THINKING ABOUT GOD

Amos 7:1-9:15; Revelation 3:7-22; Psalm 131:1-3; Proverbs 29:23

“’The time will come,’ says the Lord, ‘when the grain and grapes will grow faster than they can be harvested. Then the terraced vineyards on the hills of Israel will drip with sweet wine! I will bring my exiled people of Israel
 back from distant lands, and they will rebuild their ruined cities and live in them again. They will plant vineyards and gardens; they will eat their crops and drink their wine. I will firmly plant them there in their own land. They will never again be uprooted from the land I have given them,’ says the Lord your God.”

“Look! I stand at the door and knock. If you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in, and we will share a meal together as friends. Those who are victorious will sit with me on my throne, just as I was victorious and sat with my Father on his throne. Anyone with ears to hear must listen to the Spirit and understand what he is saying to the churches.”

“Lord, my heart is not proud; my eyes are not haughty. I don’t concern myself with matters too great or too awesome for me to grasp. Instead, I have calmed and quieted myself, like a weaned child who no longer cries for its mother’s milk. Yes, like a weaned child is my soul within me.”

“Pride ends in humiliation, while humility brings honor.”

If we want to gauge the true state of our spiritual life, we can safely begin and end with what we think about and how we think of it. How we think and of what we think are important indicators of where we actually stand with our Savior. For example, if I truly believe that God owns it all, I will view with gratitude every material blessing as a sign of His love and grace. If even a touch of greed invades my thinking, I immediately become consumed with the care and protection of “my” stuff. I put too much emphasis on it and associate it too closely with my overall security. Or, in response to the success of another, I can choose to joyfully celebrate with them, or be envious of them. The mind, not the eyes, is the window to the soul. What and how we think drives everything from our self-image to our theology. None of this is any real surprise; the surprise comes when, in light of all this, we actually stop to carefully consider how utterly careless we sometimes are with our thoughts. Thoughts really matter. Frequently, thoughts – or the lack of any proper thinking – can be determinative.

One of the main “secrets of life” I think I have stumbled on this year as I have worked through the Bible is that we must be intentionally, unceasingly diligent in paying attention to what we think and how we think. “Guarding our hearts” is a fine thing. However, guarding our minds is an absolute imperative. We may believe Satan attacks us most often in our hearts, in the area of emotion, but it just ain’t so. He must enter first through the intellect, or he will never get past it to the emotions. The reason is simple. As human beings created in the very image of our Creator, we have the ability to reason our way out of emotional funks. We can commit ourselves beyond our emotions. We can do things even though we don’t feel like doing them. People who lose the ability to do this, or will not do it, are for good cause sometimes diagnosed with mental illness.

So it comes to this. What do we think about Christ? How do we think of Him, especially when we find ourselves in a spiritual desert, or in the midst of exile? Jesus Himself says He is always just outside the door of our lives. Going further, He is persistently knocking, waiting for permission to enter. He is calling out to us, asking to be recognized. Always, in every situation and regardless of what we may think of more tangible reality, Christ is available to us and for us. We just have to quiet ourselves enough to hear and respond.

Therein lies the secret of spiritual health. When the world is crashing in, it takes more than discipline to quiet our souls. Sometimes, especially when viewed from a purely logical perspective, it takes outrageous audacity to quietly claim faith in Jesus. When every ounce of our emotion quails before the challenges of life, and we become “faint of heart,” it requires an intellectual dedication to keep listening to, let alone actually hear and act upon, the Spirit’s voice. That kind of commitment will never last if it is based solely on emotion. It will only survive if it becomes a fundamental part of the way we think. In short, if our world view is not premised upon the way God says we should see, interpret and respond to life and its myriad of circumstances, we risk allowing our emotions to subjectively determine our hope… or our lack of it.

Emotions are wonderful things in their place. However, anytime we allow our emotions and/or feelings to finally determine the way we think (rather than the other way around), we open ourselves up to great vulnerability. God is “I AM,” not “the one you think I am.” Upon that Rock is founded all that is worthy of knowing. When we feel ourselves becoming lost, it is a sure sign that something besides the baseline, primary reality of “I AM” is controlling our thoughts. Strictly speaking, this is “natural.” It is the natural result of Original Sin, when we decided how we thought, and what we thought about, was more important than what and how God thinks.