Excerpt from Pastor’s Motives (1 Peter 5:1-4).

Peter operated from a mind that had been saturated with thoughts and ideas that had come from Jesus. You could say that he had (in the words of St. Paul) “the mind of Christ.”

Why take time to expound on this? Because I am afraid that some of us have the mind of Fox News or of MSNBC. We can (and do!) repeat their talking points but we cannot repeat Jesus’s talking points! Our minds are saturated with ideas that did not come from Jesus and, in some cases, conflict with his ideas. And we probably don’t even know it.

I mentioned the news shows, but the entertainment shows – the primetime sitcoms and dramas – can also fill our minds with ideas of what is normal and good. The mind forms around what it takes in. We will think the thoughts and take for granted the assumptions that have been filling our minds. That is how humans were designed. Why is that important? Let’s take Peter for an example. He had a mind that was saturated with the wisdom of Jesus. He looked at life through the lens of Jesus’s teaching and example. Because that was true, when the crisis came in his life, he acted like Jesus.