Early yesterday morning a string of thoughts began to form in my mind and lingered, unconnected to one another, until later in the day.They began as I was went to fix the morning coffee and noticed that the clock on our microwave was exactly in sync with the clock on my smart phone. That didn't surprise me, because I had used the clock on my smart phone to set the clock on the microwave when we moved back to standard time last month. The thought that popped into my brain was that I didn't have to change the clock in my smart phone or on my computers. That was done by an unseen energy pulse from somewhere above earth's atmosphere, a ricochet of a pulse - a thought, of sorts - sent from somewhere on earth.

I thought of this again when I was praying Psalm 139, especially v. 17: "How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!" I take the prepositional phrase "to me" as being not merely subjective but directional: God's thoughts toward me, unto me, and for me are precious and numerous, more than I could ever count (v. 18). 

Then, in the afternoon, praying Psalm 92, I came to v. 5, "How great are your works, O LORD! Your thoughts are very deep!" and pondered the connection between God's works and His thoughts. Parallelisms in Hebrew poetry tend to offer different ways of saying the same thing. Are God's works merely expressions of His thoughts? If so, His thoughts must be both deep and numerous, as well as comprehensive and uninterrupted. Is my entire existence dependent upon God thinking toward me at every moment?

That reminded me of Christ thinking into existence the additional molecules to combine with hydrogen and oxygen to make wine out of water (Jn. 2) - a miracle in which the Lord neither touched the water nor spoke to it; He simply thought the wine into being, by some pulse of divine intellectual energy striking the molecules of water and turning them to something entirely different and new.

And that brought me back to the clock thing. What kind of minds can think of such stuff? To be able to change the setting of my clock from somewhere unknown to me, via energy pulses, satellites, micro-hardware, and x's and o's software! It boggles my mind. I imagine some guy sitting at a desk somewhere as the moment to change the clocks all over the world arrives, and he's thinking to himself a countdown - 3, 2, 1. Then he thinks, "Now!" and mashes a button that sends a pulse at the speed of light to a satellite, which bounces it thence to my clock. All those thoughts and pulses, just to keep my clock at the right time.

I began to wish I had such a mind as this, when I remembered Psalms 139 and 92 and the thoughts and works of God. Man can build a satellite and program it to change clocks (among many other amazing things). God spoke the cosmos into being and sustains it by His Word of power - a continual, regular, gracious, and powerful thinking of deep and numerous thoughts that allows everything that is to continue to exist. These are the thoughts of God! This is the mind of Christ!

Then it occurred to me that, as Paul says, I have the mind of Christ (1 Cor. 2.16)! How much more wonderful and potentially amazing is this! I was humbled and moved to wonder and praise by the responsibility that comes with such a privilege: to be continuously renewed in the mind of Christ (Rom. 12.1, 2) and to take every thought captive and make them all obedient to King Jesus (2 Cor. 10.3-5).

God's thoughts to us are always steadfast love and faithfulness. Are we thinking His thoughts after Him, making the most of each thought for the progress of Christ's Kingdom; or are we wasting our thoughts on frivolous, mundane things - as it were, using the mind of Christ to make water out of wine?

Additional related texts: Eph. 4.17-24; Phil. 2.1-11; Col. 3.1-3

A conversation starter: "The Scriptures teach that Christians have the mind of Christ. That being so, shouldn't we expect our thinking and conversations to reflect more of the interests of Christ and His Kingdom?"