Prolegomena for the blogosphere: I do not preach sermons relating to "national holiday" themes (Mothers Day, Fathers Day, July 4, Veterans Day, etc.). I do typically preach several messages relating to the incarnation and resurrection around Christmas and Easter. My prioity in the pulpit is to exposit God's word faithfully and systematically. I cannot do this with effectiveness or any "flow" if I am constantly having to pause for government and Hallmark holidays. So, I usually press on with the exposition with mixed feedback from the congregation. However, I feel that on these "holidays," (and I question the usage of that term for them) our culture will make up for my neglect of those certain themes. However, if I fail to proclaim God's word, who will pick up the slack?
Philippians 4:8 -- The Thinking Christian
To some this sounds like an oxymoron – thinking Christian. They associate Christianity with ignorance, mysticism, mythology, and narrow-mindedness. They believe we have three racks at the door of the church. One for your coat, one for your hat, one for your brain. Take it out when you come in, pick it up when you leave. For many centuries, the greatest and brightest minds in the world were Christians who demonstrated the reasonableness of Christian faith. But over a slow and gradual shift, two spheres of thinking evolved. Reasonable faith was divided into FAITH and REASON. Individuals who held to Christian convictions were excluded from the REASON category unless they were willing to suspend their FAITH in Biblical teaching. Whereas once nearly all the world’s leading scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians were men and women of faith, now those who claim to be Christian are viewed as mystics rather than intellectuals. People will demand of a Christian that he or she put away myths and fairy tales and do business with real SCIENCE instead.
And lest you think that is how people in the culture feel about Christians, you’d be surprised at how many Christians I have met who feel the same. Many are intimidated by intellectual discussions and scientific studies. They are afraid that that they might encounter some obstacle to their faith that they will not be able to overcome, and so they surround themselves with the comforts of insulated Christianity. And so the problem we face today is nearly the same as that described by J. Gresham Machen in 1913, when he said, “The chief obstacle to the Christian religion today lies in the sphere of the intellect. The Church is perishing today through the lack of thinking, not through an excess of it.” In our own day, William Lane Craig has said that “our Churches are filled with Christians who are idling in intellectual neutral.”[1]
The saddest thing about idling in intellectual neutral is that we feel as if somehow it is all pleasing to God. Yet the irony is that Scripture commands us to be “attentive, wise, discerning, prudent, circumspect, understanding, teachable, lovers of truth, intellectually humble and intellectually tenacious,” and to “defend our faith, instruct others in the faith, to confute those who oppose true doctrine, and so on.” And in the same Bible, we are warned against, “laziness of thought, folly, immaturity in our thinking, being easily duped or gullible, … egaging in idle speculation, intellectual arrogance or vicious curiosity.”[2] Moreover Jesus said that the Greatest Commandment is to love God with all of our heart, soul, MIND, and strength. How do we do this? Paul said in Romans 12 that we must be transformed by the renewing of our minds. We cannot become thinking Christians if we believe that God has called us to the removal of our minds.
Our need is great today for thinking Christians. We often decry our culture saying that our values are not being respected or represented as they once were in bygone days. We often hear reports and statistics from pulpits about laws that prohibit prayer and Bible reading in the schools, witnessing on the job, and encourage abortion, euthanasia, the breakdown of marriage, and sexual deviance. However, our culture turns a deaf ear to the contemporary church, for they are not ignorant of the fact that prayer and Bible reading have less and less prominence in the CHURCH with each passing day. Our divorce rates are no lower than theirs. We would probably all be shocked to know how rampant abortion is among those who claim Christianity as their personal belief. We shout about the value of unborn lives, but show little compassion for the homeless, the poor, and the famine-stricken. We talk about creation and our God-given dominion over the earth, but we commute great distances every day in gas-guzzling SUV’s and sports cars, and call anyone who cares about the environment a liberal kook. (See Ken Connor's excellent editorial entitled God, Gore, and Global Warming). We pass resolutions at our national convention calling for total abstinence from alcohol, but in private we laugh at jokes like, “How many Baptists do you take on a fishing on a trip?” Do you know the answer? The answer is at least two, because if you only take one, he’ll drink all your beer. We may laugh, but it is tragic that there is apparently enough truth to it to give rise to the humor. That is not to mention the winking endorsement we give to numerous other addictive drugs. We say we want intelligent design to replace evolution in our schools, but we are helplessly engulfed in an evolutionary economy and social culture, and we defend it with labels like capitalism, individualism, and progress. We speak about losing future generations, but we are so myopic that we do not even recognize that we have lost our own. Churches today are full of individuals and families whose children have chosen alternative spiritual and moral foundations on which to build their lives.
We face a problem of tremendous proportions today when it comes to Christian thinking. But, the problem is not that the culture thinks less and less like the church. In most of history and in much of the world today, this has always been the case. It is perhaps a happy accident that we have not noticed it in
The watering down of Christian doctrine and abandonment of conviction that is rampant in many Christians today is to be blamed on churches and pastors who have forsaken faithfulness for relevance, and in the end, have lost both. Os Guinness calls it a “self-inflicted stupidity” and says, “It’s sad to say that rarely has the church seen so many of its leaders solemnly presenting the faith in public in so many weak, trite, foolish, disastrous, and even disloyal ways as today.” He went on to say, “Never have Christians pursued relevance more strenuously; never have Christians been more irrelevant.” [3]
We desperately need a revival of Christian thinking today, but it cannot start out there in the culture until it starts in here – until there is a renaissance of thinking Christians among those who claim to BE Christian in this church and every other one, and until you and I are willing to take seriously this idea of loving God with all our minds. So today I would like for us to consider from the text before us this threefold idea of the Thinking Christian by discussing what Christians ought to think, and how Christians ought to think.
I. What a Christian Thinks
Paul gives a list of virtues that should pervade the thought-life of the follower of Christ.
A. Whatever is true.
This would exclude those things that are lies, speculations, rumors, exaggerations. What does it include? What is truth? That is a question that Pilate asked of Jesus and a question that has been asked for centuries since. In this day of postmodern thinking, many people have given up on any objective standard of truth. But I believe that as Christians we have an obligation to insist on a correspondence view of truth. What does that mean? It means that something is true if it corresponds to reality and the way the world actually is. When people ask me how I know that Christianity is true, I try to explain to them our worldview and suggest that it uniquely approaches the world as it is and makes the most sense of it. C. S. Lewis said that he believes Christianity is true in the same way that he believes the sun has risen. Not because he sees it, but because by it, he sees everything else. So, when out thoughts are pervaded by truth, it means we dwell on the things that are real, sincere, proper, reliable, and genuine.
B. Whatever is honorable (KJV: honest; NIV: noble).
Things that are respectable, decent, dignified, excellent. It is opposite of those things which are vulgar, debased, and profane.
C. Whatever is right (KJV: just).
This comes from the same Greek word as the word righteous. It means that which is in keeping with God’s holy standards. It speaks of justice, or of “fittingness.” Psalm 11:7 tells us that the Lord is righteous and He loves righteousness. He loves those who are fitted to his character. The opposite of this is evil or wicked, like the one in Psalm 36. There we read of an ungodly person, whose transgression speaks within his heart, who does not fear God, who has abandoned wisdom and goodness, and who plans wickedness on his bed that he intends to carry out when daylight comes. The prophets spoke against those who “trample the needy” (Amos 8:4) and those who deprive people of justice. This must not be true of the Christian, and therefore our thought should be just and right.
D. Whatever is pure.
Those things which are innocent, wholesome and chaste, which are free from contamination or blemish. It applies broadly to all areas of moral integrity and uprightness.
E. Whatever is lovely.
This might better be characterized as that which calls forth love in us. Some have suggested beautiful or pleasing as synonyms. Much of what is done by Christians in our day demonstrates a disregard for this virtue, and it is to our shame. God has shown us beauty in the world we live in, far beyond what is necessary for survival. At our home, we are reaping the benefits of the green thumbs who tended our gardens long before we took ownership, and there we see a variety of flowers and foliage. Is it really necessary for our survival or for the good of the ecosystem to have yellow flowers, and red flowers, and blue, and purple, and pink and orange flowers? Certainly not. One variety and one color would be sufficient. But God has given us variety so that we would think on the beauty of these things and that beauty would turn our affections heavenward to the Creator of it all, evoking love in us for Him and His creation.
F. Whatever is of good repute (KJV: good report; NIV: admirable; NRSV: commendable).
What would others think of you if they could read your thoughts? Ouch. That is where you say “Oh man,” instead of “Amen.” The opposite of these kinds of thoughts are offensive. So the believer’s thoughts should be positive, constructive, and edifying.
The list of virtues is summarized by the two ideas, “excellence” and “worthy of praise.” What occupies the mind of the Christian? Those things which are excellent and worthy of praise. I can’t help thinking that there are many churches which would benefit from this kind of thinking among their members. I certainly know that our communities need to see this kind of thinking in us. In fact, I believe that our culture is turned off by Christianity because they don’t see this kind of thinking among us. You see, it is an interesting fact that the list Paul gives is not expressly theological or inherently Christian. By and large, this list of virtues can be found almost in its entirety in the secular and even pagan writings of Paul’s day. The Greek philosophers lauded these characteristics. And there is an awareness in the hearts and minds of morally good but spiritually lost people that these are the virtues which are excellent and worthy of praise. And it is a sad commentary on the church when they do not see these things in us. When the world lives by a higher standard than the church, we have slouched to a pathetic depth. So, may the world see Christian thinking taking place in us which is dominated by these virtues.
Now secondly, consider …
II. How a Christian thinks: dwell (or think) on these things
What does it mean to think or dwell on something? The word that Paul uses here does not merely refer to mental exercise or occupation. This is not daydreaming or fantasizing. This is the kind of thinking that refers to calculation, deliberation, the process of thought that leads to a volitional act of outward expression. It is the word that is sometimes rendered reckon in our English Bibles. But it is not “reckon” as we use colloquially here in the South, meaning no more than a mere guess. It is the reckoning that involves careful calculation. So in essence, what Paul is saying here is that we think on these things, the excellent and praiseworthy things, in the process of deciding how to act out our Christian faith in the world in which we live. These are the filters through which we deliberate and calculate the course of action we will externalize as we live for Christ.
What happens if we fail to do this kind of thinking? We coast along relying on our instincts, our flesh, and our emotions to control us. We REACT carnally instead of deliberately ACTING Christianly. We make knee-jerk reactions according emotional impulses, we fire off words like deadly bullets from our mouths, and we do things that a moment of careful deliberation would have discouraged us from doing. We are to weigh heavily every action by thinking on it according the virtues which are enumerated here as characteristic of Christian thinking.
Jay Wood has written, “A godly mind is not merely one devoid of vile thoughts, nor are the faithful stewards of the mind necessarily the ones who die with all their doctrinal p’s and q’s in place.” Wood says that brainwashing might just as well accomplish that.[4] Rather, he says that a godly mind is one that displays intellectual virtue. So how does one become intellectually virtuous? First, one must recognize that it takes a lifetime, and there are no shortcuts. Our minds are developed with exercise, and exercise is hard work. It takes time devoted to Bible study, to ministry service, and to grappling scripturally with the problems of our day. Second, we must have the proper motivation. Our drive to be intellectually virtuous must not be so that we can be smarter than everyone else. It must be done for the purpose of bringing glory to God through godly living and sacrificial serving. Therefore, one cannot become a thinking Christian in a vacuum. He or she must be related to others in the covenant bond of church life. Finally, Christian thinking and Christian living are so closely intertwined that if we fail to live morally, we will lose our grasp on intellectual virtue as well, and vice versa.
Yet we must also say that moral living and sharp thinking are not Christian unless they are part of the life of a Christian. In other words, until you have given your life to Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, it doesn’t matter how good or smart you are. Moral goodness and intellectual astuteness will not save you from hell. All of us are separated from God because of sin, the only remedy available to us is faith in Jesus Christ. But this is not faith that exists in a realm apart from reason. It is a reasonable faith, whereby we acknowledge that the God who created us loves us so much that He remedied our sin problem in Himself, by dying for our sins and conquering death for us in His resurrection. And he beckons us to come to Him saying, “Come now, let us REASON together. Though your sins are as scarlet, they shall be white as snow.”
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