Minded

KING JAMES VERSION

For to be carnally minded (φρόνημα · phronēma) is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.

ROMANS 8 : 6

Drive a car with the wheels out of line, and you learn something about it the moment you relax. Hands easy on the wheel, going straight down a flat road, and the car starts to drift. A little pull to one side, the same way every time. You can correct it. You hold the wheel a touch against the drift and the car runs straight. But the moment your attention wanders, it goes back to leaning the way it was set to lean.

That lean is the thing. Not where you steer it for a second when you are paying attention. The direction it goes on its own, when you let go.

Paul has a word for that lean, and it sits in the middle of one of the most quoted verses in his letters.

For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.

I read that verse for years as a warning about my thoughts. Carnally minded meant dwelling on the wrong things, the things I knew I should stay away from. Spiritually minded meant thinking about holy things instead. Keep your thoughts clean. That was the whole of it, as far as I could tell.

But Paul did not write a verb there. He wrote a noun.

The word is phronēma. It does not mean the thoughts that pass through your head. It means the set of your mind. The direction it is turned. What your thinking does on its own when you stop holding the wheel against it. Not the thought you catch and correct on a good morning. The lean underneath it.

And look at what he says that lean is. Not what it leads to. What it is. The set of the mind toward the flesh, he says, is death. The set of the mind toward the Spirit is life and peace. In the Greek there is not even a word for is in those lines. Paul just lays the two things down side by side. This mindset. Death. That mindset. Life and peace. As if they were the same thing seen from two ends.

So the question the verse puts to me is not the one I had been answering. It is not, what are you thinking about right now. I can dress that up for an hour. It is, which way does your mind go when you turn it loose. Where does it drift in the empty minutes. What does it reach for when nothing is making it behave.

That is a harder question, and I cannot fix the answer by gripping the wheel. You cannot white-knuckle an alignment straight. Anyone who has tried to think their way into peace by force already knows this. The lean does not come out by effort. It comes out on the rack, under a hand that knows how to set it right.

And here is what I had missed in the verse. A few lines on, Paul uses that same word, phronēma, one more time, and this time it belongs to the Spirit. The Spirit has a set of mind too. So the help on offer is not that I grit my teeth and think better thoughts. It is that the Spirit's own mind moves into mine and slowly turns it, the way a man at the shop resets a wheel, until the drift itself begins to change.

You will not know it has happened by your thoughts going perfect. They will not. You will know it the way you know a car is finally aligned. You let go of the wheel for a second, brace out of old habit for the pull, and the pull is not there. The empty minute, the one that used to drift toward dread, drifts somewhere quieter now.

That quiet has a name in the verse. He called it life and peace.

MEDITATE ON THIS

The set of my mind is taking me somewhere, even in the minutes I am not steering. The Spirit is turning it, slowly, toward life and peace.

A PRAYER

Father, I have spent years keeping an eye on my thoughts and missing the deeper set of my mind underneath them. I confess that I have tried to steer myself straight by gripping harder, when the work was never mine to do. Turn the lean of my mind toward You. In the empty minutes, when I am not watching, let me drift toward peace instead of dread. In Jesus' name, amen.

— Mark