March 2, 2008 Fourth Sunday of Lent
Sermon Title: “All Your Mind”
Series: Extreme Love: The Greatest Commandment
Text: Mark 12:30
Dr.
Delivered on March 2, 2008
“You shall love
the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all
your mind, and with all your strength.”
Mark 12:30 NRSV
All Your Mind
Do you remember some of the gifts you received for Christmas as a kid? I remember many I received and you probably do too. What about a gift that you really wanted but never got? Can you think of any of those? No offense mom and dad, but I remember a game I really wanted as a child but I never received. It was an electronic game called Operation – maybe you’re heard of it. It’s basically a game of dexterity where you take tweezers and perform an “operation” on a goofy-looking guy laying on an operating table. The goal is to avoid touching the sides of each opening. If you do an annoying buzzer and light in his bulbous red nose goes off. I thought about the game this week because I was thinking of all the body parts mentioned in the Great Commandment (heart, soul, mind and strength) and I recalled some of the silly body parts you were supposed to remove from the Operation “patient.” Do you remember some of the parts? There was a tiny apple which represented the guy’s “Adam’s apple,” and a wrenched ankle, which was a bone in the shape of a wrench. And there was a “bread basket” which was a tiny piece of white bread located in his stomach area. Those of you who know and love the game probably don’t know that in 2004 Milton Bradley added the first game piece since the game was invented in 1965. It’s a piece you have to remove shaped like a tiny ice-cream cone located in the guy’s brain and the ailment related to it is called “brain freeze,” which you get right between the eyes when you eat ice cream too fast.
And speaking of the guy’s head, and brain freeze, that brings me to today’s “body part” in the list Jesus gave in the Great Commandment, the “mind.” Jesus said we are to love God with “all our mind.” In fact, of all the parts we’ll talk about, the mind is perhaps the most interesting and unusual because it’s the only one that Jesus actually added to the list God had already given in Scripture. You may recall that Jesus was asked by a questioner, “What is the greatest commandment?” His replied with a combination of two verses, Deut. 6:4-5 (love God), and Lev. 19:18 (love your neighbor as yourself). Of note is the fact that Deut. 6:4-5 says we are to love God with all our heart, soul and might (strength). Jesus specifically added “mind” when he gave his response to the guy who asked him the question. Why did he do that? Why would he add another “body part” to love God with?
There are a couple of theories about why Jesus added “mind.” One is that he added it because he was responding to a learned man, one to whom the mind would have been an important aspect of who he was that he needed to yield to God as he learned to love him. Just as Jesus told the rich young ruler to give away all his possessions in order to follow him (because possessions were so important to him), so too here Jesus, in speaking to an intellectual would have said, “love God with all your mind” because his mind, or intellect would have been something that kept him from loving God.
A second theory about why Jesus added “mind” to the equation is that he meant nothing at all by it; it was just his way of emphasizing the complete surrender of all we are and have to God as we love him. Again, as I mentioned last week, it was his way of saying “lock, stock and barrel” or “hook, line, and sinker.”
Personally, I have a third theory. I believe Jesus may have added mind because he recognized that in time the mind would be the battlefield upon which the fiercest battles would be fought for our full devotion and surrender to God. I believe Jesus realized that, in time, this particular area would be the place where things would get most difficult for us. In the two thousand years since Jesus spoke this commandment the whole idea of “faith versus reason,” or “believing versus thinking” has become difficult terrain for those who come in contact with the gospel of Jesus Christ. In fact, the defining question for many Western believers today is whether or not they can integrate their rational, scientific 21st century world view with the faith of our ancestors as described in the Scriptures.
I must confess, this was my struggle. I grew up hearing and knowing the stories of the Bible; Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, the walls of Jericho that tumbled down, and Jonah and the whale. And then I went to school and learned about plate tectonics and the age of the cosmos, and I learned more and more about competing religious and secular views of how the world came into existence, and what sustains it, and speculation about how our world will someday end, and I’ll be honest with you, everything I believed as a child was called into question. Not because I was gullible or naïve. Instead it was because I was getting more and more educated and I was developing a greater understanding and appreciation of the world around me.
What is a person to do? Do we dig a hole and put our head into it? Do we ban or burn books, or refuse to turn our televisions or computers? Do we cancel our subscriptions to our magazines and newspapers? Do we keep our children from receiving a well-rounded education for fear they’ll learn something that might undermine their faith? I don’t think so. I believe the Bible says otherwise and that’s what I want to talk about a bit today as we discuss loving God with “all our mind.”
Let me start by defining what I mean when I say “mind.” I view the mind as the core of our rationality and understanding. The mind is usually portrayed in the New Testament as the center of our intellectual activity. We “decide things” in our mind. We speak of “making up our mind,” or of having our “mind changed” about something. If you return to my opening story, the Operation game – they would depict the mind by showing a little brain you had to pick out with those tiny tweezers. Perhaps its an unfair division that is overused, but we often think of the mind/brain/thinking aspect of ourselves as being opposed to the heart/emotional/feeling part of who we are.
As for our proper care and feeding, so to speak, of the mind from a Christian perspective, there are a gazillion verses that apply. Rather than try to discuss them all, which would take all day, let me just speak for just a moment about what the Bible says about the mind and how we can love God with all of our mind according to it.
USE YOUR MIND
First of all, God definitely wants you to use your mind. He doesn’t ask us to turn our brains back into him when we become a believer. He wants us to use our noggins! This is confirmed throughout Scripture, but perhaps nowhere more vividly than in Isaiah 1:18, where the Lord says, “Come now, let us reason together, “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.” God invites us to “reason together,” to think things through. He doesn’t say “cover your eyes with your hands and jump in blindly.” Even though God knows we won’t ever be able to fully grasp his ways (how can scarlet sins be made white as snow?), he invites us – he encourages us to reason things out with him. It’s okay to question things – God can handle your questions. He really can. In fact, questioning things can sometimes help you draw closer to God.
The story the
Great Commandment comes from affirms this. Remember the setting? A scribe, an
educated man, “comes near” to God (v. 28) and asks him a question. Jesus gives
his answer. The scribe then elaborates on Jesus’ response. And then, “When
Jesus saw that the man had answered wisely, he said to him, ‘You are not far
from the
The Apostle Paul agrees. In 2 Corinthians 10:5 he speaks of “taking every thought captive and making it obedient to Christ.” In other words, there’s a battle going on up there between your ears – a battle for understanding involving the concepts and beliefs that shape the world as you see it. We’re not supposed to hide our heads in the sand or to insulate ourselves from competing visions of how things really are in the world. We are to “take every thought captive.” In other words, Christianity isn’t about externals as much as it is about what’s going on up there between your two ears.
RENEW YOUR
MIND
And that leads
to a second point I want to make about loving God with all the mind. Not only
are you supposed to use your mind, God also wants you to renew your mind. Romans 12:2 says, “Do not be conformed to
this world, but be transformed by….” What? By praise and worship music? By
small groups? By prayer? By acts of service? By going to
The word “renew” there in the Greek is important also. The word is not a passive term, or one that means a “one time only” renewal – it refers to ongoing renewal – to continuous renewal. In other words, once we start reprogramming our minds with correct beliefs and conceptions of the world from God’s perspective we are to continue to do so.
We are not to be without understanding, or as children in our understanding. We are to have a ready, fervent, forward-looking, constantly renewing mind. This requires action on our part, the act of continually choosing to grow, just as Christ did. Luke 2:52 explains that Christ grew in four areas: in wisdom (intellectual growth), in stature (physical development), in favor with God (spiritual growth), and in favor with men (social development). We must continue to grow in these areas.
Again, Paul writing to his young protégé Timothy told him to “Study to present yourself to God as one approved by him, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly explaining the word of truth.” (2 Tim. 2:16).
Dr. Howard Hendricks once shared the story of a professor who stayed up late at night pouring over his books. A passerby once asked him, “What keeps you studying? You never seem to stop.” His answer was, “I would rather my students drink from a bubbling brook than a stagnant pool.” How about you and those you have relationships with? Are they drinking from a bubbling brook or a stagnant pool?
The verdict is in, humankind can go on creating computers until kingdom come, but there will never be a computer created by man that is as intricate and that can function in as many amazing ways as that roughly three pounds of grey matter sitting there on your shoulders. God created our minds to be used for His glory. Failure on our part to actively develop our minds dishonors God. We must do all we can to educate our minds and then let God shape how we view the world through the power of his Holy Spirit.
FOCUS YOUR
MIND
There’s one more thing I want to mention that you need to do with your mind in order to love God, and that is to focus your mind on Him. It’s impossible to love God with all our mind when we have a bunch of things up there competing with Him for our thoughts. There are many obstacles to loving God with all your mind. Practically every one of these obstacles have to do with things that occupy all or part of our mind and that draw us away from him. These are like diseases of the brain – that’s a good way to think about them.
For instance, the first of these, and the most prevalent disease of the mind I see in our congregation is busyness. How can I love God with all my mind when my mind is constantly whirring with busyness? We are all so busy running here and there, multi-tasking, often spinning our wheels, and we’re totally drained from too much activity. How can we love God with “all our mind” when our mind is scattered in a million different pieces? The answer to busyness is to simplify and to focus. We all know about the power of focus, from the simple experiment of taking a magnifying glass and holding it over a leaf and seeing the leaf catch fire, to watching demonstrations of a laser beam cutting through solid steel.
Another obstacle to our loving God with all our minds, another “brain disease” that can be easily cured by focusing our minds on Christ, I put under the general heading of worry. I say general heading because I could alternately use the words, doubt, or fear. I use the word worry because that seems to be where it bubbles up most often in my life. I worry about my children, I worry about our church, I worry about my parents, I worry about my health. And the more I focus on those worries the more less and less I can love God with all my mind. But as I focus my mind on him, my confidence and love of him grows and my own pitiful limitations diminish in stature.
The classical biblical example of this, of course, was poor Peter trying to walk on the water like Jesus. You remember the story, he stepped over the side of the boat into the sea and began walking toward Jesus, but then he took his eyes off Jesus and began to notice the fierce winds and waves and he began to sink. The same thing happens to us when we allow our mind to play tricks with us as we take our focus off God and let it drift onto our circumstances.
I’ll mention one more wide spread obstacle to loving God with all your mind, and that’s guilt. Guilt is another of those categories that is pretty broad. I could’ve said remorse, or lack of forgiveness for oneself. As we either heap guilt upon ourselves, or as Satan or other people heap guilt on us, we begin to lose our focus on Christ and the weight of that guilt begins to press down on us and before long our minds are so depressed by that guilt that there is no way we can love God with all our mind. Our minds are consumed by our guilt. We feel unworthy of God’s love and forgiveness.
Listen to me, keep your eyes on Jesus…focus on him. And at this time of year especially, we need to focus on him on the cross. He hung there for you, you know. He stayed on that cross so that he could put an end to all the frantic busyness of your life and mine, as we try in vain to earn something he wants to freely give. He died there for you and me so that we would have no worries, fears or doubts in this world. He died there for the stain of your sin and mine, so we don’t need to constantly wrestle with guilt. He nailed our busyness, our worry, and our guilt to the cross and declared it, “finished.”
Let me ask you. Do you love God with all your mind? I hope when you leave here this morning you will feel complete freedom to use your mind in your faith life. It is my fond hope that you will take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ in your life. I hope that you will leave here knowing that our minds need to be constantly renewed and that we never stop growing as Christians because when we stop growing we start dying. And finally I pray that everyone here understands the importance of focus in loving God with all our minds. I hope you understand the importance of daily, even hourly taking a deep breath and focusing on God and saying, “Lord, I love you, what’s next? Who can I serve? How can I love you more?” Do you do that? If not will you begin? Today we’re going to close with communion. I always view communion as a kind of “fresh start,” a way to say, “Lord, refresh my spirit and strengthen me. From this moment on I commit my self fully to you…” Let’s take a moment right now and pray that God would use this time today to renew our minds and to help us to remember his love for us. And let’s use the time to rededicate ourselves anew to God and his purposes for our lives. Shall we? Let’s pray.