TRANSFORMING THE WAY WE THINK

“Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.”  (Romans 12:2 NLT)

To be seasoned as a Christian is to have the values of Jesus Christ seep all the way through us. No longer an external authority or set of rules, they have been internalized and personalized. They have become us. To describe this transformation of our ways of feeling and sensing is to say that we have been “Christianized.” Here the word does not refer to the event of formal entrance into the Church; it refers to the inner shaping of our emotions and judgments.

This process of being seasoned must be ongoing in our lives, since we are never fully and finally matured. But the result of this process is that our instincts become trustworthy. Never infallible, our feelings nonetheless become, in time, reliable. The mature Christian is one whose sense -- about when to express anger, about how to show affection, about who is my “neighbor” -- can be trusted. Shaped and seasoned by Christian values, our intuition becomes dependable. Our feelings are transformed so that we experience them neither as alien nor as simply unpredictable. They become positive resources in our life, part of an inner authority whose movement we can trust. We mature in our faith life, then, as we learn to consult and trust the authority of our seasoned senses.   

-- Evelyn E. Whitehead and James D. Whitehead in “Seasons of Strength: New Visions of Adult Christian Maturing”

#5592