If you did not read the title of this article, do it now and then resume reading. So what did you think when you read it? Did you first think of X-ray, CT Scan, MRI or some other procedure that is part of the medical world? It might surprise you that the Bible itself uses the phrase “inward parts.”
In the King James Version, this phrase is found fewer than ten times. We turn our attention to its use in Jeremiah 31:31-34. In this passage, God looks into the future of the Jewish nation to whom Jeremiah spoke. He described the true nature of Christianity. “This shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.” God was planning on putting His laws in man’s inward parts. The Hebrew word for “inward part” indicates the central part of man, and the New Testament quotes this Old Testament verse and uses the phrase “into their minds” (Heb. 8:10).
The words “inward parts” (or mind) and the word “heart” which follows them probably reflect Hebrew parallelism, but there is a blessing if we look more carefully at the contrast between putting “My laws in their minds” and writing “them in their hearts.” God seems to make a distinction between minds and hearts in this passage. There is a distinct difference in the mind and the heart.
Christianity first involves the law of God and the mind of man. Before His words truly become part of our spiritual lives, we must use our minds to know His laws. We listen to His words or read them in the Bible, and we are “…taught by God” and are “…drawn to Him” (John 6:44-45). We know His laws because we have put them in our minds.
However, if we stop at this point, our relationship with Him has just begun and being transformed into His image will never happen. Our inward part, our soul, must be involved. To use Paul’s words, “We all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Cor. 3:18).
We come to His word with open hearts and unveiled faces and see His image. That image is a mirror in which we see His glory, but we also see ourselves. We see Him, but our souls see ourselves. By spending time looking at Him, His image is written on our hearts and our glory becomes like His glory. These words vividly describe how the Holy Spirit changes us. God’s Spirit changes us to be like God, but it never happens without using His mirror to write His words first in our minds and then in our souls. So how do you look in your inside?
-Dan Jenkins
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