The apostle tells us that to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Again he speaks of having our spiritual understandings enlightened; and again of being joined together in the same mind; and in another place of having the mind of Christ. Peter also tells us to arm ourselves with the mind which Christ had when He was crucified. All these, and many other passages, may help us to form a Scriptural idea of what is meant by a spiritual mind. It is having the intellectual nature spiritualized through the affections of a pure heart and brought into union with the Holy Ghost so as to discern things—to reason, to form spiritual conceptions in accordance with inspired Scripture—or, as the Psalmist expresses it, seeing light in God’s light.

It takes something more than the grace of justification to have a spiritual mind; yes, and something more than the work of heart purity, in itself considered, for nothing less than the full baptism of the Holy Spirit will purge the natural darkness and carnal reasonings out of the intellect.

While sanctification is an instantaneous work of grace, to have a spiritual mind is acquired by habits of spiritual reading or by much prayer and, as Paul tells us in Colossians, by setting our mind on things above, not on things of the earth.

The mind is the central power of the soul between the affections and the will, and it is very difficult for the mind to act with vigor except in harmony with the affections. The intellect is the child of love, and follows the bent of desire, and can rapidly learn things which the heart loves. Hence, the cleansing of the heart, and filling it with pure love, is the condition of having the mental nature clarified and strengthened, to understand the things of God.

The following are some evidences of a spiritual mind:

1. It is apt in learning the things of God. It has a taste for spiritual reading, the biographies of holy people, books on the deep things of God, an avidity for the Scriptures, and a sweet relish for the psalms, the prophecies, the gospels and epistles, and finds many a sweet morsel of inspired truth hid away in the Old Testament where other minds, even able theologians, who are not divinely illuminated, see nothing but dry history. A spiritual mind is wide awake and can take in truth from a sermon or a song or a special providence with a quickness and zest which much greater minds that are not sanctified would see nothing in. Many a subject which most Christians have to take hours or days to look through and reason out and then only half see the truth and beauty therein, a spiritual mind will catch in a flash. An intellect that loves to think, and is entirely yielded to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, has an agility of motion, a quickness of perception, a keen appreciation of a fine point in truth incomprehensible to a natural mind.

2. Strength is another mark of a spiritual mind. It takes hold on truth with tremendous vigor, is serious in its thinking, penetrates to the bottom of things and, in seeking knowledge on divine things, it means business and acts with deliberation and firmness. Most people professing religion seem to have an easy, lazy, wabbling, half trifling intellect, betraying a lack of perfect sincerity, and a feebleness in their mental grasp of the great teachings of Scripture. Multitudes of them joke over spiritual things, take up with silly, childish interpretations; they think the Scriptures were not made to be understood, and hence make no effort to understand them. A weak-minded Christian will hold a death grip upon the nonessentials of religion, such as the mode of baptism or forms of church service, but has hardly any grasp at all on the great truths of the three persons in the Godhead, or the new birth, or sanctification, or the second coming of Jesus, or prevailing prayer, or the power of the Holy Ghost, or pushing evangelistic meetings, or the resurrection of the body, or the overwhelming issues of the coming age. As a child will fight for a plaything and let a kingdom slip from his hand, so an unspiritual mind will magnify a religious toy, and let a crown and a place of honor in the kingdom of Jesus go neglected. I have known people with very meager mental powers, on being baptized with the Holy Spirit, within a few months’ time manifest a vigor of intellect, an ability to grasp and remember long processes of Bible exegesis, and appreciate discriminations in doctrine a great deal better than able-minded persons who are not spiritual. Sin may sharpen the wits in inventing evil things, but it weakens the mind for apprehending the deep interior things of the soul.

A spiritual mind is marked by fullness and is ready furnished with stores of truth. When a person with a real spiritual mind begins to pray or speak or write, he does not betray any interior mental famine. There is a fullness of good solid ideas, and they are held, not in confusion, but in good order; and however odd the thoughts may be, there is a freshness and directness in their expression. Most professing Christians who have their heads crowded with many things, seem to have blank minds when it comes to Scripture or prayer or spiritual conversation. A spiritual mind will keep up a continuous daily thinking upon God, His perfections, the vastness and minuteness of His administration, the bendings in the stream of providence, and frequent reviews of revealed truth in the Old and New Testaments and is always eager to acquire knowledge that will abide and bless forever. A shallow-thinking Christian is always liable to be duped by some heresy or trifling religious fad, and multitudes of such are always drifting from apostolic faith.

3. When the intellect of a believer is in full union with the Holy Spirit, there will be in it a remarkable brightness. I do not mean it will be a genius, or a wit, flashing outwardly with philosophic brilliance, but it will have an internal brightness of thought and perception. Such a mind will have lofty, vast, and beautiful ideas of God, very sweet and enticing conceptions of the eternal Father, and of the unspeakable loveliness and grace of Jesus, and rich, inspiring apprehensions of the blessed Holy Ghost. It will have well defined views of the different works of grace. Its theology will not be a tangled maze.

It will see moral and spiritual qualities, such as humility, love, perseverance, gentleness, and other graces, almost as clearly as the eye discerns colors and magnitudes in a landscape. God promises to keep the souls of His fully trusting children as well-watered gardens, and why should not the intellect of such a one be like a flower garden or a blooming prairie, full of spiritual and mental beauty? Bright thoughts are the blossoms of the mind. Great long vistas of coming glory that open up to a spiritual mind are the premonitions of what await the toil-worn feet of God’s elect as they push their way over life’s rugged surface. As the drunkard in his tremens has visions of snakes and grim monsters that are the prelude of hell, so a spiritual mind, filled with the wine of the Holy Ghost, will have at times bright visions that stretch away in soft and tranquil whiteness through the coming ages. Oh, that our minds could once be flooded with those great spotless radiant thoughts which angels and saints and our blessed Jesus are thinking this hour in the light of glory.

4. Quick and well-defined discrimination is another trait of a spiritual mind. It readily detects truth from error, not by a slow process of reasoning, but by a heavenly instinct, a Holy Ghost intuition, which hits the mark more accurately than theological argument. When God’s love is strong enough to inundate the mind as well as the heart, it will discern the quality of error, and foresee its evil effects before they come to pass, for a heavenly mind has a prophetic capacity in it. It also will have power to detect the fitness of things as to time and place and circumstance and, if kept in a condition of teachableness, will be led to act often in the very nick of time and with a wisdom of which it is not aware. And the most important part of this spiritual discernment is to apprehend the daily unfoldings of the heavenly Father’s will, and recognize the secret impulses that come from the Holy Spirit. A spiritual mind has a fixed habit of mental prayer, and though the outward part may be occupied with current events and things, yet the inner mind is always in the attitude of kneeling before God, either in praying or adoring, and as soon as the outward mind is free, it swings back like the needle to the polar magnet in mental communion with God, or the tracing out of His dealings and purposes.

5. It is a source of physical vigor and longevity to have a spiritual mind.

To keep the thought stayed on God is the condition of great peace, as Isaiah tells us that God will keep the man in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Him. The habitual talking with the Lord in the mind will serve as a thick mantle wrapped around the soul, from the noise and bustle and trifles, and the wretched going on of men and things in the world. A fire-baptized intellect is a “secret pavilion,” a “second veil,” into which the soul may quietly and softly enter and rest beneath the golden cherubim and listen to the voice of God, for He said to Moses, “I will speak to thee from between the wings of the cherubim.”

Blessed privilege of thinking in fellowship with the Holy Spirit, of getting a peep into eternal day through the loop-holes of meditation! How it quiets the nerves, chastens our fears, invigorates the will, sweetens the affections, sprinkles the dew of kindness on our judgments of others, gently unties the cords that bind us to this life, gives us rehearsals of heavenly things, and enables us to do our work with calmness and deliberation, and in every way, as Paul tells us, conduces to life and peace.