Worldview Wednesday: The Christian Mind (that wasn't)
If we love God with all our hearts, but our minds are formed by the world, how can we ever hope to be a disciple? Or should we ask, if we think like the world, can we really claim to love God with all our heart?
Christianity in America is paper thin because our minds are bankrupt. Just a few statistics prove this reality. Without even a basic understanding of the Bible, we can’t hope to apply its principles to all the world. If we are serious about making disciples, we have to start using our minds.
A common objection might be: what about our hearts? Shouldn’t our hearts be more important than our minds? This question shows the unnecessary dichotomy we have between the heart and mind. The heart is directed toward something, and that something has to have weight and substance to be a worthy object of love. We don’t love just for the sake of loving, but love for God drives us to use our minds to understand Him, His Word, and His world.
Another good question might be: don’t we have too much information already? We have a lot of information, but information is not knowledge or understanding. Despite all of our information, “we live in what may be the most anti-intellectual period of Western Civilization” (R.C. Sproul). Constantly taking in frivolous information about the latest happenings and conflicts is not making us more wise, but it is crowding out our time and appetite for wisdom. Scrolling is easy; thinking is hard.
Another problem with our information is that we don’t translate it into action. All the knowledge God gives us should be translated into a change in our own lives or in the lives of others. We would be careful to take in less information if we held ourselves responsible for that information, and we we would have much more joy, the kind that comes from real understanding and a heart changing to become more and more like Christ.
At BBC, we want to love God with our hearts, our minds, and our strength, and here are 4 steps we can take in recovering the Christian mind.
Be deeply immersed and completely transformed by the Scriptures. Read your Bibles every day. Memorize it. Meditate on it. Think God’s thoughts after him. Spurgeon once described John Bunyan as man, who, if you pricked him, would “bleed Bible.”
Disciple our minds. We can resist killing our attention spans with distracting media and spend time in focused prayer and meditation.
Give attention to worthwhile information. Be extremely careful about what you read and take it. Don’t let the screen or channel decide how to mold your mind. Choose only the best books, sermons, and lectures. Remember your time and your mind are God’s.
Use your mind to make disciples. Confront the world’s lies that hold people in this city captive. Translating knowledge is hard, hard, work, but it is what Jesus told us to do. Consider the amount of time you spend taking in information and the amount of time you spend making disciples with real people, whether discipling or serving in the church or evangelizing outside the church.
Watch this video below and ask God to help you develop your mind as you strive to be, grow, and make disciples.