Hearts and Minds' Strategy

UV 724/10,000 Hearts and Minds’ Strategy “For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My laws in their mind and write them on their heart; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.” Hebrews 8 v 10 As the new covenant people, we are to weave our thoughts, knit our emotions, pin our hopes, build our dreams and base our decisions on the Word of God. As John Maxwell writes, “ what we delight in determines our desires.” When we delight in the Word, it will determine our desires. We take every thought captive to Christ by focussing on His Word. It is this captivity that sets us free from the bondage of sin in this world. The gospel is God’s heart and mind strategy to transform the character and the destiny of His people. Weaving and knitting involves an intricate pattern of putting things together. In weaving there is a movement of the loom that produce the warp and another movement that produces the weft. Similarly, our pattern of thought follows the warp and weft. If warp produces our positives or strengths, the weft produces our weaknesses or negatives. The integration of the Word in our thought, emotion, decision and action patterns leads to transformation of the patterns- the strengths get augmented and the weaknesses addressed, reduced or turned into strengths. Our minds and our hearts become magnets that attract the positive and repel the negatives. God’ s heart and mind strategy uses the Word to connect the minds and hearts of His people. My mentor used to say, “ There is a need to transfer the Word nine inches from the mind to the heart.” Many people take a whole lifetime to travel these nine inches. Mankind has spliced intelligence into multiple intelligences- intelligence quotient, emotional quotient and spiritual quotient. What man divides in his wisdom, God unites and integrates. He unites our hearts and minds. He dwells in our hearts by faith and operates in our lives by grace. He declares, “ I will be their God and they shall be my people.” St Paul was writing this uni-verse as a promise to the Jewish people to be fulfilled in the future. But, as far as we are concerned, the Lord has already fulfilled the promise for He is our God and we are His people. We have a sense of belonging to Him and He has a sense of belonging to us. As we meditate on His Word, it gets written or hard-wired into the neural circuitry of our brains. It affects our thoughts, imagination, emotions, actions and reactions. As we delight and enjoy living a life of obedience to His Word, it gets written into our hearts. Prateep V Philip