Transform Your Mind
This article explains how the arc of the Biblical story, from Genesis to the New Testament Gospel, and the epistles, is in fact the theology of God creating mankind, mankind rejecting God (preferring ignorance, sin, and rebellion over wisdom, love, and peace), and God’s relentless pursuit to ask us to return to Him. He wants us to make the choice of our own free-will; without that, there can be no love and no “wokeness” to love or to hate.
Having established what it means to be conscious, and briefly approached some biblical concepts on it, what does the Bible exactly say about this process of spiritual and mental development?
The foundation of the Koshiz Living message relies on the fact that the Bible, in its entirety, is the theology of personal education, self-awareness and self-realization. It is the guidebook on how to spiritually and mentally approach God by conforming our Spirit and our mind to His.
Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Romans 12:2).
In our ignorance, man is at the lowest state of consciousness, concerned only with our own ends, which is survival, rather than reconciling ourselves to God (Gen. 11:4-9). The relational process of coming to know Christ, forming our identity to his (i.e. “sanctification”) is the evolution of growth in consciousness, spiritual growth, and self- and social awareness; an increase in awareness begets a decrease in ignorance.
The study of the Old Testament Bible has Christ as the exclamation point, so the study of the Bible in its entirety up to and including Christ is useful for teaching. By the end, you will see how the Biblical story is consistent with this point of view.
This article provides an overview of what I would call true woke theology. A detailed study may require a full book to properly examine the Bible from cover to cover with this lens.
Learning To Lead With Love
After thousands of years of trying to get it right ourselves, through Mosaic laws and our broken covenants with God, God sent His son Jesus to show us the way back to Himself (John 14:6-7). He lays the roadmap to increase our awareness of who we are (as the body of the church and God’s children), our individual purpose and role in society, and how to love. He does this by sending a material example in Christ Jesus, particularly through His death and resurrection.
By following Jesus on the path back to the Father, we gain wisdom, clarity, and intuition. We learn what is objectively right and wrong. Jesus teaches us how to lead with love – and He teaches us discernment in how to identify and fight evil. We learn how to be noble, honorable, courteous, and considerate.
A Roadmap To Christ Consciousness
Being a “woke” Christian means living a life full of love; it is an intentional commitment to knowing God’s word and acting it out; faith without works is dead (2 James 14:26).
As Christ-followers, we are vessels of the Holy Spirit. Our work is inherently spiritual; the struggles we face are not simply material: we cannot always reduce them to explanations of emotions or cause and effect.
God is Woke
The first step in this tour in self-awareness is realizing we, the created, have a creator (God). The child one day understands that they have a mother or father. Your cat or dog understands that you are its owner, its caretaker, and provider.
God has made us in His own image. At some point in the psychological development, we become very aware of this fact, even to the point of knowing our good qualities, and our faults (Gen 1:7, 10, 26-7; Gen 2:25; Gen 3:11).
The next step is to die a spiritual death. We must denounce ourselves, remove our own egos from the equation, and proclaim the superiority of the ultimate standard of goodness – God (1 Corinthians 10:24; 2 Chronicles 7:14).
Trading Our Consciousness for Christ’s
This training of the mind (and ego) to self-sacrifice itself to receive Christ’s spirit is a daily process. It is a daily commitment to place God’s wants for our lives before that of our own. When we announce Jesus as our savior, we are saying that He is above us and above all things. After dying a spiritual death, we are reborn with His spirit, His gifts, His wisdom, His reward (Matthew 16:24-27).
This willingness to take on an objective third party perspective has a significant side-effect. We begin to feel a sort of detachment, aloofness, calmness – indeed, a peace – that comes from Christ. This peace allows us to feel compassion (Matthew 9:36), but it is a peace that cannot be shaken irrespective of our circumstances or the chaos happening around us (Philippians 4:6-7; Psalm 29:11; 2 Thess 3:16).
It is similar to having an arbiter to settle disagreements between two parties such as in a contract dispute. When we accept Christ into our souls, we request an intercessor to settle the disputes within our soul. This helps us to avoid biases and self-centered tendencies (Mark 3:25). The Holy Spirit brings light to darkness within ourselves (Matthew 6:22-3; John 15:26).
When we admit that Jesus is our personal savior, that we are not responsible for our past, that God provides four our future, we come to know Jesus – and to know Jesus is to know the One who sent Him (John 14:7).
From “Woke” into “Awake”
Halfway through our journey, self-esteem (the evaluation of self) develops. And over our conscious lifetimes, it fluctuates. For the conscious Christian, we know our self-worth through God, our Heavenly Father. While the worldly culture may try to diminish our self-worth, we know it is eternally valuable because of the One who made us in His image (Isaiah 40:18-22)
We come to intimately know our purpose in life, our personal mission. Through the infusion of God’s wisdom, He helps us identify what He wants us to do. He assigns us our mission, our workplace, and provides all that we need to love others so that He may be glorified through us (Jeremiah 29:11).
As we mature from childhood to adulthood (spiritually and/or physiologically) we take on new responsibilities, we realize our actions have consequences. Typically as children, we do not reason this way. Our actions and desires are short-sighted (1 Corinthians 13:11), even to the point of immediate gratification with no concern for tomorrow; as children, we do not even have the right concept time as adults do. In our child-like mental state, the world does not revolve around entirely our wants, needs, desires, or actions.
In adulthood, it is the Father’s hope that we would become servants, using Jesus as the ultimate standard by which we judge our thoughts, beliefs, and actions (Matthew 20:26-28; 2 Corinthians 10:5).
What is Bound on Earth is Bound in Heaven
Eventually, we die a physical death as well. At which time, arriving in heaven in the Lord’s heavenly kingdom – the Christian nirvana – with our perfect bodies and eternal souls, we are finally formed to God’s identity for eternity (Luke 23:43). For Christians, this is the ultimate state of consciousness.
Our (dis)service to others has a pinball effect on our social networks. To be cognizant and forward thinking about what we do and say, and to speak and act from a place of love, that is what it means to be “woke”.
Should we be on the receiving end of evil, disservice, or sin, what joy it is that as members of God’s family, no matter what harm may come our way, God can and will always turn it around for the good of those who love him (Gen 50:15-20; Romans 8:28)!
Find Jesus In The Present
The Biblical story is one of evolving in consciousness from doing (laws, rituals, discipline) to being (love, compassion, mindfulness) and being present.
In conclusion: as we grow in spiritual maturity and intimacy, the Body of Christ becomes one. Imagine a society (however small; the larger the better!), living in love and “wokeness” as described above. Being a part of the same body, what we do to one another, we do to Christ. Being in Christ each ourselves, what we do to Christ, we do to ourselves! Building God’s kingdom on Earth is the collective mission of each of our individual mandates to grow in spiritual maturity, increasing in self- and social awareness, decreasing ignorance of sin.
Call it what you’d like: transcendence, consciousness, being “woke”, sanctification, the means justify the ends. They are all ways to describe the path we should be taking to grow in Christ and therefore in love!
