Ezinne gave her life to Christ in her second year of nursing school, at a campus fellowship that met in a lecture theatre on Friday evenings. The worship was loud and joyful, the preaching was passionate, and for the first time in her life God felt near. She went every week. She joined the prayer team. She bought a Bible with a zip cover and carried it everywhere.
She also had questions. She was a careful student by nature, the kind who wanted to know why a drug worked before she gave it to a patient. When she read the Gospels, she wanted to know why Jesus said certain things, how one passage fitted with another, what a strange word meant. One evening she took a question to the fellowship coordinator, a confident young man in his final year. He listened for a moment and then smiled kindly. “Sister, that is your natural mind,” he said. “The natural man cannot receive the things of the Spirit. Stop reasoning. Just receive.”
She took his advice seriously, because she wanted to please God. She stopped asking. She stopped reading slowly. She read a verse a day from a devotional booklet and waited for the Friday meeting to feel close to God again. What she found was that her faith began to rise and fall with the atmosphere. On Friday night she was on fire. By Tuesday afternoon, after a difficult ward round and a sharp word from a senior nurse, she felt empty and confused, and she did not know why.
The change came on a night shift in her final year. The nurse in charge that night was a woman I will call Asabe, a theatre sister from Jos with grey at her temples and a Bible so worn that the cover was held on with tape. During a quiet hour around three in the morning, Asabe saw Ezinne reading her devotional booklet and asked what she was learning. Ezinne could not really say. Asabe opened her own Bible at John 16 and showed her the pencil notes in the margin. “The Holy Spirit is a teacher,” she said. “Teachers want their students to think.”
Ezinne told me later that it was the first time anyone had suggested that her mind and the Holy Spirit might be on the same side.
A false choice
Many believers have been handed the same false choice that Ezinne was given. On one side stands the mind, with its questions, study and careful reasoning. On the other stands the Spirit, with His power, presence and immediacy. We are told, openly or by implication, that we must choose. Some Christians choose the mind and become cold, clever and cautious. Others choose what they believe is the Spirit and become warm, sincere and easily carried about by every new impression.
Scripture never offers that choice. Jesus said the first and great commandment is this: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind” (Matthew 22:37). The mind is not a dangerous intruder in the life of faith. It is one of the ways we love God. Paul, writing in the very chapter where he discusses tongues and prophecy, says, “Brethren, be not children in understanding: howbeit in malice be ye children, but in understanding be men” (1 Corinthians 14:20). He tells Timothy, “Consider what I say; and the Lord give thee understanding in all things” (2 Timothy 2:7). Notice the two halves of that sentence. Timothy must consider. The Lord will give understanding. Human attention and divine illumination work together.
PunchlineThe Spirit’s work in the believer does not require us to switch off our minds. It requires us to bring them, humbly and attentively, to the Word He inspired, and to let Him form our understanding there.
The Spirit of truth
On the night before the cross, Jesus spoke at length about the Holy Spirit. He knew His disciples were confused and grieving. “I have yet many things to say unto you,” He told them, “but ye cannot bear them now” (John 16:12). Then He promised them a Teacher:
Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come. He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you. All things that the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he shall take of mine, and shall shew it unto you.
“He will guide you into all truth.” The Greek word for guide means to lead someone along a way. It appears again in Acts 8, when the Ethiopian official, reading Isaiah in his chariot, says to Philip, “How can I, except some man should guide me?” (Acts 8:31). Picture a guide walking with a traveller along a road, pointing out what is there to be seen. The Spirit does not fling truth at us from a distance. He walks with us into it.
Notice where He leads. “He shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak.” The Spirit is not an independent source of novelty. He speaks in perfect agreement with the Father and the Son. And His great purpose is stated in verse 14: “He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you.” The Holy Spirit is the great spotlight of heaven, and the spotlight is always turned towards Jesus.
This promise was given first to the apostles. Earlier Jesus had said the Spirit would “teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you” (John 14:26). The fulfilment of that promise is in our hands whenever we open the New Testament. The Gospels, the letters and the Revelation are the fruit of the Spirit guiding the apostles into all truth. So when the Spirit guides us today, He leads us into the truth He has already given. He opens what He has written.
That gives every believer a simple test for any experience of the Spirit’s teaching. Does it make Christ larger? Does it draw me to what Scripture says about Him? A “revelation” that leaves Jesus at the edge, or that cannot be found anywhere in His Word, has not come from the One whose delight is to glorify the Son.
What the Spirit reveals
The passage that Ezinne’s coordinator quoted comes from 1 Corinthians 2, and it is worth reading properly. The Corinthians admired clever speakers. Paul describes the culture bluntly: “the Greeks seek after wisdom” (1 Corinthians 1:22). Into that city he came with a message that sounded foolish to sophisticated ears, because he “determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2). Then he explains how anyone can grasp such a message:
But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.
“God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit.” What has He revealed? Verse 9 tells us: “the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.” Verse 12 tells us again: “the things that are freely given to us of God.” The content of the Spirit’s revelation is God’s gracious gift in Christ crucified. He searches “the deep things of God,” and He makes known to believers what God has freely given them.
Paul offers an illustration. Nobody knows what is going on inside a person except that person’s own spirit. In the same way, nobody knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. And we have received that Spirit. The One who knows God’s mind from the inside now lives in us, so that we “might know.” Knowing is the goal. Far from opposing understanding, the Spirit is the reason we can have it.
Then verse 13: “comparing spiritual things with spiritual.” Whatever its exact sense, and scholars discuss it, the phrase describes thoughtful work. The Spirit’s teaching is expressed in words, and words must be understood, connected and compared.
What about the verse Ezinne was given? “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14). In context, the natural man is the person who does not have the Spirit at all, the unbeliever whose whole life is lived on the level of this age. Paul is explaining why the cross looks like nonsense to people without the Spirit. A Christian with honest questions is nowhere in view. Then he says of believers, “But we have the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16).
That is a wonderful statement, and Paul immediately shows that it is not automatic. Three verses later he writes, “I... could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal” (1 Corinthians 3:1), because they were still full of envy and division. They possessed the mind of Christ, and their thinking still needed to be formed by it. That is exactly where the renewing of the mind takes place: in the space between what God has given us and what we have learned to think.
NuggetThe Spirit who searches the deep things of God lives in you so that you might know. He is the reason we can understand, never the enemy of understanding.
Hearts that burn over an open Bible
There is a scene at the end of Luke’s Gospel that shows the Spirit’s way of teaching more beautifully than any other. Two disciples were walking home to Emmaus on the evening of the resurrection, sad and bewildered. A stranger joined them on the road. It was Jesus, though they did not recognise Him. He listened to their confusion, rebuked their slowness to believe the prophets, and then did something remarkable: “beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27).
He did not simply appear in glory. He taught them the Bible. He walked them through Moses and the prophets, connecting passage to passage, showing them that the Messiah had to suffer and then enter His glory. It was a long walk and a long lesson. Then, at the table:
And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it , and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight. And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures?
“Did not our heart burn within us... while he opened to us the scriptures?” Their hearts burned while their minds were being taught. The fire and the explanation came together. Later that evening Jesus appeared to the whole group and did the same thing again: “Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures” (Luke 24:45).
This is the pattern the Spirit continues. He brings attention to Christ through the Scriptures, and He opens understanding. Many of us know the experience. You have read a passage many times, and then one day, perhaps in a sermon, a study or a quiet morning, its connection to Christ suddenly becomes clear, and something in you burns. That burning is the warmth of truth understood, a feeling joined to thought.
And this is not reserved for scholars. The psalmist wrote:
Thy testimonies are wonderful: therefore doth my soul keep them. The entrance of thy words giveth light; it giveth understanding unto the simple.
Unto the simple. The Spirit is not impressed by degrees. When the rulers in Jerusalem heard Peter and John, they “perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men,” and they marvelled, “and they took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13). A market woman who cannot read well, but who listens to Scripture with prayer and attention, can understand God’s ways more deeply than a professor who studies the text without bowing to it. Thoughtful engagement with Scripture is for everyone, at whatever level of education God has given them.
Renewed in the spirit of your mind
Paul describes the life of the Ephesians before Christ in terms of a damaged mind. The Gentiles, he says, walk “in the vanity of their mind, Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart” (Ephesians 4:17-18). Vanity means emptiness, futility. Their thinking had become hollow and their understanding dark. Then he writes, “But ye have not so learned Christ” (Ephesians 4:20).
He goes on to describe what learning Christ involves: putting off the old man, being “renewed in the spirit of your mind,” and putting on “the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness” (Ephesians 4:22-24). The middle phrase is the one to dwell on here. The spirit of your mind describes the inner disposition of our thinking, the deep orientation from which particular thoughts arise. Renewal reaches down to that level. It changes the instincts behind the thoughts.
And notice the form of the verb. Be renewed. It describes something that is done to us, continually. We do not renew ourselves by sheer mental effort. The One who renews is God, by His Spirit. Paul says the same in another letter, that believers, “beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:18). We behold. He changes.
That does not make us passive. We look, read, attend and obey, and as we do, the Spirit works. Romans 8 describes the result: “they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit... to be spiritually minded is life and peace” (Romans 8:5-6). A spiritually minded person is someone whose thinking has been brought, by the Spirit, into the atmosphere of what God cares about, and whose mind increasingly runs in those channels without being forced.
Wisdom literature describes the same partnership between seeking and receiving:
Yea, if thou criest after knowledge, and liftest up thy voice for understanding; If thou seekest her as silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasures; Then shalt thou understand the fear of the LORD , and find the knowledge of God. For the LORD giveth wisdom: out of his mouth cometh knowledge and understanding.
Look at the verbs: criest, liftest up thy voice, seekest, searchest. That is effort. And then verse 6: “For the LORD giveth wisdom.” The seeking is real, and the giving is God’s. The believer who prays for understanding and then reads carefully has not chosen between the Spirit and the mind. He is doing exactly what Scripture describes.
Renewal shows in changed judgements
How can you tell whether your mind is being renewed? Paul answers that question in his prayers. He prays for the Colossians:
For this cause we also, since the day we heard it , do not cease to pray for you, and to desire that ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; That ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God.
“Filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding.” Paul wants these believers to understand. But understanding is not the finishing line. The very next words are “That ye might walk worthy of the Lord.” Knowledge leads to conduct. Spiritual understanding shows up in fruitful work and in a life that pleases God. And the circle continues, because walking worthily leads to “increasing in the knowledge of God.” Obedience deepens understanding, and understanding deepens obedience. Jesus said something similar: “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine” (John 7:17).
He prays a similar prayer for the Philippians, “that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment; That ye may approve things that are excellent” (Philippians 1:9-10). Judgment here means moral perception, the ability to tell what matters in a particular situation. A renewed mind does not simply hold more facts. It judges differently. It sees a situation and responds the way Christ would respond, more and more often, more and more naturally.
For Ezinne, the evidence came slowly, in ordinary places. A few months after that night shift, a consultant humiliated her in front of a patient’s family. Before, she would have gone to the sluice room and cried, then spent the evening rehearsing angry speeches. This time she found herself thinking about Jesus before Pilate, silent and secure, and about a verse she had been studying in Peter about entrusting yourself to Him who judges righteously. She still felt the sting. But her judgement of the situation had changed. She did not need the consultant’s approval to know who she was.
Another time, a frightening “prophecy” circulated on her nursing class’s WhatsApp group, warning of a disaster on a particular date and urging everyone to forward it to ten people. A year earlier she would have forwarded it out of fear. Now she found herself asking whether it glorified Christ, whether it agreed with Scripture, and whether fear was the fruit the Spirit produces. She did not forward it. She sent a gentle note to the friend who had shared it, with a verse.
None of these were dramatic moments. Nobody would have noticed them from outside. But they were evidence of a mind being renewed by the Spirit through the Word: different judgements, different conduct, over time.
Renewal takes time
Jesus described the growth of the kingdom with a farming picture: “first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear” (Mark 4:28). Renewal of the mind follows a similar pattern. It is gradual. Peter’s final instruction in his second letter is to “grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18). Growth is never finished in this life.
That should take some pressure off us. You will not understand everything this year. You will still find assumptions in yourself that do not agree with Christ, sometimes after many years of faithfulness. The Spirit is patient. He does not grow weary of teaching slow students, and every one of us is a slow student.
A few guard-rails belong here. First, a renewed mind is not the same as a mind free from illness. Depression, anxiety disorders and other conditions affect believers who are deeply devoted to Christ. Renewal through Scripture and the Spirit is real and powerful, and many sufferers also need medical and professional care. Receiving that help is not a failure of faith, and nobody should be told that their illness proves their mind has not been renewed.
Second, renewal is not an intellectual competition. Some people read slowly, some have learning difficulties, some never had the chance to go to school. The Spirit teaches them all. Listening to Scripture read aloud, learning passages by heart, discussing them in a small group and singing them in worship are all ways in which the Word dwells in a person. Nehemiah describes the Levites reading the law to the people: “they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading” (Nehemiah 8:8). Understanding was a community project, and everyone could take part.
Third, study is not a substitute for the Spirit. Jesus warned religious experts who knew the text well, “Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me. And ye will not come to me, that ye might have life” (John 5:39-40). Knowledge that never comes to Christ is as empty as enthusiasm that never opens the Bible. We need both a teachable mind and a dependent heart.
Practices that keep the mind and the Spirit together
PunchlineWhat did Asabe actually teach Ezinne on those night shifts? Nothing complicated. She gave her a small exercise book and a pencil and showed her four simple steps.
Begin with prayer. Asabe always prayed the same short verse before she opened her Bible: “Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law” (Psalm 119:18). It acknowledges that you need the Spirit’s help to see, and it expects that there are wondrous things to be seen.
Read a whole passage. Asabe started Ezinne on John’s Gospel, a chapter at a time, rather than a single verse lifted from its setting. The Spirit inspired paragraphs, arguments and stories, and much of their meaning lies in how the parts fit together.
Ask honest questions. What does this passage actually say? What does it show me about Jesus? What would change in my life if I believed it? Questions are not the enemy of faith. Mary, faced with things she did not fully understand, “kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:19). Pondering is a form of worship.
Write one sentence and live it. At the end of each reading, Ezinne wrote down one thing she had understood and one way it might change her day. The next morning she would look back and ask whether it had. That simple habit tied her understanding to her conduct.
Asabe added one more thing, almost as an afterthought. “Stay in fellowship,” she said, “and keep going on Fridays. The singing is good for you. But take your Bible and your questions with you.” The Spirit works in the gathered church as well as in private study, and both belong together.
Ezinne is a ward sister now, at a teaching hospital in the east. She still works nights sometimes. A few months ago, at around three in the morning, she noticed a young student nurse sitting at the nurses’ station with her phone, scrolling through devotional messages and looking tired and a little lost.
Ezinne asked what she was learning. The girl shrugged. “I just read the verse for the day,” she said. “My pastor says too much thinking will make me lose the anointing.”
Ezinne smiled, because she recognised the look. She went to her locker and came back with her Bible, its cover now held together with tape, and an exercise book. She opened the Bible at John 16 and showed the student the pencil notes in the margin, some of them Asabe’s handwriting, copied years ago, and some of them her own.
“The Holy Spirit is a teacher,” she said. “Teachers want their students to think. Your mind is not the enemy of the Spirit. It is one of the places He has chosen to work.”
That is true for you too. The Spirit of truth lives in you so that you might know the things freely given to you of God. Bring Him your attention, your questions and your open Bible. He will glorify Christ to you, and over time, in a hundred ordinary judgements, you will find that you have begun to think differently.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- Have you ever been taught, openly or by implication, that careful thinking is unspiritual? How has that shaped your reading of Scripture?
- What does John 16:13-15 teach about the way to test whether an insight comes from the Spirit?
- Recall a time when your heart “burned” as a passage of Scripture became clear. What did you understand in that moment?
- In what area of life have your judgements changed since you came to Christ? Where do they still need renewing?
- Which of Asabe’s four practices would most help you this week?
This Week
Choose one chapter of John’s Gospel each day this week, beginning with John 14. Before reading, pray Psalm 119:18 aloud. Read the whole chapter slowly, then write down three things: what the chapter says, what it shows you about Jesus, and one way it could change how you respond to a real situation today. Each evening, look back and note whether it did. At the end of the week, share one discovery with another believer.
A Prayer
Holy Spirit, Spirit of truth, thank You that You live in me so that I may know the things that are freely given to me of God. I bring You my mind, my questions and my attention. Open my eyes to behold wondrous things in Your Word. Glorify Jesus to me as I read. Renew me in the spirit of my mind, and let what I understand show itself in the way I judge, speak and act. Make me patient with my slow growth and teachable in every season. 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.