How to Think Like God

I include my notes from my Sunday message as a public service (haha). Sadly, I will not be able to get these notes up to the standard I usually set for my published writing. Please forgive any issues. The audio will vary a lot from the manuscript. That’s showbiz. Thanks.

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For the next season we are going to look at
being an artist disciple in the Kingdom.
Our warriors are disciples.

I once found the best description of discipleship,
in all places, on Wikipedia.
A disciple in the ancient world 
was a person who followed a master teacher
and tried in every way to become like them,
in dress, in speech, and in learning.
As I put it a few years ago,
A disciple is a master copy of the original.
Jesus is the Icon of the Father,
and a disciple is a copy of the Icon.
A disciple is a walking work of conceptual art.
A disciple is the ultimate method actor,
playing the role of Jesus for all the world to see:
responding like Jesus,
motivated by the Father, just like Jesus.

And as Jesus says in many places,
and in this gospel lesson from Mark 8,
if you want to be my disciple,
you must take up your cross
and follow me.

This chapter is the heart of discipleship.
1.   You must confess that Jesus is the Christ.
2.  You must think like God, not humanity.
3.  You must take up your cross, deny yourself
and follow Jesus.

Mark 8 is an important place in Mark's gospel.
Mark is unique in that there is no origin of Jesus.
Jesus appears on the scene, and from the first verse,
begins preaching the kingdom.
And that message creates the conflict that
builds to chapter 14, 
the cross.
The gospel of Mark is all about the cross.
It's high drama.
And the key to the drama is revealed in this chapter.
In August I talked in depth about the importance 
of the feeding of the multitude.
So we need to note that 
this chapter begins with the multitude.

And the chapter ends with a quiet moment 
around a campfire.
Jesus is very busy,
and then he reflects on the busyness with his disciples.
These are not followers.
These are men who have decided to pattern their lives
on the life of Jesus.

And Jesus
asks them a question:
What's my latest poll numbers?
How am I trending on Social Media?
Have you seen the papers?
Who do people say that I am?
This is just a setup.

And the disciples relay to him the buzz on the street.

And then Jesus says,
who do YOU say that I am?

And this is the first step in discipleship.
In the old days
preachers would say "God has no grandchildren."
We are not all God's children.
Natural children are not his,
God's children are adopted,
and born again, from above,
by water and the Holy Spirit.
And this birth begins,
as it says in Romans 1,
"If we confess with our mouth,
Jesus is Lord,
and believe in our heart that God raised him from the dead."
And so Jesus tests them.
"Who do you say that I am?"

And Peter says:
"You are the Christ,
the only Son of God."

And Jesus tells him that he is blessed,
because he could have only known this by revelation.
And this is what sets Peter apart.
He was the first to truly
listen to God and act on it.
He had an unusual spiritual sense,
and he was developing the ability to receive revelation.
And out of this,
he makes his declaration.

In order to be a disciple,
you need to receive revelation from God,
and confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.
This is the beginning.

But this story doesn't end there.
Jesus begins telling them about the cross.
This is the part of the drama
where tension builds toward the climax.
The tone of Mark's gospel is going to shift after this chapter.

And when Peter hears this new revelation
he immediately challenges Jesus.
And Jesus stops him.
Get behind me Satan.
You are not thinking like God,
but like men.

And this,
honestly
is the heart of discipleship.
It's from Isaiah 55:8-9:
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
    neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
    so are my ways higher than your ways
    and my thoughts than your thoughts."

The greatest obstacle to discipleship and going forward
in the Kingdom is thoughts and opinions.
Again and again
I am confronted with people
who have made a confession 
that Jesus is Lord,
and had an experience of God
but they are hamstrung 
by thoughts and beliefs
that are not transformed.
They believe a lot of worldly ideas
couched in religious sounding language.
And as Jesus says to Peter,
this is satanic.

Discipleship is not about gradual self improvement 
or therapy on your worldly life
that makes you better and better.
Discipleship is not about a becoming more moral.
Discipleship is not about learning the right theology.
Discipleship is not about ticking off boxes of training,
religious rituals, or even education.
Discipleship is all about
presenting your body,
daily,
as a living sacrifice,
and being transformed
by the renewing of your mind.

And how our mind is renewed is very counter intuitive.
We think mind renewal is about information:
a form of cognitive-behavioral therapy.
You get more good information
and that displaces bad information.
As this now ancient maxim from computing says:
garbage in, garbage out.
And bad information is bad.
Most people have no idea that they are being discipled
by movies 
media,
and general cultural swill.

Jesus said you renew your mind this way:
If any man would come after me, 
let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 
For whoever would save his life will lose it; 
and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. 

Your mind must be renewed.
And like everything in the Kingdom,
mind renewal comes only one way.
Your old way of thinking
has to be nailed to the cross.
It has to die.
And in dying
you begin to experience a resurrection in your thinking.
The Holy Spirit and the Holy Scripture
begin to give you 
the Mind of Christ.

All of us struggle.
The struggle is usually in an area
where we are trying to get our way
and massage God into accepting it.
It's subtle control.

We often quote I Samuel 15:23,
"rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft"
to get people to obey our rules.
We rarely hear the second half of the verse:
"And stubbornness is as the sin of idolatry and iniquity."
Derek Prince once said that stubbornness is making an idol of your own opinion.

When you are called to discipleship,
you are called to listen to the Lord and do what he tells you.
Someone this week sent me a more succinct version of this: Hear and obey.
God is going to transform your thinking,
in the Greek this could be your soul
or your mind.
And this transformation begins when we stop
coming up with our human ideas and asking God to bless them.
That is human, worldly thinking, 
and it always drifts into diminishing Jesus
until you have Christianity without Christ.
Human beings without the cross
always drift off into allegiance with Satan.
Original sin is always about 
trying to do it apart from a relationship with God.
It always begins with good intentions
and ends in hell.

In my life,
transformation in my thinking looks like this:
Often God will ask me to fast from something.
And immediately,
I discover that some simple thing in my life
is actually a stronghold where I am choosing to do it my way
and not God's way.
And often,
there is a thought process behind what I was doing
that was opposed to the Lord and his Kingdom.

This happened with social media.
God first told me to go off social media in 2016.
I resisted.
"But Lord,
I need social media to sell my books and build my ministry."
(Never mind that God said not to build a ministry.)
The Lord continued to gently speak to me.
And in 2017 I took the Marketing Seminary with Seth Godin.
And after analyzing my marketing activity,
I discovered social media was not helping me one bit.
In fact, it was costing me money,
and causing me trouble.

And when I walked away I noticed that books kept selling,
the Friday email kept growing,
and I kept meeting and speaking to new people.
And I didn't have someone constantly telling me how to think.
We are being discipled all the time.
Buildboards are discipling you.
Music in shops is discipling you.
Taylor Swift is discipling you.
Streaming is discipling you.
Social media is discipling you.
If you drink from a poisoned well,
you will eventually get poisoned.
Note that the things around bombarding you with messages
all have artists and creative people in them.
This is why Satan needs to control the arts.
Whoever controls the arts,
disciples the nations.
This is why I talk about basic discipleship all the time
and not about the arts. 

Let me share some of how this looks in my life.

Lately the Lord has said 
"no news and no booze."
(For the record,
I have one pint of Guinness on Thursdays)
(And also for the record,
this is happening in the context of my daily rhythm 
of prayer, Bible study, communing with Jesus
and listening to God.)

When the Lord touched this area,
I discovered a major area of pride in my life that needed to die.
I discovered that one pint a week
dulled my senses enough
that I would miss opportunities when they arose.
God said news was like acid on my faith.
I was being discipled to think like the world
and not like God.

I don't have time to tell you how much removing sugar
transformed my thinking.

And for those of us who are called into the 
creative professional realm
this is really important.
We are called into a real spiritual war zone.
The standard line is 
if a Christian is going to make it in the arts
they have to outdo those in the world to get to the top,
and then you have a platform then you can use that to advance the Kingdom.
Of course, many of those who choose this route
are not deep disciples.
This goes really bad for most folks,
and by the time they get to the top,
they forgot they were Christians.
And some become high-profile agents of Satan.  
Just do a search on Duck Duck Go.

Others find it safer to create an alternate Christian eco-system
where everybody is just as worldly as the world,
but squeaky clean, 
smiley, 
and mean.

Did he really say that?

When you go out into the real world,
things are very different.
Babylon is a very dangerous place.
New York,
London,
Paris, and Rome
are tough places.
You have to be as wise as a serpent,
and as innocent as a dove.
And the only way you can do that 
is to get quiet
and not run ahead of God.
You have to say,
not my will,
but Yours.
I will not do it my way,
or the way I was told it would make me successful.

Doing what God says 
is going to transform your thinking.
Because God never asks us to do something for the obvious reasons.
God asks us to do things
to train us
and to shift our way of seeing things.
It is never for the obvious reasons.
God never lets you know why you are doing things
until you have done them.
And then you understand.
Understanding comes after obedience.
Abraham didn't know why he had to leave his country
and go to the place God showed him.
We know.

God calls us to come and die,
and then God gives us the reason why.

That's how transformation happens.

At the end of his life,
Paul was in jail.
He thought he was a failure
who sent a few letters to little bands of followers 
scattered across the world.
He didn't know someone would save all those letters.

Listening and obeying will change you.
You have no idea what you are doing.
But you need to do it.

This is costly grace.
This is discipleship.

As Bonhoeffer said,
it is costly because it demands we give up everything.
It is grace because we are called to follow Jesus Christ.

Confess Jesus Christ as Lord.
Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
Deny yourself, take up your cross,
and follow him.