A MIND THAT WANTS TO CHECK
OUT
We’ve all witnessed older
people, maybe in their 90’s, who “check out” of life. They’ve lived vital,
energetic lives and now they are ready to move on. Their minds begin to
deteriorate. You probably have noticed that people are starting to “check out”
at a much younger age. This has got to stop.
I understand that life
becomes hard. We don’t want to deal with all the deadlines, the
responsibilities put on us, the lack of fair treatment or fair pay for what we
do; We are tired of dealing with crazy people, delays, things going wrong. We
want other people to deal with these complicated things for us and we would
just like to float a little on someone else’s energy. THIS IS A DANGEROUS
THOUGHT AND A SLIPPERY PATH!
I see and know of people
who have done this very thing and now they have a hard time remembering the
smallest things. They have difficulty finishing a sentence. They have a great
idea but can’t seem to execute it.
Once a person starts down
this path of disengaging, the mind gets lazy and thinks it’s justified. Soon it
doesn’t even realize what’s going on and it’s only circling on itself, even
obsessing on the same things over and over and basically going nowhere.
The Lord wanted to show
this to me in other people and my response was not only sadness, but also some
frustration too. Then, it happened to me!
I had a difficult week
with deadlines and way too many people with too many different ideas and it was
confusing and a bit overwhelming. By the weekend I was exhausted. One of my
best friends came over and she wanted to tell me the details about what was
going on in her life; some of it involved me too. Part way through her
excitement, I checked out.
I didn’t even realize it until
about fifteen minutes later when I asked her about some portion of her story. I
may have imagined it, but it seemed that she gave me this incredulous sideways
look that said, “I just told you a few minutes ago! Weren’t you listening?” The
answer, sadly enough, was, “Nope, I checked out!”
I had just done the very
thing I was all grumbly about seeing in other people! I woke up to what the
Lord had been trying to show me: “NO MORE CHECKING OUT! I’ve shown you what happens to other people.
Don’t let it happen to you.”
We can’t allow ourselves
to get lazy-minded. Second Timothy 1:7 tells us, “God hath
not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound
mind.” But we have to guard it, claim it and make it obey what the Word of God
says about it.
In the next chapter of Timothy, God tells us, “The servant
of the Lord must be gentle unto all, apt to teach, in meekness instructing
those that oppose themselves, that they may recover themselves out of the snare
of the devil, who are taken captive by him at his will” (vv. 24-26). These
verses are not just talking about helping other people, but we are included in
the “all.” We are part of the: “that
they may recover [also translated “awake”] themselves out of the snare of the
devil.”
It is a terrible snare of the devil, that he can get us to
be slovenly with our minds. Yes, we may get tired physically, or worn down by
the confusion and craziness of people and the world around us, but we have a
loving Lord to help us recover ourselves, wake ourselves up and have our minds
be clear, fit, vibrant and sound.
A great example is the man in the Gadarenes. The record is
in Mark 5. Verse 2 says, “When he [Jesus] was come out of the ship, immediately
there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit.” This man’s mind
was unclean. It wasn’t sharp; it wasn’t clear. In fact, he fit into the
category we just saw in 2 Timothy 2:24: He was among “those that oppose
themselves,” so much so, that he literally cut himself:
“Night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs,
crying, and cutting himself” (v. 5). The word “tombs” is translated from the
Greek word that means, “a monument or memorial to perpetuate the memory of
any person or thing.” Tombs usually hold the remains of someone who is dead.
The man of the Gadarenes was dwelling with things that were
dead, things of the past that should have been dealt with and left dead. Instead,
he was going back physically and mentally, obsessing over them, and in so much
agony, he was mutilating himself. We have cutters today and many are young
girls, obsessing over things that need to be dealt with according to God’s Word
and left for dead.
The answer is always Jesus. Even these unclean, unsound
demons that possessed the man of the tombs and kept him crazy, were no match
for the Lord Jesus Christ.
Jesus “said unto him, ‘Come out of the man, thou unclean
spirit’” (v.8). And the people “came to Jesus and saw the man
who had been demon-possessed sitting down, clothed and in his right mind”
(v. 15). Here we see that this man’s mind was restored, it was “his”
right mind.
In other words, as nuts as he was, his mind wasn’t beyond the
point of restoration. He once had a sharp, clear, vibrant and sound mind and
when Jesus’s words were spoken to him, and he believed them, he got back his
right mind! He had a right to own his own mind. And we do to!
And what did the man do? He followed Jesus and told others
about how he was delivered and healed.
So if we are determined to keep our wits about us till our
last day here on earth, then we always need to look to the Lord and follow Him.
We don’t have to be afraid of anything. God will never give us anything we can’t
handle and we never have to think we need to mentally “check out.”
We stay strong-minded and clear-headed, no matter what goes
on around us and we keep our eyes on Jesus who helped the crazy Gadarene man
get his mind back. Instead of dwelling in the tombs, we dwell on the words of
the one who made us: “God hath
not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound
mind.”
Love, Carolyn
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