For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. 12 What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. 1 Corinthians 2:11-12 (NIV)
These verses show us that there is a difference between thought (mind) and spirit. At the same time, there is a difference between our spirit (human, of the world, with which we are born) and that of God. According to these verses, the individual spirit of each person is the only one who really knows the thoughts: the deep ones, the everyday ones, and even the ones that go unnoticed.
So, the mind is a completely individual space: no one can know what or how we think in the way it truly happens in our mind. Of course, we can communicate ideas, but thought is something more primitive than an idea, and even more so than the verbalization of that idea. Still, there are ideas that we only think and do not communicate, and that are known only to each of us within ourselves. The same is true of God. Only the spirit of God can know his thoughts: his way of thinking, his ideas, his plans. He can also communicate his ideas to others (for example, through the Bible) and there are other things that we will not know until we get to heaven.
The great thing about putting our trust in God is that when we do so, God gives us his Spirit, that is, he puts his mind in us. Thanks to this, we can not only know what God thinks, but we also receive his way of thinking, his mentality, his way of reacting to problems, successes, challenges, and much more.
Now, in our person, there would then be two spirits: the human one, with which we were born of the flesh, and the one of God, which we received when we were born of the Spirit. That is the battle that rages in our finite mind: Do we believe that God put his mind in ours? If we believe that this is so (which is true whether we believe it or not because we find it in the Bible -v. 16- ), then our thoughts will be aligned with God’s, and we will be able to see with his eyes better and better. Also, our actions and reactions will become like God's. For this, it is essential that, on the one hand, we understand our responsibility as humans to know God through his Word and prayer, and on the other hand, that we recognize God's ability to do supernatural things in our lives. This results in our material achievements always being spiritual because we could never do anything outside of God, nor would God do things in us if we did not allow Him to.
In addition to keeping this in mind in the present and for the future, we must realize that, if we are children of God, this has already manifested itself in the past. Surely there were situations in your life in which you had the strength, the wisdom, the will to make the right decision, to react in the way that pleases God, or to do something for someone. Maybe you were aware at that moment that it was the Spirit who guided you, or maybe not. I invite you to pray a simple and short prayer to ask God to reveal these situations to you. God is our guide, our strength, our daily sustenance, our comfort, our refuge, our compass. If all his children have the mind of Christ, then we can all hear the same voice and agree, because God does not contradict himself. We must remember that we have the mind of Christ as we make our daily decisions.
[As adapted from The Bondage Breaker and Stomping Out The Darkness by Dr. Neil Anderson and Dr. Dave Park.]