Strong Minds

 

And 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

 

Have we lost our minds and our strength?

We hear a lot about loving God with our hearts and even our souls (see above). It seems there is less teaching about loving God with our whole mind and strength.

As cyber space has increased, it almost seems like our real world experience and work for the Lord has decreased. Can it be that people are spending so much time with technology, that we have forgotten that there are both intellectual and physical expectations of our faith?

I have seen this in some pseudo-intellectual conversations on Facebook, as well as the complaints of some people (often with children), that they had to leave the church they were in because the preaching was “over our heads.” Even when Facebook debates get too deep from a biblical perspective, some will just stop discussing, rather than do the research to see if they are right or wrong.

There was a speaker at the Future of Christendom Conference, Bo Marinov, who  encouraged preachers to preach over the heads of people on Sunday mornings. He encouraged them to challenge people to grow by sending them home with Biblical things to think about – presumably, to look up and talk about with their families, or each other.

In the book of Acts, the Bereans were considered “noble” because they would hear preaching and then go look in the scriptures to see if what they had heard was true (Acts 17:10-11). The more interesting thing about them is that they would receive the word with “all eagerness.”

Is part of why some leave the church over preaching considered “over our heads” because we are not all that eager to hear it in the first place?  If, in order to understand it completely, more work is required, does that make it “not worth it” for us? Are many of us looking to hear more of what we have always heard? Is it too much work to look into the scriptures?

The mind is something God calls us to use to love Him. How much time do we spend on mind-numbing things (TV, Facebook, video games, computer games, bad books, etc.)? Could that time be spent looking into the word of God? And then, using our spiritual and physical strength, go out into the real world and work for the Kingdom of God?

Most Christians agree that our nation is a spiritual mess. How much of that is because we want our spiritual education to be easy, without work outside of church? Our spiritual laziness is being passed to the next generation. Teaching them to accept the challenge of doing some digging on their own may help them to be placed in the “noble” category by God.

How will we teach the next generation to love God with their minds and strength, as well as their hearts and souls, before we lose them to a host of other, lesser, forms of using them?

Let’s do this for the glory of God and the good of His people.