Jeremiah 31:33b – The Maker's Mind Makeover

33 But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My law in their minds… Jeremiah 31:33b, New King James Version

My church recently held a prayer service in place of the usual Sunday order. My wife and I participated over the Internet from our living room. When directed to pray for a particular manifestation of God's glory, I started to speak to the Lord out loud. My wife seemed to shrink a little, to withdraw within herself.

With at least as much defensiveness as deftness of discipleship, I asked why. "You're overwhelming," she confessed. My demonstrativeness was smothering her quieter considerations nurtured in the Church of Christ in which women did not pray out loud in the presence of men. Honest, she connected this particular expression of my zeal-as-leadership to my habitually unilateral selection of the scriptural passages we read each day. 

 

Her subtext, if not her exact words, revealed that she felt strong-armed for spiritual ends. CS Lewis's fictional demon Screwtape indicts my bent toward religious performance in his toast, relishing, ""The fine flower of unholiness can grow only in the close neighbourhood of the Holy.  Nowhere do we tempt so successfully as on the very steps of  the altar."  

This encounter has me thinking about God's placement of Jeremiah 31:32 and 33, juxtaposition of the old and new covenants. In verse 32, God's ultimate, intimate image for His heart beating through the old covenant pictured him as Husband. No wonder. As He ordained, in a spousal covenant, we are, remind John and Stasi Eldridge in Love and War, in a humanly unparalleled position to be used to influence the character of our partner. Thus He takes that role, radiates that affection, vision, and long-term commitment.

But then He surpasses it as only a Sovereign still creating in His own image can. This was as far, the Word seems to suggest by its positioning, as the old covenant can go. Spouses can set the tone for one another. We can suggest. We can, and should, exhort and confront from time to time. We can, as Peter puts it, wash each other with the Word, as is the particular Scriptural responsibility of husbands. Yet, no human effort can bring clean newness to the inside. No mutual mental discipline can move God's Word from the external to truly integrate it with the mind of Christ made new in us. God does that. He says I WILL.

There are doubtless areas in which my wife is believing for the further advance of the Law, the Word, the Spirit of Christ as Word made flesh, integrated with my thinking. In particular, I can live long off of vain imaginations, no less vain because they are scripturally-based. I can dither longer and more longingly than most over the options: "On one hand, we could follow God's Word and do this. On the other hand, we could follow God's Word and do that." Or, or, or. It is usually my wife who brings my speculations to the point of actuation and obedience. "Let's do this at this place and this time."

Without the promised and ongoing fulfillment of Jeremiah 31:33 that God is integrating our way of thinking as redeemed sons and daughters with His, the more we claim to want one another's betterment, the more heavy and constant our manipulations of one another to "holy" ends become. We trust God's Word, at least the parts of it that we quote in which we see ourselves as having arrived at some superiority, but we don't trust God's WORK in those for whom we bear some responsibility. His Jude promise to present His as spotless somehow applies to us, but not individually, intimately to them.

As we have intercessory energy to burn in our vision for a handful of others in our lives and dare not spend it nagging, persistent, practical prayer beckons. The counsel of E.M. Bounds in Power Through Prayer applies here in close-quarters, risk-of-rubbing-raw discipleship at least as much in evangelistic encounters. "Talking to men for God is a great thing, but talking to God for men is greater still. He will never talk well and with real success to men for God who has not learned well how to talk to God for men.”

We pray, then, for the renewing of our own minds, for the clarity of our own vision according to His Law as He removes the beams therein that obscure our perspective. We pray for HIS choice of timely encounters, seasoned with grace, for both the conversational and the confrontational to be used of Him to allow those we love to think His thoughts after Him, and in turn to challenge us to leave old paradigms behind.