With All Your Mind . . .

RENEWAL OF THE MIND

Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. - - - Rom 12:2

While God humbles the proud he does not despise the mind, which he has created. God not only created man, but created him to think. Isaiah shows how God said to his people: “Israel does not know, my people do not understand.” and then invited them to “Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord.” God has always intended that his people think and to think responsibly and morally. Jesus coupled his rebuke to his disciples, “O men of little faith,” with Do you not perceive? (Matt. 16:9), and we can believe that it is God’s intention that faith and understanding are closely related in uniting us to God.

In our initial article in this series we acknowledged our debt to a thin but powerful volume by John R. W. Stott entitled Your Mind Matters, from which we continue to draw ideas in this installment. Stott observes, for instance, that the importance of the mind is evidenced in the fact that God is a self-revealing God. God discloses his mind to man’s mind! How could the Creator have exalted the human mind more than that?

Stott makes a further point that I like: in nature God’s revelation is visualized while in the scriptures it is verbalized. In both instances man must exercise his reason to benefit from the revelation. Kepler described his study of astronomy as “Thinking God’s thoughts after him” even though he realized that God’s revelation in science is “a proclamation without words.” If man unlocks the secrets of the universe, which the Creator has put there, he must think. When Newton’s friends asked him how he managed to know so much about the universe, he replied By applying my mind to it.

So it is with the Bible, which is chock-full of goodies, a disclosure of God’s secrets. God’s mind (as much as paper and ink can convey the mind of God!) is enclosed in scripture, and does not become disclosed until man applies his mind to it. God may as well have never revealed his will if the Bible is to be a closed book. And there are many ways for it to be closed beside with lock and chain. Prejudice can lock it tighter than a bank vault, and so can sectarianism. Reading it through someone else’s eyes closes it as much as if you buried it. A lack of common education can keep it closed, even when one does not intend it.

It is too often the case that one studies the Bible all his life, and even teaches from its pages, without ever really understanding what it is all about. He may catch the words and yet miss the message. It is like going to the big circus and seeing the sideshows but missing the main event. Alexander Campbell was very conscious of the science of interpretation, and he laid down several hermenuetical rules, but there was one rule that he saw as basic: one must come within the understanding distance. Just as one will not see the rats driven from the barn if he closes his eyes, he will not understand the scriptures unless he wants to.

The understanding distance! I will not hear anyone if I stay out of earshot, and that includes the Lord when he seeks to speak to me in his word. Someone has described our nation’s most serious illness as the malady of not wanting. One can stop smoking if she really wants to; she can be moral, law-abiding, responsible and industrious if she really wants to. We do not have to be righteous to be blessed, but only want to be righteous, for Jesus says: “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst for righteousness.” But how many of us really want to be like Jesus --- more than we want other things? And how many of us, as we approach the. Bible, come within the understanding distance. The scriptures remain closed if we draw nigh with our eyes while our hearts are far away.

If words without thoughts never to heaven go, as Shakespeare assures us, then words without knowledge may be just as meaningless. “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” The Lord asks Job, and then urges him to Gird up your loins like a man. God is inviting him to think and to think searchingly, It is worthy of all acceptation for the modern church to hearken to the plea, Gird up your minds!

The apostles urged their young churches to use their heads. “I speak as to sensible (reasonable) men; judge for yourselves what I say” (l Cor. 10:15). Make every effort, 2 Pet. 1:5 says, “to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge.” And Paul may be saying even more when he says: “Having the eyes of your heart enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power in us who believe, according to the working of his great might” (Eph, 1: 18-19). The Spirit works on our “inner eyes” so that we might understand. That is, if our “want to” is fixed!

The prophets of the Old Testament measured evil among God’s people in terms of what had happened to their thinking. “My people are foolish, they know me not,” Jer. 4:22 reads, “they are stupid children, they have no understanding.” Hos. 4:6 shows that God rejected Israel because they had rejected knowledge, and the prophets pungent words have reverberated through the centuries, speaking even to the modern church: My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Pro. 30:2 shows that being a human being has a certain intellectual implication: “I am too stupid to be a man. I have not the understanding of a man.”

To be anti-intellectual, therefore, is to deny the humanity that God has given us. It is presumed that since the scriptures put down “human wisdom” that there is something wrong with being knowledgeable. But when Paul says such things as “In the wisdom of God the world did not know God through wisdom” and “God made foolish the wisdom of the world” he is not placing rationality against irrationality or the intellectual against the non-intellectual, but he is contrasting the revelation of God with the wisdom of men, showing that the human race can be saved only by what God has revealed, not by what man might conjure up from his own wisdom.

Man is to be rational, he is to be intelligent, for this is his only way of grasping God’s revelation and “growing in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Man’s mind is thus to be applied to what God has revealed, not to his own vain imaginations. So, rather than to put down “book learnin” and to lampoon “getting an education” we should rather question the kind of books one is learning and the nature of the education. John R. W. Stott, who is a Londoner, was impressed with something Billy Graham said when he visited his city and addressed 600 ministers. “I’ve preached too much and studied too little,” said the evangelist, and went on to say that if he had his life to live over he would study three times more than he had. Graham was not, of course, talking about what Paul calls “worldly wisdom,” but that wisdom which brings one closer to God.

God’s philanthropy is such that a person can change, and as Rom. 12:2 indicates there can be a renewal of the mind. If one’s “senseless heart is darkened” or if he is “high minded” or “carnally minded,” all of which the scriptures condemn, he does not have to remain that way. His mind can be renewed! That is the good news of the gospel. So when one believes in Jesus and is baptized in reference to that faith, it is not simply a matter of his body being buried, however rich the symbolism might be. His mind is to be baptized too! This means that his beliefs, values, desired, innermost thoughts, attitudes, and purposes in life all undergo a transformation --- though change is a better word since the mind is invisible and formless.

A changed mind! What a glorious miracle that is. Indifference gives way to caring, hate gives way to love, cynicism gives way to faith, despair gives way to hope, violence gives way to peace. The selfish, conceited, arrogant mind is now “the mind of Christ.” A renewed mind means a new life. The old man of the world has passed away and all things are now new.

Pro. 3: 14 assures us that this kind of wisdom is better than silver and gold. With the soaring prices of those precious metals these days what more needs to be said? - the Editor