God may speak to you in the Spirit and show you things by revelation that are spiritual concepts, but they will never do you any good unless your mind can grasp what He is showing you. As an illustration, we know the human eye does not give us what we call sight; instead, the eye provides an image to the brain. Sight is a function of the human brain because it is the brain that interprets the image. So what we refer to as sight really involves the process of understanding that the mind gives us. Our spiritual sight and hearing work the same way. It does not matter how wonderful the things are that God gives us; if we do not understand them, we cannot apply them.
The Lord can give you visions and impressions, but the meaning has to come through to your brain. Read the books of Revelation and Ezekiel. God spoke to those prophets and showed them visions and images. But those visions and images still required a process of understanding. Whatever God speaks to us today or shows us in the Spirit still goes through the human mind. Therefore, the human mind becomes the switchboard of our walk with God. Everything that happens to us in the spirit must go through the process of being interpreted by the mind if we are to gain an understanding of it.
The problem is that our minds become conformed to that which influences them. For example, no one could run a four-minute mile until the first guy did it. Then everyone started doing it. So obviously your mind can put a limitation on your body’s ability to perform. Likewise, your mind can restrict your spirit’s ability to reach into the Lord. If things are impossible in your thinking, then your spirit will be restrained under those feelings and thoughts of limitation. Somehow by the grace of God we must break out of the extreme limitations that we have regarding the Lord and our capacities in Him. God is saying, “Don’t automatically think you understand what I’m saying or think that you are properly interpreting what I’m showing you.” Instead, bring it back before the Lord and present yourself to Him. Just resubmit all the ways you think, function, and relate, rather than doing things out of rote conditioning or assuming you have understanding.
The Bible is the foundation of our faith, but understanding it is completely dependent upon your mind’s ability to grasp what God is saying. We see so many divisions within Christianity because there are so many different minds reading this same Book but understanding it in different ways. The promise is that we will all see eye to eye when the Lord brings again Zion (Isaiah 52:8, KJV). But that will only happen by the renewing of our minds.
How many things do we hold on to when the Lord is trying to get us into a new way of thinking? We may be hearing Him and seeing the visions, but these things have to be interpreted by the mind. Your mind can interpret those things by past conditioning, or it can “be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2).[1] Present yourself to Him and say, “Lord, am I interpreting this correctly? Let my mind be renewed. Let this create a whole new day in my walk with You.”
[1] All Scripture references are from the New American Standard Bible 1995 (NASB1995).