I must have asked the question wrong, because I’ll never forget his response. He said, “Be careful. It sounds like you’re talking about mind control.”
It sounds like you’re talking about mind control. I’ve come to the conviction that he was more right than he could have ever known. Your mind-set controls your mind, and this can be both good and bad. If your construction of reality has been shaped subconsciously by the influence of others and the experiences of your own life, you may be under the control of others far more than you realize.
There are layers of language that describe this phenomenon. Sometimes the language you use is worldview. The concept of a worldview entered our language in the 1850s. It comes from a German word that is describing a comprehensive conception or image of the universe and of humanity’s relation to it. Others talk about our mind-set, which is also fairly recent language, first used in the 1920s. And while worldview deals with our comprehensive view of reality, mind-set deals more with our personal attitude, intention, or disposition toward life.
When you know your mind, you begin to see that your worldview and your mind-set are inseparable. If your view of the universe is that it is generative, creative, and unlimited in its resources, you will have a mind-set of generosity and will engage life with open hands and profound optimism. If your worldview understands the universe to be the result of arbitrary chance or of mathematical determinism, your mind-set will filter out any proof that would support the contrary.
In the most practical sense, what matters most is how you see life. Your internal mind-set designs your external world. If you believe the world is full of possibilities, it is. If you believe the world is filled with fascinating people, you will find them. If you believe the future is waiting to be created, you will create the future that is waiting for you. If you believe in love, you will find love. If you believe in hope, you will find hope. And the reason you will find them is because you will bring them with you.
We don’t simply find the world we are looking for; we create it. This is why the warrior must know their mind. Your mind is where your future is formed. If your mind-set is formed by fear and anger or by greed and envy, that’s the only kind of world you will ever find. You will never fully understand that you found that world because you created it and compelled it to come.
The warrior trains their mind to know the good and beautiful and true. This is the war they fight within themselves, and this is the world they fight to create. We have a warm word for living in the past: tradition. In the theological world, it’s known as orthodoxy, and in the world of science, it’s simply called truth.
You cannot take every thought captive one thought at a time. This would lead to madness. You can capture your thoughts only by proactively creating the filter through which those thoughts are processed. To begin to take every thought captive, you must ask yourself, Where did those thoughts come from, and how did they get into my head? The process of taking every thought captive begins by identifying the source of your thoughts and the filter through which those thoughts are sent out or allowed in.
Mind of Your Own
We already know through our cognitive processes, such as selected sensory perception, that we are not aware of everything we see—that our brains filter out, without asking us permission, everything they assume is irrelevant for our survival. We see only what we need to see—except when we don’t. There are those moments in which critical information has been filtered out because it was wrongly perceived as irrelevant.
The same holds true with the thoughts that rise out of our subconscious into our conscious minds. Your mind-set filters out information that disagrees with your view of reality. And if it doesn’t filter it out, it distorts it to conform to your view of reality. The thoughts that your mind-set allows to move quickly through to your conscious mind are the ones that reaffirm already held beliefs and convictions.
The same researchers who assess that we have up to sixty thousand thoughts a day also assess that up to 80 percent of those thoughts can be negative and repetitive.53 That would mean that forty-eight thousand negative thoughts come crashing into your brain every single day of your life. You may be aware of only half a dozen of them.
Maybe that would be a great exercise in self-awareness. Take a moment and write down every negative thought that comes to mind. Then write down every positive thought that holds your attention. Which seem to most naturally come to the surface for you?
The extreme version of mind control would cause you to no longer be able to think for yourself. The opposite version is to actually believe you can think for yourself, because you’ve never taken time to deconstruct your mind-set. You never even ask yourself the hard question, How did I come to see the world this way?
When the apostle Paul was writing to the Romans, he instructed them, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will”54 This may be one of the most commonly referred to passages in the Bible, yet we rarely know how to apply it. What does it mean to “conform to the pattern of this world”? Far too often this was denigrated to moralizing over a person’s actions, but that’s not at all that Paul was talking about. When the apostle speaks of not conforming to the pattern of this world, he’s actually confronting our mind-sets. There is a pattern of thinking that is formed inside a person who does not believe in God. It is interesting that Paul sees the process of breaking free from conforming patterns as the transformation of the renewing of our minds. The warrior must see the world from a new perspective. The warrior sees life from a different vantage point. The way of the warrior is the path to a new mind-set. The warrior has a new mind.
It is no small thing that Paul says that only with this new mind can you become a new you. So often the will of God is described as something to be received rather than something that must be perceived. Paul tells us that when our minds are renewed, it is then and only then that we are able to test and approve what the will of God is. When we see the world from this new mind, we will see that God’s intention for us is good and pleasing and perfect.
Imagine having an infinite number of futures right in front of you and each one of them is as easily accessible as the others. All you have to do is choose one. The challenge is that all of them are invisible to you and are perceivable only by the material that you bring into the moment. Historically, we have been taught to think of the will of God from a linear perspective. His will becomes more of a tightrope that we either walk on or fall off of. It’s this kind of limited view of the future that causes us to speak in terms of God’s perfect will and God’s permissive will. Once you have fallen off the tightrope of his perfect will, all you are left with is a merciful version of a divine plan B. The future is more beautifully complex than that. It makes perfect sense that an infinite God would have an infinite number of beautiful futures awaiting us. In fact, one of the most reassuring promises in Scripture is that God can create the most beautiful future out of our imperfection and brokenness. When Paul says that we will be able to test and approve God’s good, perfect will for our lives, we think of one path, one line, one road.
What if the future is far more complex and beautiful than this? What if there is an endless number of futures awaiting us but the portal through which we enter into those futures is shaped by the choices we make? Paul connects having a new mind with creating a new future. The future is not linear; it is dynamic. The future is not determined; it is created. This is why it is so critical to know your mind. It is in your mind that the future begins. It is through the transformation of your mind that you can usher in the future only God could have planned.
The only thing better than our imagining a better life is creating it. The only thing better than imagining a better world is creating it. The warrior understands that the wor
ld’s best future will not come without a battle. You must fight for the future that you dream of. The warrior does not fight to hold on to the past but rather to take hold of the future. The future belongs to those with the courage to create it. This is the way of the warrior. The warrior remembers but does not look back. The future is coming from only one direction and that’s forward. The warrior has learned that if their mind is lost in the past, they will lose their future.
Have you ever felt that there was an opportunity that you missed and you don’t know how you didn’t see it? It’s almost as if we’re color-blind, but the blindness is actually related to the future. It’s not that you must choose a future; it’s that you must choose the future.
Your mind-set is the filter through which you see your potential futures. If you enter into life with optimism and hope, you will see an endless number of futures filled with optimism and hope. You will see possibilities and opportunities all around you. You will see wonder and beauty. You won’t see just one choice that could lead to a more beautiful future. The only thing that may overwhelm you or make you feel paralyzed is that you have so many good choices from which to choose. Wouldn’t it be an amazing life if you had to keep saying no to extraordinary choices—to an alternative and beautiful future? So often we act as if there are only two choices for the future: a good one and a destructive one, the one that God chooses for us and the one we choose for ourselves.
I think the future is much more like the garden, where humanity’s story began. We tend to focus on the two trees, but the garden was full of trees. One of the first commands of the Bible was for Adam and Eve to eat freely. They were allowed to eat from the fruit of any tree in the garden except for one. Most of the time, we act as if there is only one good choice and an endless number of choices that will destroy our lives. This is not how the story of the world began, and this is not how the story continues.
When your mind is shaped by hope, you do not see simply two paths; you see an endless number of paths filled with opportunity, possibility, and beauty. However, if your mind-set is shaped by cynicism or fear or doubt, then the only paths you see in front of you are the ones that are filled with pain and disappointment, with failure and hardship.
Have you ever considered that what you allow to shape your mind is what shapes your perception of the opportunities in front of you? That’s why when you are full of fear, every possible future seems terrifying. That’s why when you carry inside your soul wounding and brokenness, every potential future is fraught with disappointment and betrayal. Your mind-set shapes how you see reality, but more important, it shapes how you see your future.
How many futures can you see right now? Are they filled with joy, with friendship, with success and fulfillment? Or are they the kinds of futures you would do anything to avoid? I think why so many of us are paralyzed, why we hold on to the past and live trapped in the moment, is that we can’t see our way out into different lives. We can’t see our way through to better futures. It’s important that we note that even though our mind-sets filter the information that we receive consciously, it determines what information moves from our subconscious into our conscious minds. It also becomes like a telescope that points us to a very particular future, but what it allows us to see is not all that’s available to us.
The hardest thing to do is convince someone who is overwhelmed with despair that there is actually a future and hope. One of the most difficult things to do is convince someone who has been heartbroken, who has lost at love, that there is a person out there who will love them completely and will long for their love in return. It is very difficult to help someone who has come to the end of a dream, who feels devastated by failure, to realize there is a greater future waiting for them, that there is another dream waiting to be awakened.
One of the greatest gifts we can give others is to help them have new eyes with which they can see their own selves, their own lives, and their own future. Paul’s words become more poignant: “Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world. Do not allow your mind to be shaped by any patterns that would steal from you the hope that God created you to live in.”55
A Mind for the Future
Whenever someone tells me they don’t have faith, I ask them if they have anything planned for tomorrow. Because if you have anything planned for tomorrow and you don’t have faith, that’s the most absurd decision you’ve ever made. How can you plan something for tomorrow when tomorrow doesn’t exist? How can you plan something for a week from now or a month from now or a year from now without faith? If you really didn’t have faith, you would take all your vacation time right away. After all, why would you leave it to the future, which is not guaranteed? Now, that’s an act of faith.
Faith shapes your mind-set. It shifts your perspective about your limits or the lack thereof. It’s perplexing when someone puts their faith in something that seems absolutely absurd and then it comes to pass.
I remember watching Super Bowl LI. At one stage in the game, the New England Patriots were down about twenty-five points against the Atlanta Falcons. Every one of us in the room was certain that the game had already been decided by halftime except for one person: my son, Aaron. He never gave up on the Patriots. He seemed to somehow believe the entire time that they would come back and win. We thought he was ridiculous. Over time, though, you could just feel the entire emotion of the room shift as quarterback Tom Brady kept leading one successful drive after another. At the end of the game, the rest of us were stunned to have witnessed one of the greatest comebacks in Super Bowl history. But Aaron had been simply waiting for us in the future, for reality to catch up with faith.
We may call it economics, but Wall Street is an industry of faith. Education is completely built on faith. We pour into the lives of an emerging generation, believing that if they are well taught, they will create a better world. Imagine how it would shift your perspective of the future if you actually began to live by faith, if you allowed faith to shape your mind-set. This would radically change the way you would see every circumstance in your life. Even in the most difficult and painful times, you would see every moment as a promise that God would meet you there. You would never see anything in life as a dead end because you’d know that God would always guide you to a way through.
Faith changes our perceptions of the future. Faith always sees a way. In Hebrews we are told that faith is the substance of things unseen and the assurance of things hoped for.56 I don’t know about you, but I have found it’s much easier to have confidence in things I have rather than things I hope for. In the same way, it’s much easier to have assurance about things I can see than about things I cannot see.
When we have confidence in things hoped for, we are instantly connected to the future. Hope cannot exist in the past. That’s called regret. Hope can exist only in the future. Faith connects us to the future. It also shifts the parameters of our limitations. When we have assurance in things seen, we are limited by what we have, by what we know, and by what we can prove. When we have assurance in things not seen, we now add to our resources everything that exists in the realm of mystery, uncertainty, and endless possibilities.
My wife and I were recently at a conference in Northern California called EG. It’s a more intimate version of TED, bringing together some of the world’s greatest thinkers, researchers, and explorers. I was pretty certain Kim and I would enjoy two days of anonymity, but within the first few hours someone recognized me as the pastor of Mosaic and impressed me with a question about the absurdity of faith.
The query was very specific: “So you believe that God made the sun stand still?” A small crowd had gathered. Before I could even answer the initial question specifically, there came a follow-up one: “There are people who believe the sun stood still and people who do not believe the sun stood still. What would you say would be the qualitative difference between those two kinds of people?”
I looked at him as if the answer was obvious. I told the small group listening, “I think it matters less whether you believe the sun stood still than whether you have such limited thinking that you believe that it’s not possible. I prefer the mind-set that believes the sun could stand still because it is a mind-set of endless possibilities.” The person who automatically eliminates that possibility is a person with limited thinking. I love that faith expands our imagination and opens us to a universe with endless possibilities.
It’s the same with love. There may be no more dramatic shift in perspective than when we come to the conviction that the entire universe is created out of love—that everything exists because of love, that God is love, and that his primary motivation in all things is love. Once you believe the intention of the universe is to expand the love that God has graciously released upon all creation, it will change your view of everything. You cannot believe that God’s will is good and pleasing and perfect if you do not believe that the unifying principle of the universe is love.
When you allow your mind-set to be shaped with the dynamic processes of faith, hope, and love, your mind-set becomes ever expanding. When your mind stream is informed by the endless opportunities visible only by faith, by the rich beauty and wonder visible only with hope, by the richness and depth available only through love, then the future becomes everything God ever intended it to be for you.
So my question for you is simple: When you look into the future, what do you see? The warrior must win the battle in their mind against fear, doubt, and hate and walk courageously into a future revealed only through faith, hope, and love.
The Way of the Warrior Page 9