Letter: Do you think as God thinks?

Dear fellow Christians,

I’m sure this will come as a surprise to some of you but there have been times in my life when I was wrong in my thinking. Has this ever happened to you? Perhaps you were so dug in on what you believed or felt in a conversation with your spouse or maybe when it comes to God’s Word and Church teaching that you were not able to think or imagine the truth being anything different.

In the Gospel passage for this weekend (Mk 8:27-35), after Peter declares Jesus to be “the Christ”, Jesus reveals the truth of what will happen to him. He says He will suffer greatly, be rejected, killed and will rise on the third day. Peter then confronts and tries to correct Jesus. Jesus responds by saying “get behind me Satan. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”

This must have been quite an eye-opening moment for Peter. For him, it just didn’t seem that this would happen to the long-awaited Messiah. Peter allowed his personal convictions and emotions to get in the way of what Jesus was saying. Does this ever happen to you?

Today, we live in a very relativistic and subjective world. This makes it difficult to submit to and recognize objective truth. Our culture forms us to assign something to be true only if it conforms to our emotions or our own way of thinking, rather than seeing truth objectively, outside of how I think or feel. You may know this happens quite a lot when it comes to God’s Word and who Jesus is.

Attempting to mold and conform God and His Word so that it fits nice and neat into our own feelings and our own way of thinking is very popular these days. When speaking about who Jesus really is and what he really taught many will say, “That’s not the Jesus I know”.

Many are learning about Jesus from the culture rather than by reading God’s Word and learning Apostolic Tradition. This produces a false Christ and a false gospel. We must allow our minds and hearts to be formed by who God really is and not by what we want Him to be.

If God’s Word does not challenge you, then chances are you are following someone else. God calls us to lay our emotions and human-way of thinking aside and elevate our minds to conform to His Word and His Will, lest Jesus say to any one of us, “Get behind me Satan.”

In Christ,
Father Jeff Read
Holy Family Catholic Church