Ekene had been head of finance at a private hospital in Abuja for three years when Rahila joined his team. She came with excellent references from a firm in Kaduna, a professional qualification and a quiet, careful manner. On her first morning she arrived before anyone else and had read the previous quarter’s accounts by the time Ekene walked in.
He was a deacon in his church. He led a house fellowship on Wednesday evenings. He would have told you, sincerely, that he had nothing against anyone. But from the first week, something in him held back. He found himself double-checking her reconciliations when he did not double-check anyone else’s. He kept her away from the petty cash. When she was quiet in meetings, he read it as secrecy. When she asked a question about a payment, he wondered why she wanted to know.
He did not think much about why. If he had, he might have remembered a saying he had heard at family gatherings since he was a boy, a saying about people from her part of the country and what they do with money that is not theirs. He had never repeated it at work. He would have been embarrassed to. But it was there, underneath, like a stone under a carpet. Every time he walked across that part of the floor, he stumbled a little without knowing why.
Then, at the end of her fourth month, the external auditors arrived. They spent a week going through the books. On the last afternoon, the senior auditor sat down with Ekene and said, “Your accounts are in good shape. There was one significant error in the third-quarter figures, a duplicated supplier payment of a little over two million naira. But your team had already caught it. It is flagged in the reconciliation notes.” He turned the file round. The initials beside the note were Rahila’s. The duplicated payment had been authorised by Ekene himself.
That evening he sat in his car in the hospital car park for a long time, engine running, not driving home. He told me later that it was the first time he had seen the stone under the carpet.
Punchline“Pastor,” he said, “I have been born again for twenty years. How can I still think like this?”
It is one of the most honest questions a believer can ask. And the answer takes us to the heart of what Scripture means by a renewed mind.
The ground beneath the “therefore”
The most famous verses on mind renewal in the New Testament begin with the word “therefore,” and that word has a long history behind it. Before Paul writes a single instruction about how believers should think, he spends eleven chapters of Romans showing what God has done. The last of those chapters ends in an explosion of worship:
O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counsellor? Or who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again? For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen.
Paul has just been describing God’s dealings with Jew and Gentile across the whole sweep of history. Both had been disobedient. Both had come to depend entirely on God’s undeserved kindness. “For God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all” (Romans 11:32). Everyone stands on the same ground. Nobody arrives at God’s table on the strength of their background, their family, their nation or their record. All are there by mercy.
And then the apostle can only worship. “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!” He asks three questions, and each one expects the answer no one. “Who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counsellor? Or who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again?” Nobody has advised God. Nobody has put Him in their debt. “For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things.”
This is the ground from which renewed thinking begins. It matters enormously. If I try to renew my mind from the ground of my own effort, I will turn it into one more performance, another thing I must achieve to be acceptable. If I try to renew it from the ground of fear, I will become anxious and suspicious of myself. But Paul begins from mercy. God has received us without our deserving it. He has done it for people of every kind, on exactly the same terms. Every assumption I carry must eventually come and stand on that ground and be examined there.
For Ekene, that was where the stone under the carpet began to move. He had been treating his own place in God’s family as a gift of mercy. He had been treating Rahila’s place in his department as something she had to earn against a suspicion she never knew existed. The ground was uneven, and Romans 11 levelled it.
A mind that tests and approves
Now Paul turns to the life that grows from this ground:
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.
“I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God.” Paul appeals before he commands, and he appeals on the basis of mercy. The offering of the body and the renewing of the mind are responses to what God has already done.
Look at the two verbs in verse 2. Be not conformed. Be ye transformed. The first speaks of being shaped from outside, pressed into the pattern of “this world,” the present age with its assumptions about power, status, money and belonging. The second is the word from which we get metamorphosis. It is the word used when Jesus “was transfigured before them” on the mountain (Matthew 17:2), and when Paul says that believers, beholding the glory of the Lord, “are changed into the same image from glory to glory” (2 Corinthians 3:18). It describes a change that works outward from within.
Both verbs are in the present tense, and both are passive. Paul is describing an ongoing process that is done to us, as we yield to it. You are not the sculptor of your own transformation. You are the clay, placed in the hands of God, and He works by “the renewing of your mind.”
And what is the result? “That ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” The word prove was used for testing metals, assaying gold to find out whether it was genuine. A renewed mind becomes able to test situations and recognise God’s will in them. It develops discernment. A list of memorised answers would never be enough for the situations life actually brings. What God gives is retrained judgement, so that the mind increasingly sees things the way He sees them.
Then verse 3 brings the whole matter down to earth. Paul plays on a single word root four times in one sentence. In English it comes out as “not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly.” The first place renewal shows itself is in how we think about ourselves in relation to others. A renewed mind thinks soberly. It does not inflate itself. It measures itself by “the measure of faith” God has given, and then, in the verses that follow, it takes its place gladly as one member among many in the body of Christ.
That is precisely where Ekene’s old assumption lived. Without ever saying it aloud, he had been thinking of himself, and his people, more highly than he ought, and of Rahila and hers more lowly. He had not been thinking soberly. Romans 12:3 went straight to the stone.
NuggetRenewal begins on the ground of mercy, where everyone stands by grace. Every assumption we carry must come and be examined there.
The assumption beneath the reaction
There is a story in the book of Acts that shows renewal reaching the deep assumptions of a sincere believer, and the believer is the apostle Peter. It begins on a rooftop in the coastal town of Joppa:
And saw heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending unto him, as it had been a great sheet knit at the four corners, and let down to the earth: Wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air. And there came a voice to him, Rise, Peter; kill, and eat. But Peter said, Not so, Lord; for I have never eaten any thing that is common or unclean. And the voice spake unto him again the second time, What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common. This was done thrice: and the vessel was received up again into heaven.
Notice where Peter was staying. Luke has told us that he “tarried many days in Joppa with one Simon a tanner” (Acts 9:43). Tanners handled the skins of dead animals, work that many devout Jews avoided because of its uncleanness. Peter was already being stretched. Yet when the vision came, his reflex was immediate: “Not so, Lord; for I have never eaten any thing that is common or unclean.”
That sentence is extraordinary. “Not so, Lord.” Peter calls Him Lord and refuses Him in the same breath. This is the same Peter who had walked with Jesus for three years, preached at Pentecost, healed the lame man at the temple gate and stood before the Sanhedrin. He loved the Lord with his whole heart. And still, deep in him, there was an assumption so old and so settled that when God Himself contradicted it, Peter’s first response was to argue.
God answered, “What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common.” And Luke adds: “This was done thrice.” Three times the vision came. Three times Peter needed to hear it. Renewal of deep assumptions rarely happens with a single word.
And then, while Peter was still puzzling over the vision, there was a knock at the gate. Three men had arrived from Caesarea, sent by a Roman centurion named Cornelius. The vision had been about food. Its real application was about people. When Peter arrived at Cornelius’s house, he explained what had happened in him: “Ye know how that it is an unlawful thing for a man that is a Jew to keep company, or come unto one of another nation; but God hath shewed me that I should not call any man common or unclean” (Acts 10:28). A few minutes later, he said: “Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34).
I perceive. Peter is describing a change in how he sees. Something has shifted in his judgement, at the level of what he had always assumed to be simply true. And notice what made the difference. It was not that Peter tried harder to be nice to Gentiles. God revealed something about His own character and His own work: what God hath cleansed. The renewal came through a word from God about what God had done.
This is how renewal reaches the assumptions behind our reactions. Our reactions are fast. They come from somewhere beneath conscious thought, from beliefs absorbed long ago. Ekene did not decide each morning to be suspicious of Rahila. He reacted. To change the reaction, the assumption beneath it had to be exposed and contradicted by the truth of God. That is what happened to Peter on the rooftop, and what began to happen to Ekene in the car park.
Old reflexes return under pressure
PunchlineIt would be lovely to say that Peter’s assumptions were permanently changed that day in Caesarea. But Scripture is too honest for that.
Some years later, in the city of Antioch, Peter was eating with Gentile believers as a matter of course. Then a group of Jewish Christians arrived from Jerusalem, and something in Peter flinched. Paul describes it in his letter to the Galatians: “For before that certain came from James, he did eat with the Gentiles: but when they were come, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing them which were of the circumcision” (Galatians 2:12). Other Jewish believers followed his example, and even Barnabas was carried away.
Paul confronted Peter publicly, because the gospel itself was at stake. The table of the Lord was being divided by the very assumption God had addressed on the rooftop in Joppa.
What does this teach us? That renewal is real, and also gradual. An assumption can be exposed and genuinely changed, and still reassert itself under pressure, especially the pressure of fear or the pressure of belonging to a group. Peter did not stop being a new man when he withdrew from that table. He did not lose his salvation. But an old way of thinking, under stress, found its way back into his conduct, and it needed to be corrected again.
This should comfort us and sober us. It comforts us because a relapse does not mean renewal has failed. If Peter could stumble at Antioch after the rooftop vision, you can stumble too and still be on the road. It sobers us because we cannot assume that one moment of insight will carry us for ever. The writer to the Hebrews speaks of mature believers as “those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil” (Hebrews 5:14). By reason of use. Discernment grows through practice, the way a muscle grows through repeated exercise. Our judgement is reshaped as Scripture is applied again and again, in situation after situation.
Ekene found this out. A month after the audit, a payment went missing for two days before it was traced to a bank delay. His very first thought, before he could stop it, was of Rahila. He told me about it with real grief. “I thought the thing was gone,” he said. It was not gone. But this time he recognised it at once, named it before God, and did not act on it. That was renewal too.
Learning Christ
Paul wrote to the Ephesians about the difference between the mind of the old life and the mind of the new. He described the surrounding culture as walking “in the vanity of their mind, Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God” (Ephesians 4:17-18). Then he turns:
But ye have not so learned Christ; If so be that ye have heard him, and have been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus: That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; And be renewed in the spirit of your mind; And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.
“But ye have not so learned Christ.” Notice the phrase. Paul does not say “learned about Christ,” though that is included. He says they have learned Christ. Christ Himself is the curriculum. The Christian life is a school in which the subject is a Person. “If so be that ye have heard him, and have been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus.” Jesus is the teacher, Jesus is the lesson, and truth is found in Him.
This is why renewal is so much more than self-improvement. A man can work on his temper, his habits and his prejudices with the help of a good book and a strong will, and some of that may be useful. But Christian renewal is learning to think in agreement with a Person. The question is not merely “What is a better way to react?” but “How does Christ see this? How did He treat people like this? What does His cross say about this person’s worth?”
Jesus Himself had to correct His own disciples’ assumptions more than once. When a Samaritan village refused to receive Him, James and John asked, “Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did?” (Luke 9:54). They even had a biblical precedent ready. Jesus “turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of” (Luke 9:55). Their assumption about Samaritans had dressed itself up in Scripture. Jesus saw straight through it. Learning Christ meant having that assumption confronted by the Lord Himself.
Now look at the three movements in verses 22 to 24. Put off the old man. Be renewed in the spirit of your mind. Put on the new man. Many scholars note that the first and last of these, putting off and putting on, describe something decisive, while being renewed is described as continuous. The decisive change has happened in Christ. The renewal of the mind works that change out, day after day. You are not trying to become a new man. You are learning to think like the new man you already are, “which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.”
That phrase after God is created is important. The new man is God’s creation, not your project. Renewal is your thinking coming into line with what God has made you.
Dressed for a new life
Paul uses the same clothing picture in Colossians, with an important addition:
Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; And have put on the new man , which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him: Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.
“Seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; And have put on the new man.” In Colossians the putting off and putting on are described as already done. This is who you are. And then: “which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him.” The new man is being renewed, continually, and the goal of that renewal is the image of God. The language reaches right back to Genesis, where God made humanity in His image. Renewal is the restoration of what was lost, the recovery of a likeness that sin had defaced.
And then, without pausing, Paul tells us what that renewed image looks like in a community: “Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.”
Look at that list. Greek and Jew was the great religious and cultural divide of the ancient world. Circumcision and uncircumcision marked the boundary of covenant identity. Barbarian was the Greek word for anyone who did not speak Greek, and Scythian referred to a people regarded by many as the most uncivilised of all. Bond and free marked the deepest social division in the Roman world. Paul names every category that his readers used to sort people into those who mattered and those who did not. And he says that in the renewed humanity, none of these distinctions has the final word. “Christ is all, and in all.”
Here is the remarkable thing. Paul connects the renewal of the mind directly to the way we regard other people. A renewed mind holds correct doctrine, and it also sees a brother or sister of a different tribe, language, class or background and recognises Christ in them. Ekene’s assumption about Rahila was therefore far more serious than a small blemish in an otherwise renewed mind. At that point his thinking was still contradicting the very image that God was renewing in him.
That does not mean our backgrounds vanish. Paul was still a Jew. Rahila is still from Kaduna, and Ekene is still from Enugu. Language, culture and history remain, and many of them are good gifts. What changes is their power to determine worth. In Christ, they become the varied colours of one family rather than walls between rival houses.
The word dwelling richly
How does this renewal actually happen? Paul gives part of the answer a few verses later in the same chapter. He has listed the garments the new man wears: “bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering; Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another” (Colossians 3:12-13). He has told the Colossians to let the peace of God rule in their hearts. Then he writes:
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him.
“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom.” The word dwell suggests making a home. Scripture is meant to move in, unpack and live in the house, rather than visit like a guest who calls on Sunday mornings. And it is to dwell richly, not thinly. A verse a day on a calendar is better than nothing. But a mind that is being reshaped needs more substantial food: whole passages read in context, stories followed to their end, letters read as letters, psalms prayed aloud.
Notice that this indwelling Word works in community. “Teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.” We do not renew our minds alone. Other believers teach us, correct us, sing truth into us and see our blind spots more clearly than we do. Ekene’s stone under the carpet had been invisible to him for twenty years. It took an auditor’s file, a house fellowship study on Acts 10 and the honest questions of a friend to bring it into the light.
And notice the songs. God has designed us so that what we sing goes deep. A hymn learned in childhood can still steady a frightened adult decades later. When the church sings truth together, that truth is being lodged in places that a lecture might never reach. Renewal happens in the mind, but it also happens in the memory, the imagination and the affections, and song reaches all of them.
Then verse 17 takes renewal out of the meeting and into the week: “And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him.” Whatsoever. The office, the market, the kitchen, the boardroom. Renewed thinking must be practised where life is actually lived. Doing everything “in the name of the Lord Jesus” means asking, in each ordinary situation, what it would look like to act as His representative, under His authority, in agreement with His character.
Practising a different response
Renewal is not complete until it reaches ordinary conduct. Scripture reshapes judgement gradually, and the believer must practise the new response in real life, often before it feels natural. Let me suggest how this works.
First, notice the reaction. Most of our assumptions announce themselves through reactions that are slightly out of proportion. A flash of irritation that is too strong for the situation. A suspicion that arrives too quickly. A fear that does not match the facts. Ekene’s double-checking was his clue. When you notice a reaction like that, stop and ask, “What am I assuming here?”
Second, name the assumption honestly. Write it down if you need to. “I assume that people from that background are dishonest.” “I assume that if I do not shout, no one will respect me.” “I assume that money is always about to run out.” “I assume that God is punishing me whenever things go wrong.” “I assume that admitting a mistake will make people despise me.” Naming the belief takes away much of its hidden power.
Third, bring the assumption to the ground of mercy and to the Word. Ask how it stands in the light of Romans 11 and 12, of the rooftop in Joppa, of Colossians 3:11, or of whatever passage speaks to it most directly. Ask how Jesus treated people, money, power or failure. Let Scripture argue with the assumption. Sometimes it will take the vision three times.
Fourth, choose the new response and practise it, deliberately, in small ways. You will often act before you feel. Some call that hypocrisy, but it is simply the way the body learns what the mind is coming to believe. Peter walked into Cornelius’s house while he was still working out what the vision meant. Obedience and understanding grew together.
Fifth, expect to fail sometimes, and return quickly. When the old reflex fires, as it did for Peter at Antioch, do not despair. Recognise it, confess it where needed, put right any harm it caused, and keep walking. Renewal is measured over years, not days.
For Ekene, the practice was very concrete. He went to Rahila the morning after the audit and thanked her, properly, for catching his error. He did not tell her about the saying. He told her that he had been unfair in how he had managed her, and that he was sorry. He gave her responsibility for the petty cash. He stopped checking her reconciliations twice. In fellowship, he asked the group to pray for him about something he called “an old prejudice that I did not know I had.” It was humbling. He told me it was also one of the freest things he had ever done.
Five years later, Ekene’s father died in Enugu. It was the rainy season, and the roads from Abuja were bad. The burial was set for a Saturday, and Ekene had told his colleagues not to make the journey. He did not want anyone risking those roads on his account.
On the Friday evening, as the family sat in the compound receiving visitors, a car pulled up at the gate, splashed with red mud to the windows. Rahila climbed out of the passenger seat. Her husband had driven. They had left Abuja at five in the morning. She had brought a contribution from the finance department and a cooler of jollof rice her mother had insisted on sending.
Ekene told me he could not speak when he saw her. His aunts asked who she was. He said, “This is my colleague. She is my sister in the Lord.” Then he took her to greet his mother.
Later that night, after everyone had gone to bed, he sat alone in the compound and thought about the saying he had heard in that very place, at gatherings just like this one, all through his boyhood. He thought about the stone under the carpet. And he realised that it was not there any more. He could not have told you the day it went. It had been worn away, verse by verse, choice by choice, by the patient work of a God who renews minds in the image of His Son.
That is what renewal looks like. It is rarely sudden. It begins on the ground of mercy, where every one of us stands by grace alone. It reaches down beneath our reactions to the assumptions we never knew we had. It works through the Word dwelling richly, through the church singing and correcting, through repeated small acts of obedience. And slowly, over years, we find that we have begun to think in agreement with God.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- Which of your reactions tend to be out of proportion to the situation? What assumption might lie beneath them?
- Romans 11:32 says God has had mercy on all on the same terms. How does that ground challenge the way you regard people unlike yourself?
- Peter said, “Not so, Lord.” Where might you be resisting a word from God because it contradicts a long-held assumption?
- Colossians 3:11 names the social divisions of Paul’s world. What would the equivalent list look like in your church, your city or your workplace?
- What is one small, concrete response you could practise this week that agrees with what God’s Word says, even before it feels natural?
This Week
Each evening this week, review the day and note one moment when your reaction was stronger, faster or colder than the situation called for. Write down the assumption you think sat beneath it. Then find a passage of Scripture that speaks to that assumption and read it in context. Choose one practical action for the following day that agrees with that passage, and do it. At the end of the week, share what you have discovered with one trusted believer and ask them to pray with you.
A Prayer
Father, thank You that I stand before You by mercy alone, on the same ground as every other believer. I offer You my body and my mind. Expose the assumptions I have carried for years without knowing it, especially those that make me think of myself more highly than I ought, or of others more lowly than You do. Let the word of Christ dwell in me richly. Renew me in knowledge after Your image. When my old reflexes return, help me to recognise them, to turn back to You quickly and to practise the new way again. Teach me to see Christ in every brother and sister You have made one with me. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.