“When you can do the common things of life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.” George Washington Carver

One of my great delights in life is discovering more about who God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit really are. God Himself said, “My ways are not your ways, and My thoughts are not your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9). To me, this means there’s always something new to learn about how and what the Godhead thinks about any subject (including myself) and what they want to do in and through us. These moments of learning are especially precious because they help us represent Him to the world in Spirit and truth (John 4:23-4). 

According to Scripture, part of the Holy Spirit’s job description is teaching us about all things (John 14:26), so He must be able to help us change the way we think and act. We obviously can’t do it by ourselves, because too often we think our thoughts and ways are already God-perfect! That’s how the Scribes and Pharisees got in trouble. They were absolutely convinced their explanations of the Bible were 100% accurate. They could not contain their rage when Jesus arrived on the scene challenging their interpretations of God’s words. Like those Jesus haters, we can also quote God’s words but lack God’s heart. When we act and speak from those disconnected places, we can also be absolutely convinced we’re doing divine work.

How did Jesus deal with those stuck and hard places of misunderstanding? He regularly did things to blow people’s minds and intentionally shake them up!

Jesus was recognized by everyone as someone who spoke with authority unlike other teachers (Matthew 7:28-9). Yet he was not afraid to walk away from a conversation leaving people confused, questioning and wrestling with what He’d just shared. Perhaps if we look more closely at some of those examples, we’ll be better equipped to recognize when the Holy Spirit’s trying to do the same thing with us and actually cooperate with His mind-blowing work!

In Matthew 4:19, Jesus called his first disciples. They were fishermen with lots of experience and practical knowledge on how to fish. We can only guess at how confused they must have been when He promised to make them into “fishers of men.” He devoted the next 3 ½ years of His life to transforming their minds and hearts to His way of thinking.

Jesus also frequently asked open-ended questions. "Why do you reason about these things in your hearts?” (Luke 5:22-24) “How can Satan cast out Satan?” (Matthew 12:26) “To what shall we liken the kingdom of God? With what parable shall we picture it?”  (Mark 4:30-32) 

When a multitude remarked that His mother and brothers were outside seeking Him, He seized the opportunity to even rewrite their definition of family: “Who is My mother, or my brothers? Whoever does the will of God is My brother and My sister and mother.” (Mark 3:35) That must have been a real mindblower.

Another time He told a complex story that included four different examples of what could happen when sowing seeds (Mark 4:1-20). He gave the crowd no explanations about what the scenarios meant. Later when the puzzled disciples asked Jesus privately for help to grasp its meaning, He still refrained from providing a lot of specifics about how to apply it in their own lives. Each disciple had to do his own wrestling with the content to make the lesson individually useful.

Jesus was particularly mind-blowing when He healed people of sickness and disease. Once he made a mud pack and applied it to a blind man’s eyes (John 9:6-7). Another time he merely requested a crippled man to stretch out his arm (Matthes 12:13). He never used the same technique twice, which forced his students to depend on Jesus for moment-to-moment instruction. They simply could not pin Jesus down to one method or formula for restoring health. 

There were and are just too many Kingdom ways to express God’s love. To our puny natural way of thinking, it makes no sense to love our enemies (Matthew 5:43-48). How can we even begin to want or figure out how to do that?

The good news is the Holy Spirit is ready to practically lead us into God’s ways and thoughts in all different forms. God knows how to repair soil, write IT algorithms, invest money, pass chemistry tests, love the unlovely, and save souls. When the famous researcher, George Washington Carver, was asked by a group of Congressmen how he came up with 300 different uses for the peanut, he gave all the credit to our Savior, saying the Lord had inspired his scientific discoveries. 

What do you think? Is it safe to say that God may be planning some special times to blow our minds so there’s more room for His ways and thoughts to come in? If that’s true, we better get ready for experiences we can’t control or restrict that will launch us into the mind of Christ (1 Cor 2:16)!