Love the Lord your God with all your mind!

I am afraid that an entire generation has forgotten to think. It is so easy these days to just flip on the tube, relax, and check out……veg out man. That’s the current context and sentiment for an entire generation plus some. Do you realize how many ads you see in a day? All of them telling you what to think, what to eat, what to wear, what to say, what to believe, what to love, what to do!!!

Do we realize how much our culture is in us, in the church! I think maybe we have failed to fulfill more than one element of the great commandment. Love must have the preeminence, strength must be given to the Lord, our hearts need to be tender and engaged, yes yes yes, all of these. But our minds, our minds need to be enthralled in thoughts of God.

I fear we have left theology to the academics. We are all called, however, to be theologians. For what is theology but thinking upon God? We were all made, fashioned, and designed to dwell upon the mysteries of the God head. We must think again, we need to give our minds to Jesus.

What does it mean to love the Lord with all our minds? Can we start by filtering what we look at, what we give our time to, and what we read?

Meditation from St. Anselm of Canterbury

Any athiest that argues against the person or being of God is attempting to deny existance of any and all good. To me, athiests are just angry and seek to perport that anger is all there is. If they hold a correct view, that there is no such thing as a God, then they necessarily believe that there is no good at all in this world or in the heavens. If they did believe in any good or any good thing then they must use reason to dedact that that good came from some good thing and one chief good thing.

St. Anselm says it this way; “We have found then, that there is something supremely good (because all good things are good through some one thing, namely that which is good through itself). But in the same way we arrive at the necessary conclusion that there is something supremely great, since whatsoever is great is great through some one thing, namely that which is great through itself…..and since only that which is supremely good can be supremely great, it is necessary that there is something that is best and greatest, i.e. of everything that exists, the supreme.” Or, God.

For someone to say that there is good that does not flow from some other good is to say that rivers flow in and out of themselves without being fed by some other water source, it’s incoherent.

This idea mentioned begs many questions to those seekers of truth but for those who reason it is sound enough for now.

No kingdom without pressing in. No kingdom without violence.

Luke 16:16 “The law and the prophets were until John. Since that time the kingdom of God has been preached, and everyone is pressing into it.”

Matthew 11:12 “And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.”

In order for true Christianity to permeate the heart  (what I mean by true Christianity is that belief in Christ as the son of God and in the devotion to living a life fully dedicated to God) there must be a violent disposition to lay hold of Christ and to follow through on the promises of His word.

The kingdom of heaven suffers violence. What does this mean? What is causing violence upon the kingdom, what is the clash? I believe it is the way of the world that is in violent opposition to the way of the kingdom. The love of money, the love of pleasures, the idols of possessions, and the unwillingness to be obedient and submissive to truth are all enemies of the cross of Jesus and the kingdom rule which that cross inaugurated.

In order for the kingdom to come we must be more violent in fighting for righteousness than we are violent to gain pleasure and ease. Violence implies resistance and where there is no resistance to the spirit of this age and love of the world then I wonder if there is any kingdom dynamic present. It takes focused energy to encounter the manifestations of the kingdom but it takes little to no effort to encounter manifestations of the spirit of this age. Violence of heart against the fleeting pleasures of sin is not enough; there must be a violence within to pursue holy lifestyles and to experience God himself, personally and tangibly.

What does it profit us to stop halfway in the journey? It would be like a man in a burning building fleeing the dangers of the burning top floor only to stop on the stairs and declare his safety and trust that the fire will not spread to the downstairs! Eventually the whole house will be ablaze. We must be vigilent in pursuing the fullness of the kingdom lest we be in danger of false safety.

Travel makes one think

I’ve recently been in Macon, Georgia doing some ministry at the house of prayer there. I was amazed to see the hunger and the desperate need for God’s presence while I was there. It was a great encouragement to my heart as an intercessor to see that God is truly raising up a people to be completely set apart for His purposes in the earth. Glory awaits those who take the kingdom by force. To suffer it violently to receive its glory, that is our call now and the greatest test for the church in this age. God be with us.

It takes discipline to receive.

To him who has, more will be given. To him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him.

The Lord gives extravagantly. And he asks us to do the same. The reality is that He will give more to those who can receive more, and receiving takes discipline. It’s hard to take something you don’t deserve, well, sometimes.

There is a renewal of the mind that needs to occur in order to see the Lord rightly, as He is. There is a shift in our inner man when we come to faith in Christ but that shift continues to happen throughout the process of the Spirit sanctifying us. Some of these shifts comes by free grace and the complete work of God’s mercy on our hearts but some of this transformation is completely up to us; we still have free will when we choose Christ and we still have free will when we receive the baptism in the Holy Ghost. And so, we still have free choice when it comes to sanctification. I believe this is what the apostle Paul meant when he commanded the church to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”

It takes discipline to receive because our way of life and our culture is so contrary to the way of Christ and the way of His kingdom. In order to receive supernatural mindsets and paradigms, we must of necessity, discipline ourselves out of our current context of living in the world and being of the world. The Lord initiates and provokes us into this but the response must come from us. Righteous response comes from disciplined habits. The best conditioning for life in the Spirit is to walk in the Spirit, with the Spirit.

Thoughts on Music…

I wonder how closely music and the making thereof parallels the laws of the universe. It seems to me that creating, writing, and performing music imitates, more than any other medium, what God actually did in creating the heavens and the earth; the universe and the laws that sustain it. I think maybe this is why music is so spiritual and moving to us.

When God made man in His own image He put a creative drive within us similar to His. For some reason or another, whether by design or by coincidence, man has developed in the area of music far more, in my mind, than in any other arena besides in sin.

What this tells me is simply that God is an artist or more specifically a musician. Think of a world without sound. Imagine how uninteresting it might be. Think of waves and wind and trees and animals and everything creating a symphony of sound that ascends into the heavens. Music makes life special and humans more than any other creatures make music beautiful. God has given us this gift and I believe it is one of His most precious endowments to the natural order.