Ephesians 4:23 Commentary and Bible Study

At conversion your conscience comes to life. You have new aims and desires and trusts. You love the Lord and his word and you want to honour him. You are renewed entirely in the spirit of your mind. Victory over our old nature starts from within us as a profound change takes place in our mind. This change begins with the new birth at which time the citadel of our inner being is captured and possessed by the Lord. We belong to him and love him and desire to obey him. But sanctification is not instantaneous and it is only as we think through the implications of our submission to Christ and align one aspect after another of our lives to his will that our minds are completely renewed. The verb used here is interesting for it is the present passive infinitive. It is connected with the words ‘have been taught’ in verse 21, as is the previous infinitive in verse 22, ‘to put off’. Both infinitives have the force of an imperative, ‘you have been taught to put off’ or ‘have been taught that you put off’, ‘that you be renewed’. Furthermore this imperative is not aorist: a one-off action which occurred in the past at conversion, but present: a continually repeated action. How exactly can we obey a passive imperative? The verb is passive because it is the Lord who is doing the renewing, but it is a command because we are to cooperate with the Lord’s work by yielding to the Holy Spirit. We are to seek to discover his will in every aspect of life and we are to be quick to listen to the voice of conscience, educated by Scripture as the Spirit prompts us. Each change that the Lord proposes to us involves a recognition of our natural sinful tendency and a willingness to deny such suggestions of the flesh. There are two main Greek words for ‘new’. One means new in character, different from what came before; the other word means new in respect of time, recent, young, brand new. The verb used here is connected with the second word. It therefore indicates that the mind in question did not exist before. It is the spirit of the mind that is to be renewed. Clearly this is not the Holy Spirit but the individual believer’s spirit. The phrase ‘spirit of your mind’ is unique to this passage, though 2 Timothy 1:7 comes closest to it. The spirit here belongs to the mind and is a part of it. The most obvious meaning of the word here is the attitude, or disposition of your mind. When spirit and mind are distinguished, spirit refers to that part of us which relates to God and so the words might be understood to refer to the disposition of the mind as it relates to God. But the context of this passage is surely broader than this, including especially the believer’s mind towards other believers and the outworking of that mind in conduct. It is about not lying, not stealing and controlling anger. The spirit of the mind is then that state of mind, that pattern of thinking and (given the fact that the mind is a spiritual entity) that mental track that will lead to such change of conduct.