Grafton Free Presbyterian Church

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Visitors Very Welcome

The Grafton Free Presbyterian Church is a congregation within the bounds of the Asia Pacific Presbytery of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland. We are evangelical and reformed according to Scripture in doctrine, worship and practice.

• We believe that the Bible is the inspired, infallible and inerrant Word of God;
• We believe in presbyterian church government; and
• We believe that the Westminster Confession of Faith accurately summarises the principal doctrines of God's Word.

A Brief Meditation for the Month

November 2024

In his letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul, among other things, differentiates in chapter eight between the ‘spiritual mind’ and the ‘carnal mind.’ What Paul refers to is the functioning of that mysterious faculty from which our actions proceed. We read in the book of Proverbs words that apply to us all: “As he thinketh in his heart so is he,” Proverbs 23:7. Whatever we may appear to be or whatever we say to impress our neighbour, it is within the secret world of our thoughts that reality exists. We may hide that reality from our fellows, but it is impossible to keep it hidden from God, who is the searcher of our hearts and thoughts. God himself informs us, “I the Lord search the heart,” Jeremiah 17:10. If, dear reader, we believe what God says, then we understand the solemnity with which we ought to conduct ourselves before God rather than men who cannot see beyond that which is superficial. It is with God, then, from whom we cannot hide hypocrisy or falsehood, that we ought to concern ourselves. He has appointed a day of judgement when each of us shall be judged accurately and justly according to the divine record, when the books shall be opened, and everyone will be judged according to that record, Revelation 20:12. The apostle Paul refers to this occasion as “The day when “God shall judge the secrets of men,” Romans 2:16. What secrets, whether good or bad, we carry in our bosoms, all of them are fully known to God our final judge. Much of our secret thinking, however, is reflected in our outward conduct and behaviour, and this exposes our internal condition, whether we think with a spiritual mind or the carnal, unrenewed mind of the natural man. Through the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit, the sin-infected mind experiences a supernatural transformation to become a spiritual mind. The evidence that such a transformation has taken place is in the difference between the old and the new thinking process and the focus of the thoughts. Paul wrote: “They that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit,” Romans 8:5. This being the case, each of us is in a position, upon examination of the focus of our thoughts, to assess what is going on in the secrecy of our minds, and by what we concentrate upon, whether we are truly as spiritually minded as we ought to be or whether our minds have become the instruments of God-dishonouring mental and physical activity. Paul was able to write as one who knew experientially what such a radical change the Spirit of God produces in the thinking of the regenerate man. He told King Agrippa: “I verily thought with myself, that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth,” Acts 26:9. Although we may conclude that Paul’s mind before his converting encounter with Jesus was a religious mind, it was nevertheless, according to his own writing, at enmity with God, Romans 8:7. This ought to impress upon us the difference between a religious mind and a spiritual mind. A religious mind may not be a spiritual mind, and religious thoughts may not be spiritual thoughts. In regeneration, the Spirit of God creates a spiritually minded man.

John Owen, the Puritan theologian, wrote of the evidence for a saving change in our spiritual condition: “We can have no greater evidence of a change in us from this state and condition, than a change wrought in the course of our thoughts…A change here is a blessed evidence of a change of state…And the more the stream of our thoughts is turned, the more our minds are filled by those of a contrary nature, the greater and more firm is our evidence of a translation out of that depraved state and condition.”

G. G. Hutton.

[See articles from previous months.]

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