This week I am focusing on our minds before we became followers of Christ. I am referring to it as the Pre-Christian mind. When we talk about loving God with our mind, we have to talk about where we have been to give a foundation on where we want to go. The Pre-Christian mind, which is the state of our mind before Christ saved us, is at war with God.”And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds” (Col.1:21). We also read in James “Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.” (Jas 4:4) The Bible is clear that our Pre-Christian mind is at war with God, it is an enemy of God. Why?

The connection man had with God in the Garden of Eden was destroyed by disobedience to God’s rule. That sinful act of rebellion brought spiritual death to all mankind. David tells us in the Psalms “I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.” (Psa. 51:5). We are born into sin and incapable of knowing God. Jeremiah tells us “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9) We also read in Genesis “The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” (Gen. 6:5) From birth our minds and hearts, which is an aspect of the mind, is desperately sick and every intention is evil. EVERY INTENTION.

The Pre-Christian mind can reason and understand many things. What the fallen mind cannot do is understand and come to saving knowledge of Christ unless God first awakens the mind. In Ephesians 2, Paul tells us that in our Pre-Christian state we were dead in our sins and we displayed that deadness by living out the sinful desires of our mind and sin nature, which the Bible calls the flesh.

When a person experiences physical death, he is lifeless. The body is just a shell of what the person once was. Humanity is born into spiritual death, though we live in this world, our minds our lifeless when it comes to relating to and intimately knowing God, the Pre-Christian mind cannot know or experience God in this way. The fact that we have so many false ideas of God should be proof alone of this fact.

God did not leave us to wallow in our death. Paul goes on to tell us “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us,
even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ-by grace you have been saved-” (Eph. 2:4-5). When we are dead, God awakens the mind to receive and understand His revealed truth from the Scriptures. At that moment we understand and acknowledge our sinfulness and turn to God we are made alive to God by His grace. Made alive to love God with all we are including our minds.

Think about when you became a follower of Christ. How did it happen? Many heard or read the gospel and they understood it. Listen to the language we use to talk about our conversion experience listened, heard, understood, received, believed, those are the faculties of the mind. Just like we receive Christ, God expects us to use our reasoning abilities to learn how to live the Christian life. Listen to Paul’s words to the Ephesians “But that is not the way you learned Christ!- assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus,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.” (Eph. 4:20-24)

Even though we are dead to sin, by the grace of God, and alive to Christ, we still struggle with our sinful nature. I became a Christian at age 14 and for 14 years I lived a life fulfilling my sinful desires and building up patterns of thought in my mind that were hostile towards God. Even in our lives now as Christians we battle with our sinful nature, the difference now is we don’t have to be ruled by that nature. As Christians we need to tear down those strongholds in our mind and subject them to the obedience of Christ (2 Cor. 10: 5-6). In future blogs we will be going into further detail on how we love God with all our mind and renewing the mind like Paul commands in Romans 12.

My wife and I homeschool our kids, and I have been pondering on doing a philosophy class with them. So I have been studying and reading books on philosophy, right now I am on a trek, reading through “Philosophical Foundations For A Christian Worldview” by J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig. I have been chewing on a statement I read for a couple days now and it has bothered me. Take a look and read the quote and see what you think:

“Our churches are unfortunately overly-populated with people whose minds, as Christians, are going to waste… They may be spiritually regenerate, but their minds have not been converted; they still think like nonbelievers. Despite their Christian commitment, they remain largely empty selves. What is an empty self? An empty self is a person who is passive, sensate, busy and hurried, incapable of developing an interior life. Such a person is inordinately individualistic, infantile and narcissistic.

Imagine now a church filled with such people. What will be the theological understanding, evangelistic courage, and the cultural penetration of such a church? If the interior life does not really matter all that much, why should one spend the time trying to develop an intellectual, spiritually mature life? If someone is basically passive, he will just not make the effort to read, preferring to be entertained. If a person is sensate in orientation, then music, magazines filled with pictures, and visual media in general will be more important than mere words on a page or abstract thoughts. If one is hurried and distracted, one will have little patience for theoretical knowledge and too short an attention span to stay with an idea while it is being carefully developed. And if someone is overly individualistic, infantile and narcissistic, what will that person read, if he reads at all? Books about Christian celebrities, Christian romance novels imitating the worst the world has to offer, Christian self help books filled with slogans, simplistic moralizations, lots of stories and pictures, and inadequate diagnosis of the problems facing the reader. What will not be read are books that equip people to develop a well reasoned, theological understanding of the Christian faith and to assume their role in the broader work in the kingdom of God. Such a church will become impotent to stand against the powerful forces of secularism and misguided scientism. Such a church will be tempted to measure her success largely in terms of numbers–numbers achieved by cultural accomodation to empty selves. In this way the church will become her own grave digger; for her means of short term “success” will turn out in the long run to be the very thing that buries her.” (Moreland/Craig pg. 5)

I have been a Christian for over 20 years and served in churches and denominations in different capacities and in my experience, the sad part of the quote is that it is true. Unfortunately we are on a path of self destruction if something doesn’t change. If we look at our Christian heritage we will see from the beginnings of the church, it was the church that produced some of the greatest thinkers in the world. These men were unashamed to speak, write and debate in the public arena. They believed in their heart what they knew and understood in their mind.

When Jesus was asked which is the greatest commandment he replied, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ (Mark 12:29-30 ESV) Jesus pointed out that the greatest commandment involves loving God with all that we are, including our minds. For far to long we have checked our minds at the door thinking that church once or twice a week is enough. We have neglected the command of scripture to “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.” (2 Timothy 2:15 ESV) What does one approved look like? that person will be able to rightly handle the Word. One who is on a journey of knowing the what and the why’s of the Christian Faith and can teach and defend them. One who is transformed by the Word and is changing and submitting to God’s word. Someone that is not ashamed because he can answer the tough questions, if not at that moment he is on the search for the answers.

When I was a child I was involved in a program called the Royal Rangers. They had an emblem; on that emblem are 4 gold points among other things. The four gold points stood for the 4 ways a boy grows mentally, physically, spiritually and socially. The 4 ways a boy grows is taken from Luke 2 a short verse that, in my opinion, gets read over way too fast. It reads “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.” (Luke 2:52 ESV) Here we read that Jesus, God come in the flesh, the God-Man increased in stature (physically), in favor with God (spiritually), in favor with man (socially), and wisdom (mentally). Jesus, who is the founder and perfecter of our faith (Heb 12:2), who we are to imitate, grew in wisdom. If Jesus did, how much more are we responsible to?We should put our minds to work and study. We should learn how to think like Christ and subject our thoughts to the obedience of Christ (1 Cor. 10:5) We should obey Scripture and be on the journey of loving God with all our MIND.

For the next few weeks this will be my focus, how are we to love God with our mind and why it is of vital importance.