Dial In with Jonny Ardavanis - The Christian Mind: How to Win the Battle for Your Thoughts | Brad Klassen and Jonny Ardavanis

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

Discover the crucial role of the mind in the Christian life with Dr. Klassen, professor at The Master's Seminary, as he explains why Scripture repeatedly emphasizes renewing your mind. Learn the biblical three-stage approach to conquering negative thoughts, taking every thought captive, and maintaining vigilance against spiritual attacks. This powerful conversation explores practical strategies for mental renewal through Scripture, meditation, and thoughtful consumption of media. Perfect for believers seeking to love God with their whole mind and transform their thinking according to biblical truth.Watch VideosVisit the Website Buy Consider the LiliesFollow on Instagram

Well, Dr. Clausen, thank you again for sitting down. You know, it says for a believer, there's so many commands in Scripture. It says that we are to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, and then it says our mind and our strength. And there's this importance of the mind in the Christian's life. It says in Colossians 3, we're to set our minds on things above. We see even in the transformation that takes place in the life of a believer that we are to be renewed in our mind. Romans 12, 2. Ephesians 4, 23 says we're to be renewed in the spirit of our mind. It says, I'm looking here in 2 Corinthians 10, 5, that we're to take every

thought captive. And so we see this reality of the mind's importance just replete throughout the Word of God. I want you to just speak to that and why we need to understand that as a Christian, maybe even call into play there how Satan uses our minds to prevent us from seeing the glory of God. Talk about the mind's importance and why it's even a battle for the Christian. Yeah, that is a very important topic for us as believers. The topic of the mind so much in Christianity today is so focused on other things, primarily on emotions. in other expressions of Christianity, you'll have the emphasis placed on ritual, on liturgy, on mindless repetition. Jesus even addressed that as he addressed the Pharisees. And instead, you have Jesus, as well as the Old Testament law itself, calling upon the people of God to love God with their minds. Christianity, biblically speaking,

is first and foremost, if I can use the term religion, it's a religion of the mind. It deals with truth. Jesus himself even said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. And when we look at John's gospel in the prologue, Jesus is described as the word, which is a reference to truth. He is truth. And so biblical Christianity is first and foremost a matter of the mind. And to grow as a Christian is to grow in your mind. You will not be able to grow if your mind is not growing, if your mind is not being cultivated, if you're not taking in truth, if you're not meditating and being renewed in the mind, there will not be the whole person transformation that is envisioned in a text like Romans chapter 12, verses 1 and 2. So the mind is crucial. And you mentioned

2 Corinthians 10, and there Paul gives us a helpful text that walks us through the importance of the mind as it relates to dealing with Satan's wiles, the fiery darts that come from Satan. Believers will sometimes think of those darts as merely just bad circumstances or some kind of wrong emotion. But really the fiery darts of Satan come from or are related to thoughts. They're related to the mind. In fact, the name devil itself is the accuser. He is the accuser. Or another important title for the enemy of our souls is that he's the tempter. And those things begin in the mind. And so even looking at texts like 2 Corinthians 10, the Apostle Paul provides a really wonderful three-stage approach to dealing with the challenges that we face in our minds.

And this three-stage approach that he gives in chapter 10 of 2 Corinthians really help us think through the procedure of dealing with wrong thoughts. And the Apostle Paul does this by using the analogy of ancient warfare. And he begins by saying in verse five, he says, we are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God. He likens bad ideas to a fortress. And that's apropos because in our minds, we still carry with us elements of thinking from our old life. The kind of thinking that was habitual for us in our unsaved status. We were depraved in our minds, as the Apostle Paul says elsewhere. And our minds were wrapped up in deceit and ignorance and enslaved to sin.

So Paul first says, we've got to attack those lofty fortresses, the walls, the towers that have been raised up against Christ and the knowledge of Christ. And notice again, the emphasis on truth there, against the knowledge of God. It's a matter of the mind of truth. And in the attack on any city, any army knew that it first had to take out the high places. It had to take out the towers. It had to take down the walls. You can't have victory without going after those things. And so that's the first stage. And what does that look like? It means we recognize that there are these thoughts that are made up of all kinds of ingredients, all kinds of elements.

They're like mini syllogisms, premises and conclusions, calculations. And they're still floating around in our mindset. And we've got to come across them as these fortified ideas that have been set up against the knowledge of God. And we've got to destroy them. Secondly, Paul then says we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. In ancient warfare, after you've breached the walls and destroyed the towers, you're able to go in and you take the inhabitants of that city, the soldiers, the leaders, you take them captive. And you don't let them just go. If you're going to have decisive victory, you have to eliminate the enemy. You have to take them captive. And that's the extent to which we must battle in our minds. The Apostle Paul says, liken your thinking and the battle that takes place over truth to this army that has to go in, breach the walls, and then take every element, all those tiniest of premises, take them captive. Don't let them go free. There's no neutralized

zone. There is no neutrality. There is no syllogism or calculation, no smallest element of thought that somehow is allowed to escape the lordship of Christ. It must be taken captive. And then he goes on to say in verse six, the third stage, and we are ready to punish all disobedience whenever your obedience is complete. That third stage would be the vigilance that an army had to exercise once it has conquered a city. The army wouldn't just come in, destroy it and leave. And a vigilance over the possibility that there are still some lurking in the shadows who will try to regain the city. And we have to think of our minds that way. Even if we come to a time where we have taken these thoughts captive, we dare not let our guard down.

We dare not think that while I've conquered this, I can move on to other things. Instead, what is so vital is vigilance. Now, an area of pornography, they may apply some of this process in a faithful way and all of a sudden find, hey, I've gone two weeks or three weeks without a lustful thought. And they think that the battle's all over. And then they'll fall and they'll fall big. And what's missing is that third stage, that vigilance that's needed to look for what's lurking still in the shadows and to ensure that there's nothing left in that whole ideology, that whole system or framework of thinking. No tiny element is left that will seek to regain control and begin to inflict damage again on the Christian's mind. So it's a very comprehensive approach. Because of that, a lot of Christians say, well, that's just too much. That requires too much energy and attention. And then it goes to show in their lives.

Undisciplined thoughts eventually catch up to the person and lead to a very undisciplined life and a lot of heartache, a lot of pain, a lot of consequences for that undisciplined mind. As Solomon says, you know, the one who doesn't keep guard over his heart is like a city without walls. Essentially, you've got to reconstruct those walls now around the city, but now the walls and the towers that are constructed are made thoroughly of the truth, thoroughly of premises and calculations that are completely consistent with the lordship of Christ, and then you've got to guard that city. Yeah, it's so important in what you're saying regarding lust. You could take any specific sin, whether that be gossip or the way that you use your tongue, and out of the heart the mouth speaks,

and the heart is conjoined to what you're thinking about with your mind. You could take anxiety and the worries of the world, and you could think about the reality that two verses after Paul says, don't be anxious for anything. He says, whatever is pure and noble and true and excellent and lovely. Think about those things. Think, think, think. Yeah, that's right. And then, so all those realities are so prevalent throughout the scripture. So let's say I'm listening, Dr. Clausen, and I go, I want my mind renewed. I understand that I'm on board. I understand I was formerly hostile in mind. And even to your point, Peter says, prepare your minds for action. Paul says, renew your mind. But

that's a passive imperative. So it's something that happens to us as we submit our life to the word of God. So how do I renew my mind? And why is even understanding God's part in my pursuit of that so important so that we don't get sideways? Yeah, how do I renew my mind? Well, first of all, because it is your mind or because it is about the truth, you've got to have your mind exposed to the truth. And that's going to come through various sources. First of all, your own reading of the scriptures. The psalmist says, thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against you. So we have to be active in that constant intake of truth. We are bombarded from the moment we get up to the moment we lay our heads on the pillow

at night with all kinds of messages. And more than ever, we live in a culture and a society and a generation that is exposed to ideas at a pace never before seen in the history of humanity. So we have to counteract that by taking in Scripture. Now, that can come through various means. It will come, first of all, through that regular habitual practice of reading through the Scriptures, a regular plan for daily time in the Word. It'll come through things like memorizing scripture. It will come through listening to sermons and listening to podcasts where the podcast is all about wrestling through biblical truth and applying it to life. It will also, and very importantly, come through your involvement in the local church, which is climaxed every week with the gathering of the Lord's people

on the Lord's day, sitting under the preaching of the word, and you come to that ready to listen. You've done steps ahead of time to make sure that you're rested, you're clear, you're focused, and you'll take that in. But there are myriads of ways that you can bring the Scriptures into your life, and that's crucial. Another venue for this, or an exercise, I should say, is thoughtfulness. And I think this is really where we need to do a lot more work in our own lives. It's easy for us to identify a Bible reading plan or to attend Bible studies and things of that nature. But to take it more internally. Like meditating. So how do we think upon these things? So you take the truth in, but you've got to take that next step then and ruminate. You've got to go back over and read again or think in your mind, okay, what does it mean that I must believe this about God, that I must confess this sin, that I must treat my brother in this way.

I've got to handle that, tackle that with my mind and think through it. Much as a scientist would observe some kind of object that he's studying, Look at it from all kinds of different angles. Weigh it. See it under the microscope. Look at it in the most minutest of ways and also in the big picture kind of ways. But when it comes to the renewal of the mind, that's really where it starts to happen when you develop that discipline of meditation, of contemplation, of thinking God's thoughts, and thinking of all the different ways that that truth will apply to the many different aspects of my life. That's so important. I think even the element of meditation is going to cause us to be necessarily sensitive

to the reality that even if we're looking at Paul's analogy of the fortress, that we can even as a Christian begin to prepare our minds for action, which is war language, and we can set up necessary defenses. But unless we're meditating on the truth of scripture, we may inadvertently leave ourself vulnerable to even maybe things that are morally neutral that still leave us vulnerable and maybe a battle that we're actually facing. So maybe even just finally, what are maybe things that we should ask ourself, you know, from the shows we watch,

the music we listen to, the people we interact with that might not be explicitly sinful and yet it divorces our attention and our thoughtfulness from the things and truth of God's word to maybe something that, you know, we're maybe becoming passive and forgetting that we're in a battle. Yeah, well, when I look at my own struggle with the flesh, I realize and reading scripture, you get this description of all believers struggling with their flesh.

We're very, still, we're very narcissistic. We love to think thoughts that make ourselves feel good. Self-pity is a form of that. Anxiety is all about wanting to feel good, but worrying about not feeling good. Lust is all about trying to gratify ourselves at the deepest levels. It just goes on and on. And when you look at your thoughts throughout the day, it's helpful to consider how many of the thoughts that I think are all built around trying to make myself feel good. And so acknowledging that as a default position of our flesh and the realm of our battle, we have to be careful about what we'll expose expose ourselves to. So whether it's music, whether it's entertainment, whether it's social media, knowing that my default position is to fill my mind with things and think upon things which will seek to gratify myself, which is always a black this particular entertainment or this music or this reading, if you're reading something, is it seeking to fan the flames of my internal hunger

for narcissistic thoughts? Now, different people will be at different stages. And so you don't want to come up with all kinds of legalistic do's and don'ts in many areas. You can't have access to the internet or you can't have a TV, you can't have a computer and all those kinds of things. Rather, you have to take it much deeper than just those minimalistic ways of handling things. And instead, for yourself and others, we need to understand that there is no neutral territory. And if this kind of context is actually feeding my bent for narcissism, then I have to get serious. If it's a weakness for me, cut it off. If I can't handle it, I have to be man enough, vigilant enough. I have to approach it with a warlike attitude, and I have to make changes in my life. That might be a little different for me than it is for you.

And so it's not something that's merely solved by external legalistic do's and don'ts. It's much more deeper than that. And it requires us to do a lot of self-examination and not be careless of what we put into our lives. As the saying goes, garbage in, garbage out. And if we find that in our lives, the garbage that the things that are coming out are garbage, our behaviors are less than what they should be. They're not dignified. The words that we speak are increasingly dishonorable. The thoughts that we're entertaining, we've got to look at, okay, what is the intake here? And if I want to change the output of my life, the experience of my life, I really have to examine all the

things that I'm taking in. Yeah, it's so important even as we consider like how to grow in your faith and knowing that even the exercise of faith is an exercise that takes place in our mind and the Christian life is a battle for our mind and even what you're saying about the truth of God's word, exposure to truth, knowing and trusting that the spirit of God takes the word of God to renew our minds and in turn transform us into the image of the one we behold in God's word. And there's so much to be said about the mind and what you've said, Dr. Clausen, has been so helpful. So thank you for your input and biblical perspective in this regard.