A Call to Think

This is a short one today everyone! I just wanted to touch on a topic that has been coming up a bunch over the last few years. It probably warrants a longer blog post (and I might just do that in the next while), but for now I will briefly say my points here.

God desires that His people think.

It seems crazy for me to have to say this, but I have really felt the need to post this blog for quite some time.

The Bible, many more times than I could count, says this often and always. Love the Lord you God with YOUR MIND. DISCERN and consider what is said to you so as not to give your pearls to the pigs. Judge between what is true and false based on His objective truth. Consider the fruit and the message of what is said when considering friendships or any one of whom you might take counsel. Be like the Bereans when listening to what is said and put it up against the Scriptures. A woman’s thinking mind and theology (or study of God) is to be valued by her spouse. To know God, you have to study, you have to mull over - it is a book that we have been given, after all, not a Youtube short. We are to point each other to His objective truth as Christians walking beside one another. We should desire to grow into maturity and if one remains stunted, that should be a cause for concern (the book of Hebrews talks about this a lot). All of these points, and so many more, focus on the need for thought, for processing what has been studied, for rootedness in His word to comprehend who He is. How can we worship Him if we do not know who He is? And if all these places are telling people to put this aside, then how will we know who we are apparently looking at?

The interesting thing is, that unlike what is being said about thinking being problematic and boring, it is actually quite the opposite. Because the more you behold Him, the more you understand what He did, and why, and what His attributes are, and what all of this means to a believer, the more you see how incredibly strong and logical the conveying of this message is in the Bible. It makes complete sense and it brings immense peace. The more beholding, the more wonder there is to take in. And by beholding Him and reading the Bible, I’m not talking about just picking it up every morning to read it ritualistically, or to read it before a local church service where the pastor is going to give you the three takeaway points that relate to humans, or memorizing out of context Bible passages. I’m talking about processing it, asking questions about it, looking deeper into the doctrines. Ruminating on it.

It’s funny because the statement that I often hear about local church people thinking is that they shouldn’t. They shouldn’t over-think things, or people are just thinking too much about God. And it will often be said that these people are being Pharasaical. But this is a rather backward label to put on people who desire to think, because the Pharisees weren’t wanting to think. The Pharisees were the people who didn’t want to hear what Jesus had to say. They wanted to continue on in their own man-made traditions and they weren’t in awe of who Jesus was and didn’t want to get to know Him more for who He actually was. It’s interesting to me that the thinking people aren’t categorized under the Berean label because this group, who was highly praised by Paul, were wanting to think.

So, a couple things I wanted to point out here:

1) Please be wary of people telling you not to think, or that you are thinking too much. It definitely gives the appearance of those who have sinister, deceitful or manipulative motivations in wanting to keep people low and unthinking and coming only to them in an unthinking manner. A good leader should want you, just like God does, to think, to ask questions, to grow in maturity by understanding, because as the individual goes deeper they see more of Him, more of His truth and more of how it makes absolute sense.

2) Processing things, and planning things, in light of God’s word is praised in the Bible, not called over-thinking. We are to consider our decisions and our plans with His word in mind and to be discerning based on His objective truth. We plan with the information that we have to make a wise decision about whatever the circumstance might be - school, work, marriage, parenting - and we do the planning with the idea of what would be best to do in the forefront of our minds. Living your life as a worshipper, which continues throughout all of your life regardless of the life stages or age stages, or so on, that you go through, means that you will consider what His objective truth says in order to live in the joy that He desires for His people, considering what is best to do in light of this. And if your plan is to consider this, always, then it will always continue. Regardless. But there has to be a discussion about a couple of things with this. Part of this thinking process is also seeing that we can understand something without having gone through it, without having experienced something. In a very experiential, man focused church environment, this can be a bit of a tougher thing to grasp. See, a person can plan rightly for marriage by thinking about it rightly. You can get into discussions about it, you can consider who you would be looking for in a spouse, you can consider what it means for a couple to be married, you can think about who you would not want to be married to or about how you don’t want to settle in a relationship. Now, yes, as you go forward, you might see that the one person you were thinking about maybe asking out on a date becomes less of an interest and so that possibility changes, but the main plan continues: to think of marriage rightly and make decisions about that marriage with that thinking in mind. Even if it so happens that you never get married, you’ve thought about what marriage means and you’ve thought about why you are not just settling for anyone in a marriage and so that plan continues. Take it even further, if you are looking to God and speaking to Him in prayer and are coming at it like, this would be cool if it happened, but if not then… OR this would be great if it didn’t happen, but if it does… then you are considering both alternatives in light of Him and what it would mean to live rightly in both cases. He always answers prayer, either as no or yes or maybe (I’ve talked about this in a previous post), and if your prayers are more focused on “Your will be done” instead of “I’m going to tell Him what to do” then you will be speaking with Him about what could potentially be the case while keeping the main ideas of your “not having to experience it first” thinking at the core.

We saw this a lot when we were living in Alberta. See, we had to understand the respect that was given to the wilderness around us in that setting. There was the prep for your car for winter driving, there was the preparation of extra things to bring with you when you were going to be hanging out outdoors with all the potentials of very ferocious wildlife around. You had to think through it all in advance. We had to talk to the kids about the wildlife and how we had to understand that putting thought into things first was very helpful. They don’t have to experience a bear attack firsthand to know about it and, take the flip side of that, can you imagine we never talked about it with them beforehand because they might be too scared to hear it? What would they do if they were presented with the possibility of being in an area where a bear was present? I have found that this is a common problem in a lot of church environments. It’s all like, don’t think too much, don’t get into weighty conversations, especially with youth but also with everyone (the youth that grow up to be the adults). But then what happens when someone has never had talks about sex, or marriage, or parenting, or what have you, and they are hurled into being married to someone that they settled on because their friends were all getting married? I see this often because it is a very experiential, subjective kind of worldview. An “I don’t want to think about it, He’ll just do what I told Him to do, go along with my feelings, that’s just what God told me extra-biblically (but what about what He said apparently to another individual)?” You don’t have to experience something to understand and this is very poignant in local church circles because you don’t have to be in a life stage to understand what it means biblically. And intriguingly enough, the planning, and the conversations, and the thinking, actually make the adventures and the life stages and the relationships even more enjoyable. It stems from an understanding that the planning and the thinking are rooted in a constant - an all-of-life worshipper way of considering and observing.

Take the Joseph (Mary’s husband) example that always gets thrown around: He was confused and he was going to go with his plan but God had to make sure that he didn’t do it, so don’t think and make sure that you find out God’s plan so you don’t take Him by surprise. This wasn’t the case on so many fronts. One, we can’t take God by surprise (but that’s for another blog). Two, Joseph did continue on with his plan. His plan was to do things rightly. He asked Mary to be his betrothed. He heard that she had become with child and he had to consider what to do in that circumstance by saying what would be the best thing to do. Now, as the righteous man that he was, by God’s help, he said that he would dissolve their betrothment quietly so that she wouldn’t be stoned. Do you see? He was still trying to do the right thing for her in respecting her. And then the angel came to him and said what was going on and, again, he continued in his plan to do the right thing. The thinking things through in light of God and considering what is best to do IS planning and, for a worshipper of God, the constant will always be wanting to live in light of the joy that He desires for His people.

3) The third thing that I wanted to point out was that people don’t like the thinking aspect because, for some reason, spontaneous has become synonymous with more spiritual. It stems from the idea that there are still prophets and apostles around (although the Bible does say that this time of prophets and apostles has ended - see the book of Hebrews especially) and it appeared like their times with the Spirit were more spontaneous. Interestingly enough, though, when you really look at it, that’s not the case. You know how much time the prophets would spend with God? You know how much time the apostles spent taking in Jesus’ words? And now we have those words before us in the Bible. So, just like a band is able to do something “improvised” BECAUSE they have had countless hours of time spent in theory and practice, it’s the same for a Christian. It’s not just speaking off the cuff about nothing, regurgitating things that are not understood. To truly understand something, there is time spent in it to process and study and mull over it SO THAT when you are put in a circumstance that is different from others you have been in, you understand enough to see how it functions in that situation as well. The Spirit doesn’t guide into chaos - the Spirit guides us into truth, well laid out, its’ mysteries made known.

Yes, we don’t see God physically, He is not physically present in our midst. But we have His word. And He wants us to think in light of that as we worship Him throughout our every days. It’s not an unthinking faith. Quite the opposite. Unlike any other, thinking is a big part of it. We are to reflect on His word in order to know Him and live in light of that objective truth. We are to love Him with all of our minds, not like rootless plants blown away by the wind, tumbleweeds that blow here and there, but strong oaks rooted deep by streams of living water.