The Lutheran Hour
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"Two Mindsets"
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Text: Romans 8:1-7
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Imagine you’re a young adult going to college and you’re having a bad day, a really bad day. You go to your favorite class, a class that’s important to you. You enjoy it. The professor whom you greatly respect hands back the midterm tests. You got a C+. You’re disappointed. Later that evening going home, you find that you got a parking ticket. You call up your best friend to talk about your day, and they sort of brush you off. How would you feel?
There was a psychologist who did a study and presented this very situation to a significant sample of young adults and asked them to respond and write down how they would feel about that situation. One group said things like, “I’d feel like a reject. I’m a total failure. I’m an idiot. I’d feel worthless and dumb. Everyone’s better than me.” When asked to say what this would mean for their life, they said things like, “My life is pitiful. I have no life. Somebody upstairs doesn’t like me. Someone’s out to destroy me. Nobody loves me. Everybody hates me. Life is unfair. All efforts are useless. Life stinks. I’m stupid.”
The psychologist who did the study noted that these young adults were not clinically depressed. In other situations when they weren’t being assaulted by a phalanx of failures, they felt bright and energetic and optimistic. It was the compounding of failures that made them feel worthless.
Now, there was another group of young people in this study who responded differently to this scenario. When they were presented with the same situation about the test and the ticket and the distracted friend, when they were asked how they would cope, they said things like, “I need to try harder in class, to be more careful when parking the car, and to wonder if my friend had a bad day.” Or “I’d start thinking about studying in a different way for that class, I’d pay the ticket, and I’d work things out with my friend.” Or “I’d resolve to do better in the class. I’d be more careful about where I park the car or I’d contest the ticket. I’d tell my friend that I was upset when they brushed me off, and I’d ask them what’s going on.”
Through years of studying the way people cope with failure, failure in school, parenting, sports, relationships, psychologist Carol Dweck in her book titled Mindset concluded that many people operated with at least two frames of mind, two mindsets. She illustrates the difference between the two with a comic strip from Calvin and Hobbes. In the comic, we see Calvin’s classmate Susie leaning over a book with scores of notes spread out before her. She is diligently reading that book, referencing her notes when Calvin walks up and says, “What are you doing, homework?” Susie says, “I wasn’t sure I understood this chapter, so I reviewed my notes from the last chapter, and now I’m reading this.” Calvin says, “You do all that work?” Susie says, “Well, now I understand it.” Huh,” Calvin Retorts. “I used to think you were smart.”
Calvin is manifesting what is called a fixed mindset, but Susie’s is a growth mindset. Apparently, school doesn’t come easily for Calvin. He’s experienced failures in school, so he has it fixed in his mind that he’s not smart when it comes to academics. And because Susie is so successful, he assumed that it comes easily for her because she’s smart. For Calvin, the fixed mindset, failures and successes become labels that define people. People are either winners or losers, either gifted and talented, or stupid and unlucky. For the person with a fixed mindset, your performance defines you. For the other mindset, for the growth mindset represented by Susie, rather than letting her successes or failures define her, she lets them develop her. She approaches both kinds of experiences, positive or negative, wins or losses, as a path toward growth and learning.
The psychologist’s conclusions are keen insights into the human condition. On the one hand, it seems that we were made for a joyous, curious, self-forgetful life, uninhibited growth, lifelong learning. On the other hand, we all sense that we’re being watched, evaluated, judged. When we feel loved, respected, protected, life opens up, our optimism soars. But when we feel worthless, when we feel unworthy, we can already sense death’s breath on the back of our necks.
Psychologists can study human beings. They can give us insights into our predicament, and even some helpful strategies to cope with it. But they can’t fix it. The best they can do is tell us to try harder, to not be so negative, to change your mindset. The best they can do is to preach the law.
Psychologists, counselors, life coaches—they can be effective at preaching what an ancient Jewish author once called the “Law,” God’s law. This author believed that the work of God’s Law is inscribed on every human heart. God’s Law is stitched into the fabric of creation. And even if you’re not comfortable with calling it God’s Law, you can still appreciate that there are governing principles in the universe, natural laws for how to be a good person. It doesn’t mean that everybody has to act exactly the same way; it just means that there are clearly better ways and worse ways at being human. There are ways that lead to a relatively healthy life and peace, and ways that lead to distrust, dislocation, and death. And whether you call it the law of evolution or the Law of God, we can agree that it’s real, that it affects us, whether we like it or not.
And so moral philosophers, psychologists, they can come to consensus. They can agree on what we ought to be and ought not to be. That we shouldn’t let our successes and failures or circumstances define us; that we shouldn’t try to prove ourselves by showing that we are superior to others; that we shouldn’t use people to make ourselves feel more powerful or secure.
We have a common idea about what we should and shouldn’t be, and that the world could be a better place if rather than fixing our minds on judging others and worrying about being judged by them, if instead we changed our minds to learn and grow and develop together, the world would be better. And yet, learned people keep writing books because we haven’t been able to fix us, nor to fix the “fix” that we find ourselves in.
About 2,000 years ago, that Jewish author that I mentioned, a man named Paul, one of the early followers of Jesus of Nazareth, he wrote a famous letter to other followers of Jesus living in the city of Rome. Now, if you’ve ever tried reading Paul’s letter to the Romans and you found it confusing, it may be because Paul’s thinking is not always linear. Our thinking in Western culture tends to be linear. We move from point to point A to B to C, and so on. Paul’s thinking is more like a rose, like a flower. As one scholar said it, “A rose that unfolds its multiple petals from the center.” If we were to think of the letter to the Romans like a rose, the center of it, his chapter 8, it’s the point around which everything unfolds.
In Romans 8 Paul offers what he is convinced is the solution to our human problem, and he has convinced me, and many others, too. Contrary to what self-help books may lead you to believe, our human problem is not that we don’t know enough. It’s not that we have yet to develop the perfect education program. The human problem is that we are curved in on ourselves. Even the most open-minded and growth-minded among us are curved in on themselves, just like the rest of us.
Human nature, as it now stands, is like a wilting rose. It’s like a deviant flower that refuses to face the sunshine, growing instead toward the shadows, growing into the shadows. It still gets enough ambient light to survive for a little while, but curved in on itself, it’s already on the way to death. See, God designed human beings to live and to thrive in His light, by His Word, in a relationship with Him. But our lives have become misshapen. Even when we set our minds on growing, we grow unnaturally toward our own ambitions, toward our own self-serving desires.
Psychologists can see a critical difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset, but Paul sees that the two have more in common than they do differences. On their own, both of them are just self-serving in different ways. Both are fixed on themselves, still turning away from God, still growing closer to death.
In the letter, Paul calls this “living according to the sinful flesh,” that is, human nature curved in on itself. And so the law, even when it’s God’s Law, it cannot heal us. It cannot save us; it can only show us the problem. The Law written on our hearts, taught by moral philosophers, religious gurus, and self-help books, it keeps telling us to straighten up, to get better, to be better. But it doesn’t give us the power to do it. The Law puts us to the test, and we keep failing.
Paul, in the letter, is sharing something different, a new mindset, a new way of thinking that comes from God’s Spirit, given through a good announcement, a new story, a Gospel. The Gospel announcement is that God, in love, sent His own Son to be our Savior, the promised Messiah, the Christ, the King promised to the Jewish nation, the family of Abraham, to bless all people, to restore the whole creation. God’s Son Jesus became a human being, and without ever sinning, mysteriously he took on our sinful nature. He took the Law’s test into Himself. He took the failing grade we deserved, died with it, and rose from the dead, so that by faith in Jesus, led by God’s Spirit in us, we would come to have the mind of Christ.
Listen to how Paul says it in Romans 8. “So then, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ,” the anointed king Jesus, no condemnation. Why not? “Because the law of the Spirit, the Spirit of God who gives life in Christ Jesus, the Spirit has set you free from the Law of sin and death. See, God did what the Law was powerless to do, what the Law was not able to do, weakened as it was by the sinful flesh. God did it by sending His own Son in the likeness of the sinful flesh. And dealing with sin, He condemned sin in the flesh so that the righteous requirement of the Law would be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the sinful flesh, but according to the Spirit, God’s Spirit.
“See, those who walk by the sinful flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh. Those who walk by the Spirit set their minds on the matters of the Spirit. The mindset of the flesh is death; the mindset of the Spirit is life and peace. The sinful flesh’s way of thinking is hostile to God. It doesn’t put itself under God’s Law, nor is it able to. So those who are in the flesh are not able to please God. You all, however, are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit. If the Spirit of God lives in you, and if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ the King, he does not belong to Christ. But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the spirit is alive because of righteousness, because of this right standing with God through faith in Christ. And if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies by His Spirit who lives in you.”
So then, my brothers, my sisters, we are debtors. “We are in debt, not to the sinful flesh, to live according to the sinful flesh. Because if you are living according to the sinful flesh, you’re already on the way to death. But if by God’s Spirit you are putting to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live, because those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. Because you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear. No, you receive the Spirit of sonship, of adoption. And by the Spirit, we are crying out, ‘Abba! Father!’ God’s Spirit is bearing witness with our spirit, that we are God’s children. And if we are children of God, then we are heirs, co-heirs with Christ, if we are sharing in His sufferings so that we may share in His glory” (Romans 8).
There was a married couple just married, just returning from their honeymoon, and they decided to spend some time with each other’s parents. The first week they went to the bride’s parents. The bride came from a wealthy family. They lived in a mansion. They had a staff of maids and butlers, chefs and gardeners, all there to serve them. The next week, they went to the husband’s family. They lived in a small house on a farm out in the country. After dinner, on the first day when the couple was sitting alone on the porch swing out front, the bride broke down and started to cry. Her husband said to her, “What’s wrong?” She said, “With my family, when they’re nice to you, it feels like you’ve passed their test. But with your family, there is no test.”
Paul talks about two mindsets. He’s not using the psychologist’s categories of a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset. That may be a helpful distinction in everyday life, but it won’t help us solve our human problem. We can tell people all day long that they need to be more growth oriented, that they need to stop judging themselves and judging others, and focus instead on learning, but judgment is inescapable. Even the very act of writing a book about mindsets, arguing that one is better and the other is worse, implying that those with the better ones are better off, better than others, even that is a form of judgment. Try as we might, we cannot escape judgment. And even if we were able to escape for a little while, devoting ourselves to following our self-devised personal growth plans, we’d still only be growing closer to death.
I recently sat holding the frail hand of a woman from my church who was dying. Don’t let anyone tell you that death is beautiful or natural. Death is horrific. It’s the unnatural end of human life. Death is judgment, and we will all face it. It’s God’s judgment on a false life, a life curved in on itself. And the Good News of Jesus is not that we get to escape judgment; the good news is that judgment is not the first or the last word from God. The good news is that the first and the last words from God are life and love in Jesus who endured the judgment we deserve, so that we may have the sonship, the adoption, the family, the resurrection from the dead that He deserves.
We do have two mindsets before us. There is the mindset of the sinful nature, which makes you think you’re worthy if you pass the test. And then there’s the mindset of God’s Spirit, the gift of God, the mind of Christ, shaped by the promise that now there is no test. There is now no condemnation in Christ. It’s a God-given way of thinking, sustained by the Holy Spirit, and found only in our Brother Jesus, who passed the test for us. In Him we are loved, loved to life; loved, not because we made ourselves worthy. No, we’re made worthy simply because we’re loved. And if you’re willing, I invite you to pray with me.
Abba, Father, fill us with Your Spirit so that we may grow in faith toward You and in fervent love toward one another, through Your Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the same Spirit, One God, now and forever. Amen.
Reflections for July 16, 2023
Title: Two MindsetsMark Eischer: You’re listening to The Lutheran Hour. For FREE online resources, archived audio, our mobile app, and more, go to lutheranhour.org. And we’re back with our Speaker, Dr. Michael Zeigler.
Mike Zeigler: Hey, Mark.
Mark Eischer: Now when you say, “mindsets,” is this something more than a subjective feeling? And could you give an example of how people might look at a certain situation and see it in two different ways?
Mike Zeigler: So, mindset is a pattern of thinking. It’s not just feelings, more importantly it’s thoughts. So feelings are what happen to us; thoughts are how we respond to those feelings. You asked for an example, so for an example, I work really hard to make a dinner for my family and I can tell that they don’t like it. In fact, they tell me they don’t like it. A feeling of disappointment washes over me. My thoughts then are how I respond to that feeling. If I have a fixed mindset, this is using the language of this psychologist, Dr. Carol Dweck, if I have a fixed mindset, I might think I’m a terrible cook, I should just quit trying. Or I might think, these people don’t appreciate me and they have bad taste, and I just label them and I’m done with it. That’s a fixed mindset. A fixed mindset believes that things are set and all that’s left to do is to pass judgment, to put a label on it, to put a label on the person, bad taste or bad cook.
Now, a growth mindset would respond to this feeling of disappointment and think, “What could I do differently? How could I make the meal differently?” Or maybe I did everything right and my family’s palette of flavor just isn’t developed, and how could I help maybe take them a little further in their appreciation of different kinds of foods? So that’s a growth mindset. A growth mindset believes that people can change and that the labels that we put on them are only half the story.
Mark Eischer: And how are those two mindsets different from the one described in Romans 8?
Mike Zeigler: Paul, when he talks about mindsets, he’s helping us see the human being in relation to God. So for him, there are also two mindsets. There’s the mindset of the flesh and there’s the mindset of the Spirit. The mindset of the flesh is the human being fixed on himself or herself or only on other human beings and their thoughts and their judgments. This mindset believes that human beings are the measure of all things. It does not consider God. For Paul, the mindset of the Spirit is when the Spirit of God works in us through Jesus Christ to open up our minds and thoughts and words back to God, to live in relationship with Him. This is a mindset of the Spirit that leads to life and peace. So those are the two different mindsets that Paul is talking about.
Mark Eischer: And psychology can only take us so far.
Mike Zeigler: Psychology comes from the Greek word for “soul,” so it’s the study of the human soul, or the human person, the human life. Paul’s letter, and the rest of the Bible, shows us that if we only consider humans in relation to themselves or to other humans, then we’ll never have the full picture.
Christianity doesn’t dismiss the insights and the benefits of psychology. Instead, it puts those benefits in the bigger picture or bigger story with God. It brings them into conversation with God through Jesus. And it’s this conversation, this exchange of words with God through prayer, through listening to God’s Word in the Bible, that’s how the Holy Spirit works to change our mindsets, to help us see this bigger picture, to set our minds on God and on the people around us, on His good plans and His good purpose for us.
Music Selections for this program:
“A Mighty Fortress” arranged by Chris Bergmann. Used by permission.
“Almighty God, Your Word Is Cast” From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.