Thinking Disorder
My pastor made a comment a couple Sundays ago in which he said, “you can’t build a Godly life using human wisdom”. This, of course, raises the question, “How can one build a Godly life?” Given that there is only one other kind of wisdom, we need to look in that direction.
This is something I have been pondering and pursuing for quite a few years now. 2 portions of Scripture seem to pop up on a regular basis. Sometimes daily, sometimes less frequently, but reoccurring nonetheless.
The first one is I Corinthians 3:18-19. “Do not deceive yourselves. If any of you think you are wise by the standards of this age, you should become “fools” so that you may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight.”
The second one is Isaiah 55:8; “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.” This is a very blunt statement with no qualifiers.
Both of these passages key in on the way we think and how different it is compared to the mind of God. Since we can say with confidence that it isn’t God’s mind that has to change, we can, with the same confidence say that it certainly is ours.
Why is our mind so important? For one thing, God has chosen to communicate in such a way that thinking is necessary. God has chosen to use words and sentences and paragraphs to communicate His truth. He doesn’t program us to “know” all that we can know, or even all we need to know, only the very basic things have we been programmed with, such as knowledge of the existence of God as Romans 1 tells us. Everything else we need to know is found in the rest of Scripture. Obtaining that knowledge requires thought.
Another reason we need to make sure our mind is on track with God is found in Luke 10:27; “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” This verse is found in 3 of the 4 Gospels. Jesus included the mind here, even though the original thought in Deuteronomy 6 doesn’t mention the mind. Jesus chose to include it.
As I thought about the Luke passage, it dawned on me that the mind plays an important part in loving God with all of our hearts as well. Generally speaking, we tend to think of the heart in emotional terms. However, any depth of love comes from knowledge of a person, not so much our feelings. Deep love survives even when the feelings change.
One of the most striking examples of this is the Job story. There was no visible evidence, as Job went through his ordeal, that showed that God loved him. To the contrary, everything pointed to either sin on Job’s part (which was his so-called friend’s position) or that God had abandoned him in his hour of need (which was also his so-called friend’s position). Job was able to endure because of what he knew of God, not what he saw or felt. There are many other examples in Scripture showing us that knowledge can save us from many difficult situations we may go through.
The way we think has been a problem since the very beginning. Most would say that Eve sinned when she took the first bite. I think it’s a good possibility that sin took hold before that, someplace in her thought process previous to the bite. It wasn’t that she didn’t know the truth, rather, she chose to suppress it and Adam followed suit. Her thinking was already disordered.
In a message that I heard a while back, given by David Platt, he explained it like this. “Sin brings disorder. It disorders our worship, it disorders the way we think, it disorders our desires, and it disorders our behavior. We have exchanged God’s pattern for our preferences”. That is exactly what Eve and Adam did. They exchanged what they knew to be right/true for their own preferences.
When the Christian and atheist alike look at the Bible or life in general and can’t understand why God did such and such, or didn’t do such and such, it is because our thinking has been disordered. As complicated as the debate seems to get these days, there is only one reason for atheism or any form of disbelief to exist and it’s found in Romans 1:18-20. Men “suppress the truth”. They suppress truth that is “evident within them”. This evidence is there not by clever apologetic arguments or through higher education, rather because “God made it evident to them”. So why would a person suppress something they know to be true? Again, the answer is sin, sin in the broadest sense. Not the individual practice of sin, though that complicates the whole narrative, but sin as in that which has brought pain to child birth, the weeds that grow in our gardens, and that which causes the earth to “groan”. All of creation has been disordered because of sin.
John 8:32 says; “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” This verse would suggest that knowledge of the truth is what sets us free. However, in the previous verse (31) it makes clear that knowledge alone doesn’t do much of anything, as was evidenced with Eve in the garden. Eve knew the truth, and she still sinned. Verse 31 tells us that we need to apply the truth. “If you hold to my teaches, you are really my disciples.” “Hold to” is the same as “apply”. Truth that isn’t applied is worthless.
One of the first things we can do to combat this disorder and change or “renew” our minds, is to question everything that comes from the world around us. Hold it up against Scripture. Romans 12:2 tells us that the only way to discern “what is the will of God” is through a renewed mind. The more we practice this the more we see how out of order the world is in greater and greater detail.
Not only should we question what comes from the world around us, but we must also be engaged in critiquing what we are taught in Church and hear in “Christian” circles.
A.W. Tozer said, “Our real idea of God may be buried under the rubbish of conventional religious notions and may require an intelligent and vigorous search before it is finally unearthed and exposed for what it is.” Even in religious circles the wisdom of the world is often found.
We aren’t to do this because we don’t trust our pastors or our brothers and sisters in the Church in general. Rather, because we know that fallen man is capable of deceiving and being deceived. We are to do it because we have an enemy who “prowls like a lion, seeking to destroy” A perfect example of this is found in Acts 17.
“The brethren immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea, and when they arrived, they went into the synagogue of the Jews. Now these were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica, for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so.”
The Bereans are only mentioned once in all of Scripture. They are known for their inquisitiveness. I believe they are mentioned specifically to teach us that our minds matter. They “examined the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so”. What things? The things that the Apostle Paul was teaching them. If the Bereans were lauded for checking up on the teachings of arguably the top Apostle, the one that would go on write much of the Scriptures that were to come, how much more should we be checking up on the teachings we hear every week and throughout the week?
C.J. Mahaney put it this way; “Those who feel deeply about the gospel are those who think deeply about the gospel. …thinking is the sturdy foundation for our easily misguided affections. If you want to feel profoundly, learn to think carefully.”
Even our efforts of evangelism are often times disordered. Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have discussions or debates when the opportunity arises. However, we must always keep in mind, and this is the reason we should be praying as we discuss, that no one comes to Christ through the clever presentation of the Gospel. It took many discussions before I saw this to be a reality. It is the work of the Holy Spirit that brings conversion. God may very well use the sounds coming from our mouths to communicate His message to the unsaved, but it is still through Him which the power of salvation comes to a person.
The easy way to go about our lives is by feel. We see this in all areas of life. Most people pick a narrative they are comfortable with and, to use a gambling term, they go all in. They no longer seek truth or give much thought at all to the possibility that what they believe is not true or not the best or flat out destructive. Critical thought is becoming a rare thing. Again, we need to keep in mind that our enemy, Satan, aggressively seeks to deceive us. This is also one reason why we are told to “take every thought captive”.
II Corinthians 10:5 “We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ”.
If I go back 15 or 20 years, I would have to admit that I didn’t give the “mind” it’s due. It wasn’t that I didn’t think about things, even think deeply about things from time to time. However, my feelings, more often than I like to admit, trumped my thinking. I am grateful to God that He stuck with me (sticks with me) and changed me and continues to change me in that sense. Now, it is my desire to believe what is right, correct, accurate, consistent with how God thinks, with what He has spoken to us in the written Word, even when it is outside my comfort zone.
We can renew our minds. We can have more and more of the mind of God, because Jesus gave his body and his blood to save us from slavery to sin and the disorder that it brings.
To be continued…