The Making of a Mind

Everything you are passes through one place. Every joy, every fear, every prayer, every choice — all of it runs through the mind. It is the center of a person. And a mind is not born finished; it is made, slowly, in stages. Trace that making all the way out, and you find it does not end where you would expect — it does not end at all.

It begins in feeling

The newborn mind lives in pure sensation. No words yet, no concepts — only the felt world: the comfort of being held, the distress of hunger, the first dawning that I am, and that there is an other who answers. It is all heart before it is ever head. And God does not despise that beginning; He formed it. “Thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb… I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:13–14). The feeling comes first because we are made for relationship before we are made for argument.

Then words open the world

With language and movement, everything changes. Now the child can name what was once only felt — and to name a thing is to begin to understand it, to hold it, to reach it. This is no small thing, and it is no accident: we are made in the image of a God who creates by speaking. “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light” (Genesis 1:3); the first task He gave the first man was to name the creatures (Genesis 2:19). The word-bearing mind is a faint echo of the Word who made all things. Through words, raw experience becomes a world a person can live in.

Experience ripens into maturity

Then come the years of use. Understanding is not downloaded; it is earned by living — by trying, failing, weighing, and discerning. Scripture puts it exactly: “strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil” (Hebrews 5:14). Even the Lord Jesus, in His humanity, “learned… obedience by the things which he suffered” (Hebrews 5:8), and “increased in wisdom and stature” (Luke 2:52). The childish is laid down: “when I became a man, I put away childish things” (1 Corinthians 13:11). This is the summit of the natural mind — and it is genuinely good.

But the staircase has a ceiling — and a second one begins

Here is the turn, and it is the whole thing. The natural mind, however mature, cannot climb its way into the spiritual. It is not a matter of one more step up the same stairs:

Spiritual awakening is not the top of the natural staircase; it is the first step of a different one. You do not graduate into it — you are born into it: “that which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6). And the place where it all turns is, fittingly, the mind:

And yet a Voice is already calling

But here is the mercy folded into it: that ceiling is not soundproof. The natural man cannot climb into the spiritual by himself — yet he is not left unable to hear. Long before he is born again, a Voice is already calling him, and it is God’s own. The drawing always comes first: “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him” (John 6:44); “I, if I be lifted up… will draw all men unto me” (John 12:32). The Spirit works on the un-awakened world to “reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment” (John 16:8), and “the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance” (Romans 2:4). And it can be resisted — “ye do always resist the Holy Ghost” (Acts 7:51) — which proves He is truly speaking, for there would be nothing to resist in silence.

And He is endlessly resourceful in how He calls — “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake” (Hebrews 1:1) has never run out of doorways into a heart. He draws through people: a friend’s question, a stranger’s kindness, a mother’s prayers, a preacher sent (“how shall they hear without a preacher?” — Romans 10:14). He draws through words you read or hear: a verse, a song, a page, the heavens themselves, whose “voice is gone out through all the earth” (Psalm 19:3–4). And He draws through experience: a providence, a beauty, a loss. The prodigal was drawn home by a famine (Luke 15:14–17); the psalmist confessed, “before I was afflicted I went astray: but now have I kept thy word” (Psalm 119:67). The channels are a thousand; the Voice is one; and it is always saying the same thing: come.

So that restless hunger, that prick of conscience, that strange pull toward the light — it is not nothing, and it is not merely yours. It is the voice of God upon the natural man, and it always leads in exactly one direction: toward repentance, toward the Spirit, toward the new man. Young Samuel “did not yet know the LORD” and still heard Him call his name in the night (1 Samuel 3:7). You can hear before you understand. The call is God’s; the answer is yours; and the answer, when you give it, becomes the second birth. “Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely” (Revelation 22:17).

And of all the ways He calls, one is decisive. The people, the providences, the beauty — they plough the ground; but the seed that actually quickens a dead heart to life is the Word of God.

A famine turned the prodigal, but it was the word he finally spoke — “I will arise and go to my father” (Luke 15:18) — that carried him home. Everything else draws; the Word comes home. And at the last the Word is not merely a message but a Person — “the Word was made flesh” (John 1:14) — who says of the one who hears, “we will come unto him, and make our abode with him” (John 14:23). The long drawing arrives exactly where it was always headed: the living Word, come home to a heart, to stay.

And the Word has an appointed gateway — preaching. “How shall they hear without a preacher?” (Romans 10:14); “it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe” (1 Corinthians 1:21). It was a sermon that birthed the first three thousand: Peter preached, the Word came home, the crowd was “pricked in their heart” and cried, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” (Acts 2:37) — and the answer he gave them that day is the very one this page is walking you toward.

A new language

And the awakened mind learns to speak a tongue the natural mind could never generate on its own — a grammar of the inner life. “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” (1 Corinthians 2:13). There is an inward witness now — “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God” (Romans 8:16); there is communion, discernment, a peace the mind had no category for — “thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee” (Isaiah 26:3). And astonishingly, we are given to share His very thought: “we have the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16); “let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5).

So we grow up twice

And here is the quiet beauty of it: the new life repeats your whole arc, one storey higher. You are born again as a spiritual infant and begin to feed: “as newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby” (1 Peter 2:2). You learn the new language. You mature through spiritual experience — from milk to “strong meat” (1 Corinthians 3:2) — growing “unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13). Feeling, word, experience, maturity — the very same shape as before, except now the life that is growing up is His, not merely yours.

The blossoming that never ends

And this is where the two lives finally, forever part. The natural life has a ceiling built into it: the body’s blossom opens and, in the same motion, begins to fade. “All flesh is grass… the grass withereth, the flower fadeth” (Isaiah 40:6–7). But watch what happens to the inward mind as the outward one declines — the most hopeful inversion in all of Scripture:

While the body winds down, the spirit is still opening. “The righteous… shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing” (Psalm 92:12–14). “They go from strength to strength” (Psalm 84:7). “The path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day” (Proverbs 4:18). More and more — never less.

And it does not stop at death, because its source is inexhaustible. We are “changed into the same image from glory to glory” (2 Corinthians 3:18) — and there is no final glory on that road, because the One we are being changed toward is infinite. A finite soul can draw nearer to an unbounded God through all eternity and never arrive, never exhaust Him, never hit a wall — only keep unfolding. “That in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace” (Ephesians 2:7) — ages, plural, forever. And the destination is not merely endless growth but endless growth into His likeness — “it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but… we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). We become what we behold. An inheritance “incorruptible… that fadeth not away” (1 Peter 1:4). The natural life says bloom, then fade. The spiritual life says bloom — and keep blooming, world without end.

Not the god within — the God who gives life

One honest word, because the age sells a cheap copy of this. Spiritual awakening is not the discovery of a divinity already inside you, waiting to be unlocked — that is the oldest lie, “ye shall be as gods” (Genesis 3:5). It is the opposite: being made alive from outside, by the Spirit of God, because the natural mind cannot reach the spiritual on its own. The counterfeit always imitates something real; this is the real thing it imitates — and it is infinitely better, because at the end of it is not your own small self enlarged, but the living God Himself, known face to face.

Where the renewing begins

A mind that will blossom forever has to be born first, and that birth has a doorway — the same one Peter named to the very first hearers who asked, “what shall we do?”

You grew up once, into this life. You can be born to grow up a second time — into a life whose best is always still ahead, whose flower never fades, whose mind is being made, day by day, into the mind of Christ. World without end.