Romans 12:1-2 – I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
THEME OF THE DAY: THE THINKING CHRISTIAN. The mind plays an important part in our walk with the Lord. When we became Christians, it involved our minds. We responded to facts. The Gospel is a message of factual objective truth. Even the definition of repentance shows us the necessity of the mind in becoming a Christian. Repentance in its simplest definition is “a changing of the mind.” And this process of thinking continues in the growth of a Christian. A worthwhile Bible study would be a study on the word “mind”. In the New Testament alone, it appears eighty-three times in seventy-five verses. Our mind and thus thinking is so important. It reveals what we really are. King Solomon wrote “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he” (Proverbs 23:7). As we think, so we believe. As we believe, so we live. Yet, when it comes to right thinking, or Biblical thinking, we face tremendous challenges. We live in a fast-paced world full of technological advances, gadgets, and a wealth of distractions pulling us away from using our mind.
The consequences of not engaging and exercising our minds are severe. The English author, Harry Blamires, wrote a book which is one of the most influential books to enter my life. It is titled “The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think?”. He wrote of the severe consequence of being a non-thinking Christian. Here are his words . . . “There is no longer a Christian mind. There is still, of course, a Christian ethic, a Christian practice, and a Christian spirituality. As a moral being, the modern Christian subscribes to a code other than that of the non-Christian. As a member of the church, he undertakes obligations and observations ignored by the non-Christian. As a spiritual being, in prayer and meditation, he strives to cultivate a dimension of life unexplored by the non-Christian. But as a thinking being, the modern Christian has succumbed to secularization. He accepts religion – its morality, its worship, its spiritual culture; but he rejects the religious view of life, the view which sets all earthly issues within the context of the eternal, the view which relates all human problems – social, political, cultural – to the doctrinal foundations of the Christian faith, the view which sees all things here below in terms of God’s supremacy and earth’s transitoriness, in terms of heaven and hell.”
Evaluate if what Blamires says is true in our lives. Do we live life, all of life, in the context of the eternal? Or do we have moral, church, and spiritual aspects of our lives but they seem “disconnected” or isolated from our “real” life of daily responsibilities and tasks? His words are worthy of self-examination. He is saying, “We may go through life morally right, attend church, have some resemblance of spirituality, but not be a thinking Christian; a Christian whose mind has been transformed to live daily in the eternal realm, not this temporal realm.”
There is another consequence of not cultivating a Biblical mind and lack being a thinking Christian. We lose our attention span when challenged to think on Biblical truths. Here are a few examples. It is easy to sit through a two-hour movie without any problem; spend a couple of hours on Facebook and browsing the internet with no trouble; or be quite engaged at a multiple hour concert. None of these require much thought. But be challenged to sit through a fifty-minute to an hour long expository sermon on Sunday and we drift, or worse, complain about the length of the sermon. And it is not uncommon to see churches accommodate our lack of attention to shorten sermons to thirty minutes or less. Now, please, don’t misunderstand me. Length of sermon doesn’t mean quality, but is it possible to feed the Lord’s sheep with the necessary theology, doctrine and Biblical truth to equip them to live Biblically in an increasingly godless society with maybe thirty minutes of preaching a week? Church history would tell us “no” as great churches, and even great revival movements were characterized by the supremacy of preaching, mind-engaging preaching, and yes, even lengthy mind-engaging preaching. It is a challenge to be a thinking Christian but it is a challenge we must accept and develop. Without being thinking Christians, we cannot be growing Christians.
PRAYER: “Father, protect me from the world which seeks to drive me from Your Word.”
QUOTE: “Either the Word will conform us or the world. And which one is a daily choice we make.”
In the affection of Christ Jesus,
Pastor Jim