The Wholeheart Disciple VI: Loving God With All Your Mind Part 2 - The Wholeheart Disciple: Starting Points

You're listening to the road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

So I'm advocating an intellectually deep, historically faithful, robust faith, based on scientific and historical evidence, based on God's character, based on the supernatural, based on solid theology, based on who God is, based on faith and reason, and based in the sola scriptura, the great maxim of the Reformation 500 years ago, scripture only.

At The Road, our vision is to raise up wholehearted disciples of Jesus Christ.

For more information on The Road, visit theroad.org.

We hope you are encouraged by today's message from Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

We're looking at loving God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and that being the key to everything.

So in that sense, it's directly proportional to what we do by who we are and what we become through loving Christ with all our heart.

Soul, mind, and strength.

And we've been talking about this for a few weeks.

And we have over a hundred of you in Outlier University.

So just six weeks ago, we started Outlier University.

And over a hundred of you are signed up, going to classes and learning stuff and growing.

And this is part of it.

This is, I'm using the pulpit to give this course on being a wholeheart disciple.

And so you that have been coming, you know, we've been covering kind of the multi, I would call it the multifaceted rainbow of the personality of man and God from Mark 12, 30.

He says, God's, Jesus says, love the Lord your God with all of your heart, and we talked about that, that the heart is your emotions.

We love God emotionally.

Not emotionalism, but an emotional relationship.

Love always involves emotions.

Then he says, with all of your soul, and we talked about our identity and connecting with God's identity of us and us receiving that identity, that he loves you, that you're beloved, irregardless of your merits, irregardless of your works, you are completely and absolutely and unconditionally loved by God.

We talked about that.

And then loving God with your mind.

And so a couple weeks ago, I talked about loving God with your mind, and that was part one.

And in loving God with our mind, let me just go over that again because it was a couple weeks ago.

I emphasize that Christianity is a thinking person's religion.

It is about study, it is about reflection, it is about meditation, and it's about thought.

It's thinking.

It's a thinking man's faith.

Now I say that because most religions of the world, not all, but most, are not thinking man's religions.

For example, Buddhism, by and large, is not a is not robust in its thinking.

Shintoism in Japan is definitely not.

Shintoism doesn't even have a main book that they even study from.

It's more cultural.

And Christianity is unique in that all of the great scientists, most of the great historians and theologians and philosophers of the past were Christian.

Now, the last 100 years has been different, but leading up to the 1920 centuries, there has been the most robust thinkers were believers, were believers in Christ.

It's a thinking man's faith.

And here's my thesis.

Here's my thesis.

You cannot truly love God with all of your heart without first loving God with all of your mind.

That your heart follows your mind.

Your emotions follow facts.

Your heart follows your mind, and loving God with your mind, listen, also always involves, from my perspective, and from I believe a biblical perspective, it means loving God intimately.

So we can't separate the two.

Now, for the sake of didactic teaching here, I'm separating the two, but the reality is, is loving God with your mind that never leads to an emotional intimacy with Christ is not the kind of love that Jesus is speaking of here when he says, Love me with all of your heart, all of your soul, all of your mind, and all of your strength.

That's one statement.

He means it all goes together.

The personality of God all comes together through the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And so we are we are physical, we are emotional, we are spiritual, we are mental.

And God wants us to love with all of our faculties that are created in the image of God.

And so he speaks of loving him with our mind.

And it's the hard, I shared with you a couple weeks ago, that's the hardest thing to get people to do.

Is think.

Think.

It's not hard to get people to go to a rock concert and feel the music.

It's hard to get them to think about the vision of their life.

Old or young.

And many people have wasted their life because they never think.

And so they and so they just trip up one emotional fix after another, or what's the latest thing happening in the culture?

And they're fashionable, but they're going nowhere.

And so Christianity challenges us to think, it challenges us to renew our minds.

That's more next week.

Next week I want to talk about renewing our minds.

And so I'm advocating an intellectually deep, historically faithful, robust faith, based on scientific and historical evidence, based on God's character, based on the supernatural, based on solid theology, based on who God is, based on faith and reason, and based in the sola scriptura, the great maxim of the Reformation 500 years ago, scripture only.

Scripture only.

That we base our faith at the road at Chapel Hills in this book.

We believe it's inerrant, we believe it's infallible, and we believe it's for life change.

That when we read it, when we study it, when we reflect on it, and it starts changing our minds, it changes our hearts.

And when it changes our minds and our hearts, it changes you.

And that's exciting stuff.

And that's the adventure before us.

So three weeks ago, I gave you the first reason why we love God with all of our mind, and that's because we are in a spiritual battle for our hearts and minds.

So look, if you have your Bible, look at 2 Corinthians chapter 10.

2 Corinthians 10 · chapter mention

I'm just going to briefly go over that again because it's been a couple weeks.

We had the men's retreat, and I had to go out and shoot Bambi.

So, but 2 Corinthians 10 3 through 5, for the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments, every high thing that exhausts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.

The issue here is that our hearts are changed by our minds, and strongholds are built by the way we think.

And all of us come out of backgrounds where our thinking is warped.

We heard stuff from our dad, we heard stuff from our mom.

We heard stuff from our college professor.

Wherever it came from, this world and the way in which this world thinks is not the ways of God.

And so there's strongholds that get built up, ideas, principles that have to change within us.

And so Satan knows that.

Demons know that.

And so they plant within your heart, they plant within your mind ideas about God, ideas about creation, ideas about people that have the ability, if they're not renewed by the power of the Holy Spirit through the Word of God, to become strongholds in our thinking.

And we have a real hard time getting set free, and we can't understand what the pastor's talking about, and we can't understand when we read God's word.

That was me.

I mean, three days before I got saved, I wasn't reading the Bible because I didn't even know where my Bible was.

I had one, I had two Bibles.

I had a confirmation Bible and a Bible, a red Bible that my grandmother gave me.

But I don't know where that, I didn't know where they were.

I hadn't read them.

But if I had read my Bible before I got, I wouldn't have known what I was reading.

It made absolutely no sense.

The next day, after coming to know Christ, someone gave me a little green Gideon's Bible, and it all made sense.

And I'm like, what in the world?

This is the most exciting book ever.

Because my mind was transformed by the Holy Spirit.

You see what I'm saying?

And so, with that, strongholds over the next 30 years began to get broken down over time.

Got broken down.

So, anyway, we we love God with all of our mind because of these strongholds.

And then I talked about three world views today.

There's three major worldviews today that we have to tackle.

The first is scientific naturalism.

Scientific naturalism.

And this is the dominant view in Western culture and on the university today.

And you can go back and listen to the sermon.

I'm not going to go over it.

Postmodern relativism would be number two.

Postmodern relativism.

I talked about that.

I wanted to read a great quote that I that Stu sent me, Stu Orr, this week from John Stone Street in Breakpoint.

And in his kind of a quick definition of postmodernism, I thought it was really good.

Postmodernism is a snake eating its own tail.

It is self-contradictory.

It invokes ideas such as justice, fairness, and tolerance while at the same time denying that there are any universal values.

Largely because there is no way to discern those values.

All that's left in postmodernism is a vast ocean of subjectivity where power determines what's true and what's not.

That's why you see at Berkeley, that's why you see at other universities, when conservative other ideas, conservative values speakers have come in, all they need to do is just tear the place apart.

They run around bashing in windows and causing riots and stuff.

Because the engagement of true values actually is an affront to them because they don't have any answers.

And that's not what made our country great.

And so we always, I love, I think it's awesome to debate issues with an atheist or an agnostic or a Buddhist or a Muslim.

Because why should we ever be fearful of other ideas?

Because truth always wins.

So let's be in it.

Let's be in the arena.

Let's never, I mean, if a group of Muslims want to build a temple right next door to us, I say, come on, we'll help purchase the land.

Let's do it.

Because closer proximity to truth.

So we shouldn't fear these things.

We should be excited about those things because the truth is what sets us free.

Don't be afraid of falsehood if you've got the truth.

And so postmodernism really struggles there because they don't have the truth.

They know they don't, they don't know what to do about it.

And then thirdly, the other worldview is supernatural, biblical Christianity.

I'm not talking about religious, I'm not talking about churchy Christianity or religious Christianity.

I'm talking about supernatural, biblical Christianity, where God's alive, where the Holy Spirit's at work, where the word is preached, where the sacraments are rightly administered, but where mission is happening, where lives are being changed.

If lives are not being changed, Christ isn't there because when Christ shows up, he always changes lives.

So biblical Christianity.

So I'm advocating for a vibrant faith of love and reasoning.

Augustine said it well.

I believe in order to understand, and I understand the better to believe.

So faith and reason go together.

Faith, the substance of things unseen, is not a leap into darkness, rather, faith is a leap out of the darkness.

And Christianity celebrates science, and Christianity celebrates philosophy, and Christianity celebrates mathematics, and Christianity celebrates the cosmos.

Indeed, the greatest scientists in each of those fields usually were believers in God.

So why do we love God with all of our minds?

Let me give you the second reason today, and this is it.

Because we've been given the mind of Christ.

That exciting! We've been given the mind of Christ.

Turn in your Bibles to 1 Corinthians 2.

Oh my goodness.

What was great about my hunting trip was I didn't have a license to hunt this year, and uh I'd used it on another special hunt that I went on, and so I sat in the camp and hour after hour while the guys were out by the fire just reading 1 Corinthians 2.

Going, oh I wanted to fly back or get a helicopter back and preach last Sunday really bad.

Because I was pumped up.

So I get to do it today.

So anyway, 1 Corinthians 2.

Look at verse 16.

This is your birthright, folks.

You ought to store it, you ought to exit, you ought to check it, whatever you need to do, highlight it.

For who has known the mind of the Lord that we may instruct him?

Rhetorical question.

Who out there has known the mind of the Lord that they might instruct him?

And then he says this we have the mind of Christ.

We have God's mind.

When you got saved, now if you're not saved today, then you don't have the mind of Christ.

But if you're saved and you're a disciple of Jesus, you've been given the mind of Christ.

You say, well, what does that mean?

That means you're not as stupid as you once were.

It really does.

It means you're not an ignoramus.

No matter what your dad says, or your mom dad, or your teacher says.

Actually, David says in the Psalms, I'm smarter than my instructors.

How about that?

How about going to Philosophy 101 at DU or UCCS or one of these, uh Harvard or Yale, and you're smarter than your philosophy teacher.

You are.

Now they'll convince you of the opposite, but the reality is you have the mind of Christ.

You can think differently.

All the research that's going on right now, Sean Occor and his book on the happiness factor and happiness advantage, books like that, and there's a whole slew of them right now, is talking about the plasticity of the mind, the plasticity of the brain.

They're discovering that you can think differently.

You can actually teach an old dog new tricks.

Not my dogs, you can't, but I'm talking about people.

People can change.

There's a plasticity of the mind.

You do not have to keep being the same person you've been being.

You don't have to keep doing what you've always.

You can change.

And then on top of that, that's just naturally looking at what they're discovering.

The supernatural rim is that you have the mind of Christ.

You can change.

You do not have to have an addictive personality anymore toward drugs and alcohol and porn.

You can change.

And he's going to tell us how.

It's pretty interesting.

Pretty interesting how.

So look at, so that's that's the that's the thesis there.

Now jump up to verse 6 because this is the context.

However, we speak wisdom among those who are mature, yet not the wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing.

So, first of all, he wants to make a differentiation between the wisdom of this world, the wisdom of this age, the wisdom of the university, the wisdom of the Greeks, the wisdom of the Jews, to say, I'm talking about something different here, gang.

I'm talking about the wisdom from God.

And it's not like the rulers uh rule from.

It's not the wisdom they use.

It's philosophically a different worldview than them.

But we speak the wisdom of God, verse 7.

Wisdom of God in a mystery.

Really interesting.

That it's a mystery.

By the way, when you're in situations where you can't answer someone's question about God or about the Bible or about creation or evolution, it's fine to say, I'm still working this stuff out, it's a mystery.

I'm trying to, I'm I'm gaining ground on that.

I don't know what the right answer to that is.

It's a mystery.

And so even Paul, the most learned man of his time, when the Bible was written, said, it's a mystery.

The hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages for our glory, which none of the rulers of this age even knew about.

For had they known, they would have not crucified the Lord of glory.

You know what he's talking about here?

He's talking about prophecies, these hundreds of prophecies from Genesis to Malachi, in the book that the Jews had at the time, they didn't see the Messiah.

They couldn't see the Messiah.

That's the God of this age.

Even Paul would say, I didn't see it.

I was a Hebrew of Hebrews, I was a Pharisee of Pharisees, I didn't see it either.

But then God revealed it.

Well, how?

Because God initiates.

You're here this morning because at some point God initiated with you.

He called you out.

He called you out and he began to give you wisdom about mysteries that just the day before you didn't even understand.

Isn't that wild that God does that?

And so he makes this differentiation between the two.

And then, verse 9 to me, this is this is the power of the mystery of the wisdom and knowledge of God.

I has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love him.

Some of you that have been walking with the Lord for a few years, and you're still living a robust, joyful, spirit-filled, word-rooted faith.

Don't you look back and go, I never dreamed that God would have done all these miracles in my life.

You can't even imagine it.

You can't even conceive of it.

But it was being imagined and conceived in God's mind for you.

And it is right now, and he's not finished with you yet.

And if you'll follow him, and if you'll if you'll cling to him, if you'll cling to his word, and you'll cry out, man, eye is not seen, ear is not heard, all that God has for you.

Even with all those failures of the past, even with all those mistakes.

Listen, if you don't have some failures, you're not risking enough.

Failures are good.

Failures are okay.

And that's why.

Paul would say, I boast in my weakness.

I don't boast in my strength, I boast in my weakness.

Basically saying, I can boast about my failures.

I didn't get it.

I do now.

Wow.

And he's the one writing this.

But God has revealed them to us.

So it's not that it's something that we can't comprehend completely.

He says, look, you can.

You can even right now get it.

But God has revealed this to us through the Spirit, through the Holy Spirit.

For the Spirit searches all things.

Yes, even the deep things of God.

For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him?

Even so, no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God.

Now we have received not the Spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God.

So what he's saying is he's giving a metaphor that just like only you know in your spirit what you're thinking about.

Nobody else knows.

You know what's happening in your spirit, even your spouse doesn't know what's happening in your spirit.

You know what's happening in your spirit.

Well, in the same way, God has a mind, and in his mind, nobody knows the mind of God except God.

But then he throws in this incredibly supernatural faculty that's now been given to us called the Holy Spirit.

And so the Spirit of God, which is in touch with the mind of God and in touch with your spirit, connects the two, and you have the mind of Christ.

So you now have thoughts that are so unnatural to you because you know Jesus.

Now, what happens with many believers is they start shutting that down because they start listening again to the world and the flesh.

You can do that.

You can go back to the world, you can go back to Satan, you can go back to the flesh, and now, and that's what we're going to talk about next week, that's why you have to renew your mind.

That's why you have to keep renewing your mind.

Because if you don't renew your mind on a daily basis or at least a weekly basis, you will go back to your natural way of thinking.

But what he's saying here is, look, I here's the deal is that God has revealed to us what eye has not seen, ear is not heard, through his spirit, because the spirit's the only one that's connecting with the mind of God and your spirit.

Now, if you're not a believer in Christ this morning, if you've not given yourself to Christ, if you've not allowed Christ to give himself to you, you don't have a clue what I'm talking about.

You can try till the cows come home.

Just like Martin Luther did, which we'll cover when we get to Luther.

Luther did everything the medieval church told him he needed to do to be holy and to be righteous, and he came to the conclusion that God hates me and I hate God.

That's where many agnostics and atheists are today, because they're trying the wrong way.

They're giving themselves to a self-effort of self-merit to somehow find God.

Never works.

Rather, they have to surrender to the grace of Christ by faith.

And the righteous, Romans 1, 18, the righteous shall live by faith.

So look at verse 9 again.

Three things.

Three ways that our minds are renewed.

Three ways that our minds are renewed.

Three ways that we have the mind of Christ.

The first is eye has not seen nor ear heard perception.

Perceptional knowledge.

Your five senses.

You can now hear, feel, touch, see stuff you never could before.

It's accentuated now.

I would call it the spiritual sixth sense of the Holy Spirit.

My wife and I, and some of you that have been with me in some circumstances, many of you in this room would attest to this.

We have gone into houses where we can feel the demonic.

You can feel it.

You can feel it in worship in this room sometimes.

We come into this room and you feel the power of the Holy Spirit.

You feel something's happening here.

Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't.

But God begins to give you a perception of your five senses, and he gives you a sixth sense about things that you didn't know before.

We have a number of Christian counselors on our team here at the road, and they know, they'll tell you, man, they can't explain it, but they're listening to someone talk and they know what the problem is.

They got a word of knowledge, they got a word of wisdom, they know what's going on there.

That is this whole idea of eye is not seen nor ear heard.

Can't be natural, it's supernatural.

They can't really even explain it, but they just know in their spirit about what the issue is.

Then he says, Nor have entered the heart of man.

I would call that conceptual knowledge.

So this is reasoning, this is intellect, this is study, this is being an ardent student.

This is reading, you know, sometimes you can read a passage and on a superficial sense it speaks to you, but then you should do a word study.

You should learn how to use a commentary and read other stuff, and you go, oh man, I was totally off on what this verse is talking about.

That's called conceptual knowledge.

That's building on concepts.

So there's perception, but this and there's conceptual.

And then he says, the things which God has prepared for those who love him.

That's spiritual.

You need all these: perceptive ability, conceptual ability, and spiritual ability.

That's the mind of Christ.

Isn't that exciting?

You have that.

You have that.

This is what C.S.

Lewis in his classic book, Mere Christianity, writes.

God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers.

They're all slackers.

If you're thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you, you're embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all.

But fortunately, it works the other way around too.

Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened.

One of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education in and of itself.

That is why an uneducated believer like Bunyan was able to write a book, The Pilgrim's Progress, that has astonished the whole world.

Little cobbler.

John Bunyan.

Martin Luther, peasant's son, changed the world.

God uses most often the uneducated.

To change the world because they know they're stupid.

Some of you struggle because you think you're so smart.

Now, by the way, nobody else does, but you do.

And when you finally humble yourself and realize that nobody really gives a rip about how many degrees you have or if you have a D or an M after your name, you might actually start to become significant in the kingdom of God.

Because the kingdom of God is based up and is based in humble people who submit their minds to Christ.

And they begin to say, you know, I'm not so smart after all.

But he is.

And I'm going to follow after him.

And Lord, I know a lot about astrophysics, I know a lot about mathematics, but you know what, Lord?

I want to know you, the creator of astrophysics, the creator of the cosmos.

Because when that starts to happen, oh, oh, your heart and your mind get set on fire.

And that's revival.

And that's what Jesus is saying when he says, the hour is coming, and now is when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.

For the Father is seeking such to worship him.

God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and truth.

So how do we renew our minds?

Starts here.

And I'll talk about this with the men on Tuesday morning.

I'm going to talk about some things that are significant for you guys on Tuesday morning.

But in brief, to all of us here, it starts here.

It starts with reading God's Word, being in God's Word.

God's word has this supernatural ability to discern your heart and mind.

So look at Hebrews 4.

So turn to the right, and I'll close with this.

Hebrews 4.12.

This would be a great verse to memorize.

Great verse to memorize.

The word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even into the division of soul and spirit, joints and marrow.

It's a discerner of the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

So he's comparing it to a two-edged sword that would pierce into someone's torso in a sword fight.

That the word is like that, it's two-edged, and it comes in and it actually pierces soul and spirit.

It actually pierces heart and mind.

And it starts to change your thinking.

And so that's how we get renewed, folks.

That's how we get renewed.

You've been listening to The Road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

We hope you have been blessed by today's message.

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