Thursday, August 28, 2008

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

2 comments:

Mamacrust04 said...

So glad that you have finally entered to blog world Dad! Can't wait to learn from more of your thoughts about God and the church.

Mike Newsom said...

Here are a couple quotes that I recently came across:

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert - himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt - the Divine Reason... The new skeptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn... There is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it's practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic... The old humilty made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humilty makes a man doubtful about his aims, which makes him stop working altogether... We are on the road to producing a race of man too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.
-G. K. Chesterton
It is interesting that this quote is 100years old.

Doctrine is the foundation of duty; if the theory is not correct the practice cannot be right. Tell me what a man believes and I will tell you what he will do. Tyron Edwards