So I turned my mind to
understand, to investigate and to search out wisdom and the scheme of things
and to understand the stupidity of wickedness and the madness of folly~ Ecclesiastes 7:25
After much
deliberation and careful consideration I have come to the conclusion that we
live in strange times. There are at least a million examples I could give to
make my case, but in effort to save your sanity I will share only a few: our
political leaders spend more time on news shows talking about each other than in meetings talking to each other (and yet we still pay them). Actors (people who pretend
for a living) who have little or no education and who are often lacking in real-world
experience are schooling us all how on to think about the most complex issues
of our day (and people are listening).
Many behaviors that have been considered sins
and bad choices for millennia are now called diseases; the same industry that
celebrates violence in movies and on television decries violence by the
military. Children can be overheard telling their parents what to do and buy in
public places and music—considered by many to be the universal language—has now
become so shocking and provocative that it has warning labels on it for
parents.
All
that is pretty strange, but I think that one of the strangest realities of our
time is that we live in an information age where the average person has more
access to knowledge and information than at any other time in history and yet
many people know very little about what is going on in the world around them. We
have become a low-information culture; which has created low information
consumers, parents and voters. I came across some shocking statistics that go a
long way in proving my point this past week.
According to Pew
Research Center ninety-three percent of Americans can identify Arnold Schwarzenegger,
but only sixty-one percent can identify Barak Obama. Eighty percent of
Americans can identify the symbol for Twitter but less than half can name the
current Secretary of State; only fifteen percent knew who Harry Reid was, and
most shocking to me: only sixty-six percent of Americans could successfully
identify their state’s governor.
Cultural ignorance
gets even more shocking when you look at biblical knowledge. According to Barna
Research, seventy-five percent of Americans believe that the Bible is the word
of God or inspired by God and yet according to Gallup less than half of all
Americans knew that Genesis was the first book of the Bible and one fourth
could not explain why Easter is celebrated.
I find these
statistics particularly depressing because I believe that Christians are called
to redeem all levels of culture and these statistics make me think we have
fallen down on the job. After spending some time grieving over the cultural
ignorance I searched out Scripture and came across a verse that got me thinking.
It’s Matthew 22:37:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with your mind~
What does it mean to
love God with your mind? It is an easy thing to explain how to love God with
your heart and strength but when it comes to loving God with our minds
explanations get a little trickier.
As I began to consider the meaning of this
verse I found that I had a lot of questions: Does loving God with our minds
mean we memorize a lot of Scripture? Or get a Masters in Divinity? Is loving
God with our minds limited to spiritual matters or is there more to it than
just knowing the Bible? What about
people who do not have access to higher education? Can they adequately love God
with their minds? Are intellectually gifted people at an advantage when it
comes to loving God with our minds?
I won’t lie and tell you I have it all figured
out but I do have some thoughts to share on the subject. I believe that loving
God with your mind is less about education level than mind-set. A highly
educated genius can be a fool on a spiritual and common sense level and a
person of below average intelligence can have the mind of Christ (1st
Corinthians 1:18-20). Having the mind of Christ gives us access to wisdom and
understanding that an intellectually gifted person who does not know Christ
will be lacking.
As I prayerfully
pondered all my questions concerning this subject God impressed three truths on
my heart that I want to share with you:
1.
If we
are going to love God with our minds we must have the right motivations for
pursuing knowledge.
Paul warns believers in 1st Corinthians 8:1 that knowledge
can “puff up” a person. In other words: knowledge, if pursued with the wrong
motives, can turn you into a jerk. I do not believe that Paul’s statement is a condemnation
of the pursuit of knowledge; it is simply a warning that knowledge for the sake
of knowledge is a wrong motive. Pursuing
knowledge with the hope that it makes you the smartest guy in the room or so
that you can have a bunch of letters after your name is probably sinful and at
the very least its self-absorbed. But that doesn’t mean you should remain
willfully ignorant either. Knowledge that builds up rather than puffing up always
has an endgame in mind; it is pursued for a purpose, to build up the body of
Christ or to benefit society in some way. The pursuit of knowledge can either
be an exercise in egotism or a truly noble enterprise; it all depends on your
motivation.
2.
Loving
God with your mind is about doing the best you can with what you have been
given.
Loving God with your mind is about learning as much as you can and
growing into the best, most informed person you can be. I believe that
Christians should know a lot about a few things: like the Bible, politics and
current events and a little about a lot of things like art, music, sports, and
even popular culture. Having a broad base of knowledge enables us to converse
with those outside of our churches and empowers us to engage people in
meaningful conversations about life, faith and the direction of our culture. These
types of conversations may sow the seeds of spiritual and cultural renewal.
3.
Loving
God with our minds means renewing our minds on a regular basis.
The moral confusion
that permeates our generation requires that Christians participate in popular
culture cautiously, step back frequently and go to great lengths to develop a
biblical worldview. Having a biblical worldview means that we learn to see life
and the world from God’s perspective. A biblical world-view is developed
through constant exposure to biblical truth, through corporate worship and
fellowship, as well as personal and group Bible study. If we are going to renew
our minds, we must limit contact with cultural toxins, pursue he development of
discernment and spend time with wise people.
Learning to love God with our minds might be
the first step towards redeeming our culture. I believe that loving God with
one’s mind is about more than simply knowing and loving Jesus (although it
starts there). It involves knowing stuff about the world and the people in the
world and learning to sort through the information we come across with a spirit
of discernment and a heart of wisdom. In our information age discernment is
critical because more than a few have shipwrecked their faith because they
bought into slick-sounding worldly wisdom.
Loving God with our
minds is about more than simply acquiring knowledge because although God is the
author of truth, He is also the lover of our souls who stepped into our world
with the purpose of engaging us in relationship. Loving God with our minds is
about loving what He loves. Loving God with our minds means engaging people on
issues, wisely and lovingly challenging the lies they have bought into, never
forgetting that we too once lived in darkness.
Do not conform to the
pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test
and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will~ Romans 12:2
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