Thinking Christianly

How well do you and those you know think? How well do they think about God? Does their thinking change them? A.W. Tozer first jolted me into the reality of thinking christianly about life and God. He wrote, "What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us" (The Knowledge of the Holy, 7). He seems to be defining a person by the kind and quality of thoughts occupying the mind. The character of a person has largely to do with the content of their thoughts about God. Everybody has some thoughts about God, whether accurate or not, and those thoughts spill out in the ways they talk about their lives, their fortunes or misfortunes and reflections on the news of the day.

Tozer wsa urgently concerned that the people he served think in God-centered ways. He was convinced by the middle of the last century that the Christian concept of God was "so decadent as to be utterly beneath the dignity of the Most High God" (Knowledge, 8). He feared that should the poor thnking continue, it would lead to a "moral calamity" in the church. How much more in our day whent he most popular phrase heard even among evangelicals is "but I like to think of God as . . ." and just fill in the blank with whatever blandness there is about yourself!

If you are concerned about how well you and those around you think about God, if you care concerned that they are capable of thinking like Christians and not like the world, then I recommend reading the works of John Owen. His work The Grace and Duty of Spiritual Mindedness (which I took as the title for this blog), maps out in a systematic way that will train beleiver to think "christianly"(as Harry Blamires put it in The Christian Mind) and help the followers of Jesus in this post-modern world "take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ" (2 Cor 10:5).

Thinking with a spiritual mind is a discipline to be practiced and a precious habit to form. Consider how contemporary Owen's words are from the Preface of his work:

For the world is at present in a mighty hurry, and being in many places cast off from all foundations of steadfastness, it makes the minds of men giddy with its revolutions, or disorderly in the expectations of them. Thoughts about these things are both allowable and unavoidable, if they take not the mind out of its own power by their multiplicity, vehemency and urgency, until it be unframed as unto spiritual things, retaining neither room nor time for their entertainment. Hence men walk and talk as if the world were all, when comparatively it is nothing.

Praying together with you that the church will set its mind on things above,

Be of good cheer,

Bob