my burg

"[You] were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness."  (Ephesians 4:21-24 ESV) "The whole matter of putting on the new man is in essence the application of truth to ourselves.  It is the most important thing that one can ever discover in the Christian life.  The real secret of Christian living is to discover the art of talking to yourself.  We must talk to ourselves, we must preach to ourselves, and we must take truth and apply it to ourselves, and keep on doing so.  That is the putting on of the new man.  We have to hammer away at ourselves until we have really convinced ourselves.  In other words, this is not something that you wait for passively.  If you wait until you feel like the new man it will probably never

"But that is not the way you learned Christ!-- assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness."  (Ephesians 4:20-24 ESV) "The putting on of the new man is something that must be done completely, it must always be done as a whole, and it must apply to the whole of our life continuously.  In other words, we must never do the work in compartments; we must put on the new man not only in certain parts of our lives, it must be the whole of our life.  We must not put on the new man only at certain times or when we are in certain company, or when we are in certain places.  That would be to deny the whole principle.  The new man must be the reigning and the governing principle of the w

But that is not the way you learned Christ!-- assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness."  (Ephesians 4:20-24 ESV) In a sermon on this passage, specifically verse 23, Lloyd-Jones writes... "We now recognize that becoming a Christian does not mean that you simply change your moral suit or your outward behaviour.  Nor does it merely mean that you change your opinions, or change your mind.  But it most certainly means changing the spirit of your mind.  What a distinction!  In other words, Christianity is not something that you and I take up intellectually; it is something that takes us up, and captivates us, and governs us, and controls us." "The Christian is tes

From my bookshelf I picked up again the classic little work, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think (SPCK, 1963; Servant Books, 1978), by Harry Blamires.  This author was encouraged to write by none other than C. S. Lewis, his tutor at Oxford.  Writing from mid-twentieth century Britain, Blamires examines our wholesale surrender to secularism and how to recover a uniquely Christian approach to thinking and dialogue.   "We twentieth-century Christians have chosen the way of compromise. We withdraw our Christian consciousness from the fields of public, commercial, and social life.  When we enter these fields we are compelled to accept for purposes of discussion the secular frame of reference established there.  We have no alternative -- except that of silence.  We have to use the only language spoken in these areas." (p. 27) "We have stepped mentally into secularism.  We have trained, even disciplined ourselves, to think secularly about secular things and -