You have changed a lot of things in your life and still woke up six months later in the same small place. You changed your car, your church, your suburb, maybe even your circle of friends, and yet the life you are living looks suspiciously like the one you were trying to leave. Here is the reason nobody told you: your life will never outrun your mind. It was never built to. You have spent years trying to fix your life from the outside, and God keeps pointing you back to the one room most believers never think to renovate.
This post will show you what Scripture actually says about the mind, why there is more than one mind at work in you, and why the un-renewed mind, not the devil and not your sin, is the real thing keeping most believers small. You will see what the “mind of Christ” truly means (it is closer to you than you have been taught), why everything you will ever possess has to be purchased twice, and how to reset your thinking back to factory settings. Most importantly, you will land on one sentence so freeing it can reorder your whole walk: you do not have a sin problem – your mind is the key; renew it. If you want a companion truth for this journey, read grace vs performance Christianity. You will leave able to see further than you have ever seen, because how far you can see is how far you can be. It is time to Upgrade Your Life by Thinking Like Heaven!
Upgrade your life
Let me put a promise in your hands before we go one verse deep. Your ability to go far in God, in life, and in destiny is determined by what you can see in your mind. Not your bank balance. Not your background. Not the country printed on your passport. Not the family you were born into or the failures you carry. Your mind. The person who can see further goes further, every single time, and the person who cannot see stays exactly where they are and calls it the will of God.
Picture a room at midnight. The curtains are drawn, the walls are close, and just inside the door there is a light switch wired to a globe that has worked perfectly every day of its life. The room is not broken. The wiring is not broken. The bulb is not blown. There is more than enough light available to read by, to walk by, to build a future by. But nobody ever flipped the switch. So the person inside sits in the dark, knocking their shins on the same furniture night after night, and decides that this darkness is simply the way life is.
That person is not the unbeliever. The unbeliever already knows they are in the dark. That person is the believer who has light wired into them from the day they were born again and has simply never reached for the switch.
The five minds Scripture describes
The mind is not a vague, churchy idea. The Bible takes it apart and shows you that there is not one mind in Scripture, there are several, and which one runs your life decides everything else about your life.
Read carefully and you will find at least five distinct minds:
- The mind of God, whose thoughts are higher than your thoughts.
- The mind of the Spirit, which is life and peace.
- The mind of Christ, which Paul says you already have.
- The mind of the believer, which is enlightened and unveiled.
- The mind of the unbeliever, which is blinded and dark.
Once you see them, you cannot un-see them. And notice something the religious crowd never notices. Scripture never once says the brain of God, the brain of the Spirit, or the brain of Christ. It says the mind of God, the mind of the Spirit, the mind of Christ, every single time. That is not an accident of language. That is revelation hidden in plain sight.
Why the brain serves the body and the mind serves the spirit
The brain is the organ that lets your physical body function in this physical world. But you are not only a body. You have a spirit, and your spirit needs an organ of its own to see, to receive, and to grow. That organ is the mind. The mind is to the spirit what the brain is to the body. Starve the one and you cripple the other.
We understand this perfectly on the natural side. A body can be fully grown at thirty or forty, but if the brain was never developed, the person cannot function. That is why we pour twenty years into education, filling the brain year upon year, because we know the body cannot rise above the brain that runs it. Nobody argues with this.
And then we walk into church and expect the spirit to grow while the mind is left to rot. We feed the spirit a worship song and a goosebump and send it home hungry. The same law that runs in the body runs in the spirit: unless your mind is developed, your spirit cannot develop. You stay an infant believer, born again ten or twenty years ago and still spiritually unable to walk, because the organ that feeds your spirit was never fed itself. A starved mind keeps a strong spirit in a wheelchair.
The believer with a phone at one percent
Here is how the tragedy actually looks. Picture a phone sitting at one percent. The screen is dim, everything lags, it shuts down in the middle of what matters most, and you start to believe the phone itself is the problem. It is not. It was built to run. It is simply not charged.
That is the believer with an un-renewed mind. Full capacity inside, almost no power getting through, blaming the device when the device was never broken. The unbeliever’s phone is switched off at the wall. The believer’s phone is on and starving. Different problems, same darkness on the screen. Paul draws the line without softening it:
“For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.” — Romans 8:6
Same person. Same twenty-four hours. Same ten fingers and two eyes. The only difference is which mind is running the room. The mind of the flesh looks at an old building and sees a ruin; the enlightened mind looks at the same building and sees something brand new that God is about to fill. Nothing on the outside changed. The only thing that changed is which mind is doing the looking.
Everything must be purchased twice
Here is a phrase that will change how you live: everything in your life has to be purchased twice. It is first purchased in your mind, and only then can you legally have it in this life.
The mind is the only faculty you own, together with the Holy Spirit, that is licensed to walk into the future and see another version of yourself, a version you do not have yet. You go into the future in your mind, you buy the thing there, you become so settled and comfortable with it that it is no longer a question, and then you come back into today and your body is finally allowed to step into what your mind already owns. And when you step in, it does not run away. It does not snap back. Because you already paid for it once, where it counts.
This is the whole story of Joseph, and it is the proof of everything. Joseph was in a prison, but his mind was already in the palace. From the time he was a boy, God gave him a vision of sheaves and stars bowing, and that image refused to leave him. When his brothers threw him in the pit, the image pulled him out. When he was sold into slavery, the image held. When he was thrown into jail, the palace was already living in his mind while his body sat in chains. The vision he received as a youth dragged him up out of every low place, because his mind had already gone where his body had not yet arrived. This is why God took Abraham outside and told him to number the stars. He had to put a picture in front of him before the promise could be born. The mind works with images, and the moment you can see it, you have already begun to become it.
The factory reset: what renewing your mind really means
Renewing your mind is not reading a verse and feeling a little better. It is wiping the thing back to factory settings and starting clean.
Think again about the phone. Sometimes a phone is not just low on charge, it is cluttered and corrupted, carrying errors and old files that no amount of effort seems to clear. What it needs is a reset back to default, back to how it left the factory. That is what a renewed mind is: not a slightly improved version of your old thinking, but your thinking restored to the settings heaven intended before the world, your upbringing, and every lie you inherited wrote over them.
You contradict every lie in your head with a verse. You do it at night on the floor with your Bible open if you have to, reading until the sun comes up, until slowly the person in the mirror starts to change. This is not information. It is transformation. And it is a decision you make daily, not a feeling you wait for. If you want a practical companion for guarding what enters your mind, read how to hear God’s voice in a world of digital noise.
The mind of the Anointed
Now we come to the heart of it, and it hangs on one small word. Read the verse most believers rush straight past:
“Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.” — Philippians 2:5
Circle the word “also.” Because “also” means it was not only His. It means it was a mind that existed before Him and around Him, and Jesus took it up. Jesus did not invent this mind. He adopted it. And if He adopted it, so can you.
Now catch this, because most believers have never been told it. The word “Christ” is not Jesus’ surname. He was not Joseph Christ from Nazareth. The word “Christ” means anointed. It is a title, the Anointed One. So when Paul says “the mind of Christ,” he is saying, in plain language, the mind of the Anointed. It is not Christ’s own private mind, locked away in heaven behind glass where you can only admire it from a distance. It is a mind that Christ had, a mind He carried, a mind He adopted and is now asking you to put on like a coat.
This single word study has set more people free than can be counted, because it tears down a wall religion built between you and the mind of God. And it gets bigger. The same mind Jesus adopted, Moses adopted, David adopted, Samuel adopted, Paul adopted, and then Paul turned around and said something staggering: we have it. Not “Jesus has it.” Not “one day in heaven you might receive it.” We have the mind of Christ, right now, in this body, on this earth.
Think about what that does to the story of the Bible. The people who parted seas and killed giants and wrote two-thirds of the New Testament were not a different species from you. Moses stood in front of a sea with an army at his back, and the anointed mind did not see a dead end, it saw a road. David ran toward the giant the whole army was running away from, because the anointed mind measured the giant against God instead of measuring God against the giant. Same mind. Different generations. Yours now.
You are already complete
Here is where the mind of the Anointed stops being a goal to chase and becomes a fact to believe. You have spent years trying to become something you already are.
“For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. And ye are complete in him.” — Colossians 2:9-10
Complete. Not becoming complete. Not complete once you have prayed enough, fasted enough, or finally broken the habit. Complete in Him, present tense, already. The Anointed One, the fullness of God, lives in you. When you truly know you are complete in Him, you stop striving to earn what has already been given and you start living from fullness instead of toward it. This is the difference between the believer who begs and the believer who reigns.
Royalty is in the blood, not the behaviour
Once you understand you are complete, you have to understand who you are. And your identity is not built on your behaviour. It is carried in your blood.
A prince does not become royal by acting royal. Royalty is not in his behaviour, it is in his blood. He was born into it. This is the truth heaven is speaking over you: royalty is in your blood, not your behaviour. You are royalty by lineage, by the blood of the New Covenant that adopted you, not by how well you performed this week.
“For if by one man’s offence death reigned by one; much more they which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ.” — Romans 5:17
You are built to reign in life, not to beg. Death used to be king. But the picture flipped at the cross, and now those who receive the abundance of grace are the ones who reign. So why live like a beggar with royal blood in your veins? Kings do not grovel at the gate of their own kingdom. The same blood that justified you is the blood that crowned you, and a crown answers to blood, never to behaviour. If shame keeps arguing with this, anchor yourself in why you cannot lose your salvation.
The blood that speaks better things
There is one more thing the blood does, and it changes everything about the accusations you keep hearing in the dark.
“And to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel.” — Hebrews 12:24
The blood speaks. And it speaks better things. Better than vengeance, better than payment, better than the record your own conscience keeps reading back to you. You have not come to Mount Sinai, the mountain of law that burned with fire. You have come to Mount Zion, and Zion is where the blood works, because the Lord dwells there. Listen to what is true of the people who dwell in Zion:
“And the inhabitant shall not say, I am sick: the people that dwell therein shall be forgiven their iniquity.” — Isaiah 33:24
No sickness. No unforgiven iniquity. No condemnation, no guilt, no record being read back to you in the dark. That is the better thing the blood is saying right now over your name. And there is a word the New Testament uses for what the blood made you:
“Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” — 2 Corinthians 5:17
In the Greek that word is kainos. It does not mean a slightly improved version of the old you. It means a being that never existed before, a brand-new kind of creation. That is why nothing is impossible for you. You are not the old person straining to do impossible things. You are a kainos the blood made new, and the word “impossible” was never written for the likes of you.
Conclusion: you have a mind problem, not a sin problem
Bring it all home to one sentence, and let it settle so deeply that nothing can shake it loose: you do not have a sin problem. You have a mind problem. And the day you deal with the mind is the day everything changes.
It is not the devil keeping most believers small. It is an un-renewed mind. The light is already wired into you. The switch has been yours to flip since the day you were born again. You are complete in Him, royalty by blood, a brand-new creature with heaven speaking better things over your name than you have ever spoken over yourself. All that is left is for your mind to catch up with what your spirit already owns.
So stop trying to behave your way into a bigger life. Renew your mind instead. Pick one lie you have believed about yourself and contradict it with the Word today. See yourself a year from now somewhere bigger than your current address, and hold that picture until your body is allowed to step into it. Reach for the switch.
Pray this with me: Father, today I open my mind to the mind of the Anointed. I refuse the lie that I am too ordinary, too late, or too far gone. I am complete in Christ, royalty by Your blood, a new creation with Your voice speaking better things over me. Renew my mind, switch on the light You wired into me, and let me see further than I have ever seen before. In Jesus’ name, amen.
This blog post is adapted from Leon du Preez’s partner-exclusive eBook, The Mind of the Anointed: How to Upgrade Your Life by Thinking Like Heaven. Access this eBook and many more resources when you Become a Partner today!
