Things Unseen: Living in Light of Forever

by Mark Buchanan

Alienation from God is not just about how we act. It’s about how we think. It’s in our minds. This means that the key to understanding our freedom in Christ—that we are no longer alienated from God, but are now reconciled to Him through Christ and have been made holy in His sight, without blemish or accusation—is also in our minds. Make no mistake: Christ’s redemptive work is a reality that happened out there, in place and time. His reconciling us to God, His presenting us holy and unblemished before God, is a reality, independent of whether we understand it fully or not. But its power to change us is in our minds. We are transformed through the renewing of our minds, and only then are we able to test and approve God’s good, perfect, and pleasing will (see Romans 12:2). So freedom and holiness come through what we set our minds on. “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God,” Paul says in another place, “and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). The word in Greek for take captive literally means to take prisoner. We take prisoner, he says, anything that tries to take us prisoner.