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We are continuing our September Vision series this morning. Every Fall we revisit our church vision statement or one of our four core values. This year we are spending three weeks exploring what it means to love God. Our key passage is Mark 12, which we just heard.
As we learned last year, the Greatest Commandment comes from Deuteronomy 6. Daniel helped us last week by challenging us to love God with all of our heart. We acknowledged that Jesus is not attempting to distinguish sharply between the heart, mind, and soul. He is saying that we should love God with all that we are. However, these are not synonyms. It is useful to consider how we ought to love God with our affections, our mind, and our strength.
Our focus this morning is loving God with our mind. How do we direct our thinking to line up with God’s revelation of himself for his glory?
What is my goal for this sermon?
I want to acknowledge that I have benefited from a lesser-known work by John Piper in my preparation for this sermon, his 2011 book titled, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God. I will share a few quotes from it throughout the sermon.
Our sermon points this morning are:
For our prayer this morning, I selected a prayer from the book Daniel recommended last week, A. W. Tozer’s The Knowledge of the Holy. This is the prayer at the beginning over Chapter 3. Let’s make this our prayer this morning.
O Majesty unspeakable, my soul desires to behold Thee. I cry to Thee from the dust.
Yet when I inquire after Thy name it is secret. Thou art hidden in the light which no man can approach unto. What Thou art cannot be thought or uttered, for Thy glory is ineffable.
Still, prophet and psalmist, apostle and saint have encouraged me to believe that I may in some measure know Thee. Therefore, I pray, whatever of Thyself Thou hast been pleased to disclose, help me to search out as treasure more precious than rubies or the merchandise of fine gold: for with Thee shall I live when the stars of the twilight are no more and the heavens have vanished away and only Thou remainest. Amen.
- A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy
No big surprises here for most of us. This is well-worn territory for our preaching and our life together. We are people of the Book. We believe with the Psalmist that God’s word is a “lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Psalm 119:11). We proclaim with Paul that:
2 Timothy 3:16–17 (ESV) — All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
We believe that the Bible is God’s revealed, inspired word, breathed out by him and written down by human authors. We believe that, “no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21). Where scripture speaks, God speaks.
Our Trinity Confession of Faith states:
The final judge for the examination and judgment of all religious controversies, decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits can be no other than Holy Scripture delivered by the Spirit. Our faith must rest when Scripture speaks” (TCOF 1.10).
Romans 10:17 (ESV) — So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.
This is why we emphasize knowing and understanding the scriptures. Think of all the efforts that go into us knowing the Bible. We feature “expository” preaching from God’s word every Sunday. This means as preachers we are seeking to “expose” what the Author of the text actually intends for it to mean.
Our Home Groups include some form of discussion or instruction around God’s Word. We regularly emphasize spiritual disciplines such as bible reading, bible study, bible memorization, and bible meditation.
Paul writes to his disciple Timothy, telling him:
2 Timothy 2:15 (ESV) — Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.
Old Testament saints also applied their minds to the Word of God.
Joshua wrote to the Israelites as they were entering Canaan:
Joshua 1:8 (ESV) — This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.
Later as Judah was coming back from the Babylonian captivity, the people of God listened to scripture being read.
Ezra 7:10 (ESV) — For Ezra had set his heart to study the Law of the LORD, and to do it and to teach his statutes and rules in Israel.
We should never tire of hearing reminders to read, study, meditate and apply God’s word. Psalm 119 is a robust, beautiful meditation on our love for God’s word.
However, let’s take this question a little deeper this morning. How might “applying our mind to God’s Word” indicate more than simply reading and trying to understand it?
What application of the human mind was necessary for us to have this moment studying God’s Word this morning. This is not an exhaustive list, but should provoke our thoughts.
Each of these individuals applied his mind out of love for God and his word.
We have an over-abundance of resources in the church today to help us apply our mind to knowing and loving God through his Word.
I know that many of you faithfully read, study, and even teach what you’ve learned from scripture to others.
I also know that we are unusually “bookish” as a local church. You might guess that when you walk into our lobby and see that we give away books for free.
If you are new to Cornerstone or not really much of a reader you may feel intimidated when you show up to Home Group and see full bookshelves or hear of book-reading clubs. Don’t be intimidated. We all have room to grow to use our minds to love God.
I don’t want to miss this opportunity to invite you to consider whether God might want you to use your mind in a more disciplined or focused way in the study of God’s word. That might include learning a biblical language, reading books on biblical interpretation, or even going to seminary to study theology.
Or, maybe the next step for you would simply to get an ESV Study Bible and get in a regular habit of reading scripture daily.
Please don’t hear this as intellectual snobbery or putting on airs. I’m not saying that we all have to become biblical scholars. We don’t. However…
Without the words and sentences and paragraphs of scripture, we would not know God, how to be saved, or how to interpret the world.
Acts 17:2–3 (ESV) — And Paul went in, as was his custom, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, “This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ.”
Take one active step to apply your mind more directly to knowing God through his word.
Paul pointed out that the Thessalonian Christians treated God’s word in this way:
1 Thessalonians 2:13 (ESV) — And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers.
One essential element of loving God with all our mind is understanding God’s Word. Let’s move on to Point 2.
Many of us have spent much time and energy thinking about how to love God by applying our mind to the book of God’s Word. Fewer of us have spent our time and energy thinking how we can love God by applying our mind to study the book of God’s World.
This, of course, does not mean that we have not studied the book of God’s world; it simply means we have often done that separately from our conscious devotion to God.
One need not be a Christian or even religious to study God’s World. Most of us took Earth Science, biology, chemistry, and maybe physics in school. Perhaps you leaned toward the humanities and spent your time studying history or literature or art. Some of you have taken more math than I can ever even imagine. Maybe you have been obsessed with dinosaurs since you were a kid (or at least since you watched Jurassic Park).
The question is not whether you have studied God’s world, but whether you have connected that study to your worship of the Creator.
The Psalmist points us in the right direction.
Psalm 19:1–2 (ESV) — The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.
Every day the creation declares the glory of God. Are you listening? The lens of the microscope and the lens of the telescope both focus on the glory of God if we have eyes to see it.
What does it mean if you like reading the Bible but don’t enjoy a sunrise or a gentle spring rain? Do you not stand in awe of God observing the waves of the sea, the grandeur of the mountains, or the beauty of a sunflower?
What are we supposed to see?
Romans 1:19–21 (ESV) — For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.
We know that God’s word reveals God’s character and salvation much more explicitly, but don’t miss that through the book of nature God also reveals himself. Paul says God has made it plain, that God has shown it to us through what has been made. God’s intended result of the book of nature is that we glorify God as God, that we honor him.
This is why it is absurd to assume that scientists should be atheists or agnostics by nature. The Christian should be most motivated to study, to seek, to apply his or her mind to find the glories of Christ in all that he has made.
Colossians 1:16–17 (ESV) — For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
Consider what this means for the worship of God. We are not limited to worship only when dealing with the book of God’s Word. We don’t create silos of sacred and secular to put personal devotionals, Home Group meetings, and church services in the silo of the sacred.
“All things were created through him and for him.” This includes science and math, literature and poetry, business and medicine. We should love God with all our mind in all of these areas.
This is true, not only because God created all that exists, but also because he continues holding it all together.
Our own Trinity Catechism states in answer to Question 19 that,
God’s works of providence are his holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing all his creatures and all their actions, ordering them and all things for his own glory.
Visibility into God’s character is not limited to his word alone.
Psalm 145:17 (ESV) — The LORD is righteous in all his ways and kind in all his works.
It is true that the two books are not equivalent. God’s world and works by themselves are not enough to undo the power of sin in our lives, including the fallen corruption of our minds and hearts.
We must get the order right. We need God’s word to interpret God’s world. We need God’s special revelation of himself in the bible to make sense of his general revelation of himself in nature.
John Piper says it this way.
The two books of God are not on the same level. The Bible has supreme authority, because God gave the Bible as the key to unlock the meaning of all things. Without the truth of the Bible, the most brilliant scholars may learn amazing things about nature. And we may read their books and learn from them. But they miss the main point without the special revelation of God—that everything exists to glorify Christ, that they are blinded by sin, that they need a Savior, that Christ came into the world to save sinners, and that the whole universe gets its ultimate meaning in relationship to him. When they miss the main thing, everything is skewed.
— John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2011), 191.
As those who know of God’s character and greatness from his word, how will we approach applying our mind to the book of his world?
Whatever your area of expertise in the world, help others see through the book of the world to see the greatness and goodness of God.
The heavens declare Thy glory, Lord,
In every star Thy wisdom shines;
But when our eyes behold Thy Word,
We read Thy name in fairer lines.— Isaac Watts (as quoted in The Knowledge of the Holy, Ch. 3)
We have been encouraged to apply our mind to the study of God’s word and his world. But, to what purpose?
We must remember the actual words of the Greatest Commandment.
Mark 12:30 (ESV) — 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.’
We don’t pursue knowledge (of God’s word or world) for its own sake. The command is not to love knowledge with all of your mind, but to love God. Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up (see 1 Cor 8:1-3).
One can possess a vast array of knowledge and not use it to love, know, or glorify God. This knowledge can become an occasion for pride, for the manipulation of others, or even profound evil. This knowledge without love will not bring God the glory he deserves. “If I … understand all mysteries and all knowledge … but have not love, I am nothing” (1 Cor 13:2).
This directing of our mind to culminate in love and worship is not automatic; it requires intentionality.
In my experience I find I need to ask God to help me make the connection between my thinking and my love for God.
We must remember that it is God who gives wisdom and insight. Proverbs 2 is a great reminder of that truth.
We must call out and seek the knowledge that leads to love for God and highlights the glory of God.
In quintessential John Piper language…
Therefore, the main reason God has given us minds is that we might seek out and find all the reasons that exist for treasuring him in all things and above all things. He created the world so that through it and above it we might treasure him.
— John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2011), 15.
What is my goal for this sermon?
Our ultimate goal is not our wisdom or knowledge, but Christ.
1 Corinthians 1:26–31 (ESV) — For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”
As we close, consider the greatness of God in Isaiah 40.
Isaiah 40:5 (ESV) — And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.”
Isaiah 40:8–14 (ESV) — The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. Go on up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good news; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good news; lift it up, fear not; say to the cities of Judah, “Behold your God!” Behold, the Lord GOD comes with might, and his arm rules for him; behold, his reward is with him, and his recompense before him. He will tend his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms; he will carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those that are with young. Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and marked off the heavens with a span, enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance? Who has measured the Spirit of the LORD, or what man shows him his counsel? Whom did he consult, and who made him understand? Who taught him the path of justice, and taught him knowledge, and showed him the way of understanding?
Isaiah 40:27–31 (ESV) — Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, “My way is hidden from the LORD, and my right is disregarded by my God”? Have you not known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength. Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.
Romans 11:36 (ESV) — For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.
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