. We like it when Jesus says to a woman condemned to death by a group of hypocritical men, “I don’t condemn you.” We’re not sure what to do with the rest of the story. It ends, you’ll remember, with His command, “Go and sin no more.”

Truth can be painful. For one thing, it confronts us with our “sin.” We are something less than what Our Father created us to be. For another, truth calls for change; change in the way we look at ourselves; change in the way we see God Himself. Change is difficult and often painful. So we tend to avoid it and the “truth” that calls for it.

Unfortunately, if we want the Life Christ offers, we must have “truth,” as well as “Grace.”

There’s an ancient Proverb that says, “as a man thinks in his heart so is he.” The Bible’s wisdom is that, at the core of our being, in the deepest regions of ourselves – our spirit – heart and mind interface. What matters most to us – our values, our will, our heart – determines the sort of person we are becoming. Mind – our thoughts and feelings – feeds into the heart or spirit and profoundly influences what we want more than anything else. Often it’s not clear which comes first, the thought or the will. One thing is clear. The mind matters.

A new book, “The Me I Want to Be: Becoming God’s Best Version of You …” written by John Ortberg, affirms how much your mind matters. “Becoming the best version of you … rests on one simple directive. "THINK GREAT THOUGHTS!"

“Grace,” and “truth,” … You can’t have one without the other! Until your heart embraces the truth you will never become the “TRUE YOU,” the “Vicarious Self” your Creator designed you should be initially and now seeks to restore.