Who's My Neighbor? A Biblical Call To Love OthersSample

Have you lost your mind?

Lee Copeland

Bennett, my 25-year-old-son with Autism, responds to certain situations that don’t make sense to him by asking, “Have you lost your mind?” I think what he means is, “This doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t understand where you’re coming from.”

When we think about how to understand others, we want to understand what motivates them—where they’re coming from. You might call this their internal posture or mindset. Our internal posture determines our actions and behaviors. Our scripture from Philippians refers to this internal posture in verse 5 as “mind.” The scripture writer implores us to take on the same “mind” or internal posture as Christ who demonstrated His love by choosing to intentionally subvert His inclination to self-preservation in favor of serving others.

It is this purposeful focus on others that enables us to interact with them as Christ would; with tenderness, compassion, unity, selflessness, and humility. This re-orientation of our mindset requires an intentional choice to allow our motives to be shaped by the presence and grace of Christ at work in our lives.

This is the good news. Because God has already acted in Christ, we can experience a new way of being alive in Him. We can know what it is to be genuinely loved. To know comfort, joy, intimacy, and belonging. This is where we have to be willing to own that the absence of these virtues in our lives may just be because we have yet to get our “minds” where they need to be.

If we’re still attempting to live life—even attempting to follow Christ—from the wrong mindset, then we’re not doing it right! If we are to experience the fulfillment and joy of life that God dreams for us, we’ve got to “lose our minds,” or at least the way that we’ve grown accustomed to being alive and allow God to re-orient our mindset to mirror that of Jesus himself. This is the essence of the Christian journey. Have YOU lost YOUR mind yet?