So how can one honor God with one’s mind? Primarily by using it! Let's look at these ways in which we tend to undermine our minds in serving God.
It's sometimes difficult to maintain the relationship of faith, grace and the requirement for human decision making. Paul noted the same problem. My point is certainly not original with me–it’s Biblical! Paul uses most of Galatians 5 and the first several verses of Galatians 6 dealing with the possibility that some would take their salvation as permission to sin. Some would decide that grace meant they could do as they pleased and not suffer the consequences. He makes it clear that’s not what grace is about.
The best antidote to this type of thinking is for us not to regard salvation merely as a ticket to heaven, but as spiritual healing. When we think of it like that, we might find the question rather silly. If the doctor provides you with a cure for your disease, and does not charge you (a true miracle, I know), you have received the free gift of healing. But if you go home and say, “I want the disease, I’m going to get it back,” you may well be able to make yourself sick again. You can’t then complain to the doctor that his free gift failed. You set his gift aside.
Christians sometimes depend on Jesus to save them from sin, while at the same time they indulge themselves in destructive behavior. I’ve done a transformation of the story of Susanna (Daniel 13, from the apocrypha).1 What struck me as I read and worked on presenting that story is that the elders who falsely accuse Susanna do everything possible to lead themselves into sin and eventual destruction. They dwell on their temptation. They hide the fact that they are being tempted. They get as close to sin as they can. When eventually they are caught, everything that follows is inevitable.2
Christians are often like that. “Why won’t God free me from my addictions?” someone asks, at the same time sitting with the object of his addiction readily available. Grace opens the door, grace makes it all possible, but no number of gifts will make you rich if you throw them all away.
We also often see depending on God solely in the supernatural sense. What do I mean by this? Suppose I'm ill. Amongst some Christians if I take medicine I am no longer depending on God. They would say I should have faith and expect God to heal all my diseases. But God is also the creator of the natural world, and works with, not against his natural laws.
The problem is that Christians take actions that will bear one form of fruit while expecting God’s supernatural intervention to produce the type of fruit they desire. You're going to reap what you sow! I am not denying miracles, or asking anyone not to pray for them. I pray for God’s power and God’s action myself. But I also know from scripture that God normally follows the simple law of planting and harvesting, or as Jesus said, of bearing fruit.
God’s supernatural power is not there to provide you with a license to ignore God’s laws, whether moral or natural laws written in the fabric of the universe.
In the same way the inspiration of the scriptures is seen as bypassing the people involved, whether, prophets, secretaries, or readers. It is so much easier to use “God said” for anything in the Bible, so we are often tempted to just say, “God said.” But while there are portions of the Bible that are identified as the words of God, but there are also large portions which are not. I have even heard Job’s friends quoted as what “God said,” and they are soundly condemned by God right in scripture. It takes more work to find out what God is doing when he acts in history or in our own lives than it is simply to find a phrase that says what we want it to, and then to quote it, but it also means that very often we are ignoring what God actually meant, while taking on the appearance of affirming his word.
Those who see miraculous gifts continuing in the church tend to see supernatural church offices, such as prophet or apostle in the same way. If an anointed church leader says it, then one no longer has to think. This attitude enables church leaders who have fallen into sin to continue both in their sin and in church leadership. Members who observed and thought would likely discover wrongdoing. The supernatural sources of knowledge and authority replace the natural ones completely, along with the
God put prophets and teachers in the church for a purpose–to help bring his word to the people. I’m going to be brief about this, but it’s very important! Please think about it! Now that we can all enter the sanctuary with confidence (Hebrews 10:19), we should have as our goal getting everyone to approach God for themselves. The goal is not to teach people to accept what we, as teachers, prophets, or leaders, say, but rather to get them to think for themselves, and to listen to God for themselves.
In the same way the scriptures do not exist to relieve you of the task of thinking and choosing. They are there to feed you, inform you and train you. You will have to exercise your mind if you are going to get an accurate understanding of God's will in your study of scripture.
For the individual, the goal is to approach God individually, and not to depend on the teacher, preacher, or even prophet. It may be harder, but it’s the right goal. This does not mean that you operate apart from the community. There should be accountability, but the best accountability results from everyone using every gift that they have to acquire and apply wisdom and knowledge.
Ignoring God's natural laws and overemphasizing the supernatural continues to produce bad fruit. When we start ignoring the law of cause and effect, laziness replaces the hard work of good thinking, as when we accept something just because we saw it in a book, and it was written by someone holy.
When something is in print it gains a new measure of authority. Some people think that just because it’s in a book it must be true. Many who know that one can’t trust it just because it’s in print, will trust it because it’s in a book written by someone well known. But I have a secret (not really!) to tell you. There are plenty of Christian books in print that contain misinformation. I’m not talking about differences of opinion–I’m talking about things that people from many different perspectives could agree were just factually wrong. I find, for example, that a distressingly large number of “insights” brought from Greek or Hebrew in popular books are simply wrong, while many others are at least misleading because they don’t have the proper context.
When you get information from a book, you need to check references, and then you need to assure yourself that the references themselves are reliable. There are some facts making the rounds in Christian books that have simply been quoted so many times that everyone “knows” they are right, but nobody knows precisely where those facts came from. You need to check back to a primary source–the person who actually observed and recorded the data in the first place–whenever possible.
You are responsible for planting seeds in your mind. You are the one who is going to bear the fruit. You need to honor God with your mind by looking up the information.
An appearance of piety can replace wisdom. When someone announces–”God said it, I believe it, that settles it!”–without being certain that God says it, that bypasses the human mind. I have frequently been asked how overemphasizing God's sovereign power can possibly be a problem. But the truth is always important, and the fact is that God works through the natural.
It’s easy to dishonor God while sounding extremely pious. I cannot count the number of times I have heard someone say, “I’m just doing what the Bible says,” or “That is just God’s word!” when they are not, in fact, correctly quoting the material or are taking it badly out of context. What God says for a specific situation should settle it, but what God says and what people say God says may well be two very different things.
Always remember: You will harvest what you plant, and you are the one who chooses what to plant! The human factor is critical.
The Divine Factor
But what does it mean then that our communication is with God? Many people want to find the one solid thing on which they can hang their thoughts and dreams, something that allows them to be sure that they are right. Thus they are comforted