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Where does thinking fit into the gospel? Does the grace of God in Christ have any bearing upon the way we use our minds? Or does the pressure to be "thinking Christians" come from those who are naturally disposed to being intellectual and academic? To use Gordon MacDonald's words, "Does the man or woman who claims to walk with Christ owe the Creator excellence in terms of thought?" (p. 95).
The answer must surely be, "Yes they do." For one thing, Jesus, quoting the Law of Moses, included in his summary of human duty the need to love the Lord our God with "all your mind" (Matt. 22:37; Deut. 6:5). For another, Paul tells us that we are to respond to the gospel by devoting all the members of our body to God as a living sacrifice (Rom. 12:1). This includes the mind. Indeed, it includes especially the mind. It is through the "renewing of the mind" that we are freed from a life of conformity to the world, and enabled to discover the good and perfect will of God (Rom. 12:1-2).
The grace of God in the gospel, furthermore, rescues us from slavery to sin and calls us to "live to God" (Rom. 6:4,11). This includes our minds. As those who belong to Christ we are called to be sober-minded (self-controlled - see 1 Thess. 5:6; Titus 2:6; 1 Pet. 4:7), to prepare our minds for action (1 Pet. 1:13), to set our minds on things above (Col. 3:2), and to think on the things that are pure, noble and virtuous (Phil. 4:8f.). Without question, the gospel affects the way we are to use our minds.
The capacity to think is one of the greatest gifts God has given us as human beings. It is just one of the ways in which we resemble him. Through this capacity, MacDonald says, we are able to "discover and observe the stuff of creation, to compare and contrast each of its parts, and when possible, to use them properly so as to reflect the glory of the Creator" (p. 95). Perhaps more significantly, our minds enable us to comprehend the special revelation God has made of himself in Jesus Christ, and in the inspired Word he gave his people through prophets and apostles.
It is this fact that makes Christian thinking so different from that of the world. Non-Christians suppress what they know about God and end up corrupting what is true and pure and right (Rom. 1:18, 21, 28). Christians, on the other hand, have the mind of Christ (1 Cor. 2:16). They are able to see reality in God's light, and know the truth (Ps. 36:9). This, MacDonald writes, "provides a potential intellectual breadth that the unregenerate mind does not possess. It offers an eternal and timeless perspective in which to think. In Christ there is a foundation of truth that ought to make our own ideas, our analysis of things, and our innovation among the most powerful of the age" (p. 94). This was certainly the case at the time of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, and has been since then wherever Christians have taken discipleship of the mind seriously. "But because there is an essential laziness and internal disorganization in many Christian lives," MacDonald writes, "this is not always the case. We are forfeiting one of the great gifts God provided though Christ" (p. 94).
Our minds are indeed special. We ought daily live with the awareness that our capacity to think is one of the great gifts God has given us and one that he requires us to use well, for his glory. Next week we will consider how we may do this.