by By Benson Njung’e
Christianity can best be summarized as a mystery. And that is not a good way to start an article that is trying to prove that we must be given to thinking. One major element of Christianity is faith — a faith that is granted by grace. Philippians 1:29 says, “For it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for him.” And 2 Peter 1:1 says: “To those who through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ have received a faith as precious as ours.” To that effect, A. W. Tozer observes: “To most people God is an inference, not a reality. He is a deduction from evidence which they consider adequate, but he remains personally unknown to the individual. For millions of Christians, God is no more real than He is to the non-Christian.”
Yet consider this thought by Oswald Chambers: “The Spirit of Jesus is put into me by the Atonement, then I have to construct with patience the way of thinking that is exactly in accordance with the Lord. God will not make me think like Jesus. I have to do it myself; I have to bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. ‘Abide in Me’– in intellectual matters, in money matters, in every one of the matters that make human life what it is. It is not a bandbox life.” In this quote, Oswald helps us have a clear way to ponder how to obey the call to abide so that it does not remain theoretical.
Thinking to believe
A big population today is ignorant or oblivious of the place of thinking to comprehend faith concepts. This is especially a reality with young people who want to easily get the answer to a question without contending with varying views, voices and written texts on a subject and drawing convictions that inform personal positions. This averseness to thinking is today caused by pragmatism, subjectivism and relativism, where everything is left to the mercies of the individual parties and there is a demand to respect each other’s subjective conclusions. Of this John Piper says, “Pragmatism and subjectivism obscure the reality of truth. They engage the mind, but they make it the servant of our desires and our work. But they can’t answer which desires I should pursue and which work is worthwhile.” Engaging against relativism, Piper adds, “Relativism is the perfect atmosphere for turning language into a pretext for greed by flattering people with what they want to hear.”… “Nobody is a relativist when his case is being tried in court and his objective innocence hangs on objective evidence.” Piper concludes: “It is an unhelpful and confusing category since there are no external, objective standards that are valid for everyone.”
John Piper has recommended in one of his sermons that we ought to carefully pick at least two Christian theologians who can help us in conceptualization of faith concepts. This fast tracks your search and humbles you that at the end of the day as you realize you don’t really have a ‘new revelation.’ I picked him and John Stott. Piper has written a book titled ‘Think’. He will, therefore, be my hunting companion in this article (or I might be the one trailing through the woods tracing his footsteps in this treasure hunt). I will quote him quite a bit and hopefully I will have convinced you to look out for the book and get the most out of it.
To be holy is not to be in-human
In the church you will find two camps of lost people. There are those who have lost their lives physically and spiritually due to a failure to understand scripture and there are people who are lost and spiritually dead because they have failed to conceptualize faith as a reality of the supernatural while making every effort to learn. One side of the pendulum disregards the supernatural working of the Holy Spirit to regenerate a person and ends up in legalism. The other side swings to champion for the work of the Holy Spirit and totally disregards the efforts of a people to be given to comprehend the truth cognitively. Yet God does not ignore the human abilities he gave us in the saving faith and the sanctification process. Piper says, “One might infer from the pervasive effects of sin in laming our minds that thinking has no significant role in how God creates saving faith… Even though our natural minds are depraved and darkened and foolish, the New Testament demands that we use them in coming to faith and leading people to faith and in the process of Christian growth and obedience. There is no way to awaken faith or strengthen faith that evades thinking.” The Parable of the Sower paints a clear picture on the role of understanding in the work of saving faith. “The difference between the soil that was lifeless and the soil that bears fruit is understanding,” Piper observes.
Technology today has aided people who know the answers on their lips without knowing them conceptually. Many in church barely know the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith. An invitation to think is an invitation to interrogate the realities of the person and the purpose of Christ Jesus. There are those who searched scriptures thinking that in them they would find life but refused to behold Jesus and therefore forfeited the Savior. There are those who ‘believed’ in him, but when put to task to comprehend the truth that Jesus is the Bread of Life that comes from heaven and that they must feed on him, they turned away from him and ultimately were condemned. To this Jesus turned to his disciples and asked, “Do you want to go away as well?” Simon Peter answered, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.”
Peter’s answer captures the thrust of my hunt. He uses two words that are antagonistic — believe and know. Faith and knowledge. The Word is in words. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… And the Word became flesh and lived among us”John 1:1,14. Piper observes: “God has willed that the clearest and most authoritative knowledge of him this side of heaven come through his written Word, the Bible.” God has given us all that we need to know about him in His word. That’s why we must not be so thrilled by the ‘spectacular spiritual sports’ performed by some to achieve dependence on a ‘man of God’ than point to Christ. The supernatural we must be preoccupied with is the privilege of studying the Word of God, both as a cognitive and faith venture. Without both, we will not make anything out of the Word.
Jesus models this. When starting his ministry after being tempted in the wilderness, Jesus gets to the temple, asks for a scroll, reads from Isaiah and expounds it for the hearers. Psalm 119:130 says: “The unfolding of your words gives light; it imparts understanding to the simple.” The writer of the Word is the Word. Hebrew says, “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son…” We must be given to comprehend what God intends in his writing through study and applying the rules of interpretation. Piper reflects and says, “The aim of reading should ordinarily be to understand what the writer wants understood. To ignore that aim is to break the golden rule of reading.” The psalm quoted makes a case that teaching effectively leads people to understand. Comprehension is a goal to studying and teaching scripture.
Mind the Mind
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind,” Matthew 22:37. We must mind our mind in loving God. Jesus does not leave out our minds when He is listing the components of our humanity that must wholesomely love God. Piper says, “Loving God with all our mind means wholly engaging our thinking to do all it can to awaken and express the heartfelt fullness of treasuring God above all things.” He adds, “The main reason God has given us a mind is that we might seek out and find all the reasons that exist for treasuring him in all things and above all things.”
Paul charges his protégé Timothy in 2 Timothy 2:7 this way: “Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything.” In his writings, Paul promotes thinking in a major way. In 2 Timothy 4:13, we see Paul the scholar when he asks for his scrolls and parchments. He was therefore not lording it over the church that which he was not given to. Piper says, “Thinking is indispensable on the path to passion for God.”
David also calls attention to balancing the heart and the mind in seeking and serving God. As he charges his son Solomon in 1 Chronicles 28:9, he says: “Solomon my son, know the God of your father and serve him with a whole heart and with a willing mind, for the Lord searches all hearts and understands every plan and thought.” David is categorical to charge his son to serve God with all faculties that make him human. Paul too calls the attention of the church in Rome to be renewed in their mind. He writes in Romans 2:2: “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.”
Yet adding information to the mind is not the solution because more often, education help sinners refine their way of sinning. In Ephesians 4:17-24, Paul uses the term, “…to be renewed in the spirit of your mind.” Piper comments and says, “Our brains are not mare mechanical computer handling data objectively and then offering them to the heart for appropriately moral responses.” The mind doesn’t just perceive and detect; it has a posture, it has a demeanor, it has a bearing, it has an altitude, it has a bent. Our mental problem is not merely our finitude, whereby we lack a certain piece of information. Our problem is that we are fallen, yet we want to be God. Our mind is bent in a way it says, ‘I don’t like having a supreme absolute being having sway over my life.’ The mind wants to say, ‘I will determine what I want, and nothing coming from outside of me is going to be my absolute authority’.
As long as that mindset of hostility to God in his absoluteness exists, we will not be transformed except in the most external artificial ways. Therefore, the problem of the mind is a software issue. That’s why Paul says that we must be renewed in the spirit of our mind. He diagnoses the problem and says, “Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds.” One of the decays of those not born again is a mind that is dead in sin. It cannot perceive truth truly and obey it duly. Paul continues to charge the believer to “…put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”
Deceitful Desires
Deceitful desires are those that call attention to glory in ourselves and not in God. Deceitful desires call us to enjoy God’s gifts without decisively declaring that without God all these things are futility in themselves. Deceitful desires make us think we can enjoy the gifts of God without the presence of God. Augustine of Hippo would say, “He loves Thee too little, who loves anything together with Thee, which he loves not for Thy sake.”
Deceitful desires stem from the fallenness of man. One who is not born again is inclined to sin for they are dead in sin. Contrarily, we who are believers must be given to have the mind of Christ by continually feeding our minds with the word of God. Cultivating an appetite for the Word of God. That’s why studying, memorizing and meditation must replace a lot of time used to feed the mind with garbage. What may actually seem harmless but does not edify us in our walk with the Lord is more often the deadliest subtle weapon the enemy uses. The many hours spent online often don’t build up but are spiritually fatal. There is need for intentional studying to comprehend biblical truths for a personal conviction that translates to actions that help grow into Christlikeness.
Conclusively, Tozer considers the reality of sin that mars the reality of God. He says, “Why do the very ransomed children of God know so little of that habitual conscious communion with God which the Scriptures seem to offer? The answer is our chronic unbelief. God and the spiritual world are real. But sin has so clouded the lenses of our hearts that we cannot see. The great unseen Reality is God.”
Maturity measure
Hebrew 5:11-13: “About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing… for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.”
Taking enough time to conceptualize a truth is a sign of maturity. Detesting the baby cup of spiritual food is a sign of maturity. A mature believer has an appetite to pay the cost to trace the thought flow of the Author in His Word, to behold the wonder in totality and not just a glimpse of it. Piper says, “Part of maturity is the principle of deferred gratification. If you cannot embrace the pain of learning but must have instant gratification, you forfeited the greatest reward of life.” (Pg 47). He adds, “If we don’t choose to think harder, we will settle for an adolescent level of unethical rest of our lives.”
Signs are signages
Sign-based faith is so precarious. Matthew 11:20-24, 12:38-42 warns: “Then he began to denounce the cities where most of his mighty works had been done, because they did not repent…An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.” The sign of Jonah must be sought and believed in. It can’t be substituted. This the death and the resurrection of Jesus. In Acts 2, the signs drew the attention and the Word drew the souls to God. “Faith comes by hearing and by hearing the Word of God.” Preach the Word. Teach the Word. The hearers will be granted to know. And the truth will set them free.
“Thinking is essential on the path to understanding. But understanding is a gift of God.” Therefore, “Decisive in our seeing is God’s causing light to shine in our hearts.” Among the Pauline prayers is one in Ephesians 3:14-21 where Paul explicitly prays for the Ephesian church to be granted understanding of the truth “that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
It’s easy to be oblivious of how much for us is in God’s word and that we need to understand it. Paul seems to suggest that we must seek to know the Lord more and more in his Word ‘that we may be filled with all the fullness of God’. He uses the phrase, “…to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” an oxymoron since ‘to know,’ suggests that we can know while ‘surpasses knowledge’ sounds like its unattainable.
Benson Njung’e serves with Focus-Kenya in the Pwani Region.
