Don't ignore your mind!

It was an entirely sincere statement, offered up by a devout Believer in Christ - "I don't really need to know church history or the origins of theology. I just know Jesus Christ, living in me." The speaker was referring to a recent series of sermons that I am preaching in response to the questions that the best-seller, The DaVinci Code, has raised in the minds of many Americans. What can a person gain by having a grasp on how the New Testament came into existence, by understanding the why's and wherefore's of the councils held many centuries ago to forge the creeds that shape our faith? Is it all really important? Or can a Believer sustain a vital faith with a personal experience of Jesus' Presence centered in the now?

It is not really a choice an either/or choice. If our Christianity is all about history and theology, about just knowing a set of facts and memorizing a creed, it will quickly become a dead thing, incapable of sustaining us in the present troubles and trials of life. However, if our faith is entirely a subjective experience fueled by fervent worship and personal piety, we will be unable to successfully engage in dialogue with those who claim their own religious experiences apart from Christ Jesus.

I am a Pentecostal by training and experience. The strength of my tradition is the immediacy of it, the warmth of heart that comes with expecting the Holy Spirit to be personally close, leading and guiding, healing, saving, and keeping me. I wouldn't trade that for anything. What a wonderfully powerful experience it is to go to prayer and to have the privilege of praying in the Spirit, beyond the formation of words. The intimacy of such moments is a treasured gift for me in my Christian life. The weakness of my tradition is that, too! Pentecostals are big on 'the heart,' on inspiration that leads to launching out in faith into some endeavor or another. There is a tendency to ignore 'the head,' to treat reason and understanding with suspicion, if not outright hostility. Jesus urges us to love God with 'all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength.' It has befallen me many times to find myself in a revival meeting where the speaker urges people to set aside their minds to just 'go with the flow of the Spirit.' Because I am steeped the language and tradition of Pentecost, I understand that he doesn't really intend for the crowd to go into a trance. But, I have seen some strange, silly things happen because of such rhetoric. For some, that exhortation becomes an excuse to set aside common courtesy and even common sense to engage in emotional excesses that have little or nothing to do with a genuine experience of the Spirit's power or Presence.

True worship, whether private and personal, or corporate and public, involves both the mind and the heart, the cognitive functions of reason and the emotive responses that come from deep inside of us. A recent phenomenon in Christianity is something called 'the emergent church.' I still evaluating it, reading the books published by the leaders of the movement, but I am starting to conclude that the movement is a reaction to both 'heart-less' Christianity and 'mind-less' Christianity. The leaders are attempting to be thoughtful, without becoming dogmatic; warmly inspired, without becoming silly in emotional excess. But I'm also concluding that they are, perhaps, too ready to sacrifice the hard sayings of the Scripture in an effort to be 'relevant' to our culture.

Don't ignore your mind, and don't 'worship' your heart! Take Paul's advice to the Corinthian church. Think on this word from the Word today:

So what’s the solution? The answer is simple enough.
Do both. I should be spiritually free and expressive as I pray, but I should also be thoughtful and mindful as I pray. I should sing with my spirit, and sing with my mind.

If you give a blessing using your private prayer language, which no one else understands, how can some outsider who has just shown up and has no idea what’s going on know when to say “Amen”? Your blessing might be beautiful, but you have very effectively cut that person out of it. I’m grateful to God for the gift of praying in tongues that he gives us for praising him, which leads to wonderful intimacies we enjoy with him. I enter into this as much or more than any of you. But when I’m in a church assembled for worship, I’d rather say five words that everyone can understand and learn from than say ten thousand that sound to others like gibberish.

To be perfectly frank, I’m getting exasperated with your infantile thinking.
How long before you grow up and use your head—your adult head? It’s all right to have a childlike unfamiliarity with evil; a simple no is all that’s needed there. But there’s far more to saying yes to something. Only mature and well-exercised intelligence can save you from falling into gullibility. - 1 Corinthians 14:15-20 (The Message)