“The prospering of God’s cause on earth depends upon his people thinking well.”

“Today we are apt to downplay or disregard the importance of good thinking to strong faith; and some, disastrously, even regard thinking as opposed to faith. They do not realize that in so doing they are not honoring God, but simply yielding to the deeply anti-intellectualist currents of Western egalitarianism, rooted, in turn, in the romantic idealization of impulse and blind feeling found in David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and their nineteenth-and twentieth-century followers.”

“…Jesus Christ…was and is the most powerful thinker the world has ever known.”

“Many Christians today will be surprised to learn that Isaac Watts – the composer of such well-known hymns as “Joy to the World,” “Alas! And Did My Savior Bleed?” “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” “Jesus Shall Reign Where’er the Sun,” and “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” along with many others – also taught logic and wrote a widely used textbook, Logic: The Right Use of Reason in the Inquiry After Truth.”

– All quotes taken from Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart

Let’s spend a few moments dwelling on what the late Christian philosopher Dallas Willard said. We see so much in our current culture that rails against people of faith as having any reasoning ability whatsoever. It’s been posted on my Confident Christianity Facebook wall that Christians are wholesale brainwashed (three times in one week in July 2016, in fact). Of course, these ideas are as prevalent on our airwaves as are casseroles at a Baptist potluck! Our minds will be assaulted by this negative imagery, but what can we do about it?

First, we need to turn the focus inward. The Scriptures, especially throughout Proverbs, are explicit to instruct that humans must grow in knowledge, especially knowledge about God. Wisdom in the Christian text is called “supreme” and is worth obtaining though “it cost you everything you have.” (Proverbs 4:7) Pause and think on that statement for a moment. Let God’s Word instruct you; perhaps look up the passage in different translations. Now, consider this: are you gaining wisdom in a way that demonstrates its supremacy in your life? Would people around you testify that you have this attitude? If your answer is either negative or uncertain, than think about how you are coming across to those who do not believe in God. While I adamantly disagree with a wholesale condemnation on Christians as uncritical thinkers—as grossly false—I can also recall many Christians who portray this very trait…as well as many professing atheists or Muslims.

Our Western society, especially so in America, seems to have radically changed to an anti-intellectualism that often portrays itself as intellectual or reasonable, no matter what an individual professes about religion. Christians cannot afford to be on this cultural cruise ship of following their desires and leaving difficult thinking checked on the dock. As Willard noted, uncritical thinking leads to error, not to honoring God—nor, I would add, to freedom in Christ. Yet it’s not so easy to desire to think well, or critically. Becoming an individual who puts deep thought on a matter ahead of one’s initial reactions or deep-entrenched desires is a difficult path, with suffering involved. So as we turn our attention inward, we must be intentional about becoming Christ-like in our daily habits.

It is from the practices of the spiritual disciplines that we will find the discipline to trust God. In my own Christian history, I have found next to no training on how to develop a life that truly trusts God rather than merely professes to trust God. This idea is key to the developing of a critical thinker. When I am in the habit of communing with the Lord through prayer, meditation, silence, solitude, fasting, studying, worshiping, etcetera, I develop the ability to trust God by not trusting myself for everything. I begin to realize that what at first seems true to me, may be distorted due to the barrage of influences on my mind. Why does this happen?

Think through some of the disciplines. How does fasting help a person trust God? Does it not put your very life into the hands of God, saying, “I trust you with the absolute basics of life”? How does silence and solitude help a person trust God? Does it not take one of our most valuable commodities, our time, and place it into the hands of God, saying, “I give to you what I think I do not have, so that I can live within Your guidance and perfect governance? I give You control.” How does studying help a person trust God? Does it not put an order to what we think is most important in life by saying, “There is nothing more important than the knowledge of God”? And each discipline in turn trains us to trust the Creator of all things physical and spiritual so that we may grow in Biblical wisdom: having knowledge and putting it into action in our lives.

When a Christian attends to the discipline of his desires, conforming himself more and more unto the teachings of the Spirit (Christlikeness), he becomes a powerful testimony to the truth of God because he learns and engages in more of the truth about the nature of reality. He is no longer inventing fictions, no matter how elaborate or eloquently stated, but is rather living within a coherent worldview.

The suffering on this path arises from the conflict between an individual’s distorted desires leading towards untruth/evil and the reality of God’s goodness and truth. One suffers when a dearly held belief is grossly false. In the Chronicles of Narnia, the character Eustace is turned into a dragon due to following his selfish desires. When he is ready to cast off the untruths resulting in this predicament, Aslan (God), scrapes the outward layers of dragon scales off of him (the layers of falsehood built up around him). Eustace describes a deep hurt as the scales come off, yet as those untruths fall away, he calls the result a “good pain.”

In order to effectively and profoundly communicate to a society trending away from objective truth, especially objective goodness, God must be allowed to scrape away the layers of falsehood built up around our own selves. We must stop insulating ourselves from the “good pain” of maturing in Christ. We must not board the cultural cruise of non-stop fulfillment of “my own way of seeing things.” Rather, we must desire to conform our own thoughts to reality, as found in the truth of Jesus Christ. This week, would you join me in praying that God would give us the desire to be those who are truth-seekers, pain-endurers, and conformers to Christ?

In the next Knowing session, we will turn the focus outward to ministering to others.