The Wholeheart Disciple V: Loving God With All Your Mind Part 1 - The Wholeheart Disciple: Starting Points

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

How do we left the ob with our mind?

We have this phrase, I fell in life.

It's almost like we fell down the steps.

I fell in life.

Nobody falls in life.

Not real life.

We fall into fat infatuation.

We fall into emotionalism.

We fall into feelings.

But the feelings of the heart.

That life come from the transformation of our thinking about whatever that thing is.

So we grow in love.

We don't fall in love.

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.

This morning, really different kind of message than you're used to hearing from me.

I want to talk about loving God with your mind.

We've talked about loving God with our whole heart.

We've talked about loving God with our whole soul, our identity.

But I want to talk about loving God with our whole mind.

And in the process of getting ready for this, there's just too much information to do in one message.

So this is going to be a part one and a part two.

You're going to get part one today.

Because no time in our history has the assault been so acute from the elite intellectuals of our country on our universities and graduate schools as it is today.

Against not only Christianity, but also against the very vision and values that formed our nation.

Never has there been such an assault on young hearts and minds when they go to school as there is today directly against Christianity, pitying science, physics, neurosciences as opposed to Christianity.

But simultaneously, never has there been such a movement of the Holy Spirit in the millennial generation.

Those that I would consider as a debate about what that is, but somewhere between about 16 years old, 15 years old, up to about 39 years old, the millennial generation, never have I in my lifetime seen a younger generation more dialed in intellectually and emotionally than what we have today.

When I was coming up and got saved at the University of Georgia in the 70s, there were a few leading speakers like Josh McDowell and Francis Schaefer and others that were speaking on college campuses.

But today there's just dozens.

There's dozens of millennial speakers.

There's dozens of men and women that are that are out there confronting the culture in a winsome, joyful, defendable but not defensive way.

And I'll make a distinction as I go along.

What I'm going to say today, and this is my thesis, this is my thesis today, is that you can't love God with all of your heart until you love God with all of your mind.

It's my thesis that the heart follows the mind.

Not the other way around.

And so until you know about something, you can't know something.

You have to know about something before your heart dives into knowing that something on anything in life.

And so what I want to talk about today is this issue of engaging our minds with loving God.

How do we love God with our minds?

So let's start where we've been starting now for weeks at Mark chapter 12.

Mark 12 · chapter mention

So as you turn to Mark chapter 12, where Jesus gives us the greatest command.

Mark 12 · chapter mention

And we've talked about this whole issue of loving God with our heart and our soul.

Now, men and women, we started Outlier University four weeks ago with the belief that the local church is the best place for training hearts and minds to be able to engage the culture.

It is our responsibility at the local church level to engage our culture with the issues that are confronting our culture today.

Not issues that were being debated 75 years ago, not issues that were being debated 25 years ago, but what are the issues facing the church today, not just on the university level, but also within our culture, also within our jobs, also within our families right now.

And so outlier university is about building men and women who want to go against the grain, who do not want to follow the crowd, that want to stand out as outliers emotionally, intellectually, mentally, and in our identity.

And so two of our five classes deal with apologetics.

And I'm going to explain in a moment what we mean and how we define apologetics.

But in Mark chapter 12, Jesus said in verse 30, you shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart.

Mark 12 · chapter mention

So at Outlier University, we offer courses in this particular sermon series that I'm doing is loving God emotionally.

That Jesus has emotions, that the Holy Spirit is our friend, that we can have an emotional connection with Jesus Christ.

Now you don't depend on that, and we'll talk about emotionalism in a moment.

But if you do not ever connect with the Lord emotionally, it will be hard to have an intimate, growing, personal, vital, dynamic relationship with Jesus Christ.

We talked about that.

Then Jesus says, Love me with all of your soul.

And so we talked about identity.

This idea of how do you define success?

How do you define what it means to be who you are and what you believe to be the most important values of your life?

That's your identity.

And we talked about that last week, how the world bombards us with the importance of achievements and accomplishments and how you look and your status and how much money you make.

And Jesus challenges us to know that you're beloved, that you're, with all of your shame issues, can be set free to a success that's based on being loved by God and you loving Him.

And that relationship we have with Him.

Well, today I want to tackle, so get ready, this idea of loving with your mind, loving God with your mind.

And there's going to be a lot of definitions, so I'm not going to walk around as much as I normally do.

So it'll be easier for all the guys back there in the camera.

Because I want to talk about definitions.

I'm going to give definitions, and I also want to talk about what some of the leading intellectuals are saying today, both in the Ivy League of intellectual ivory tower world of the university, but also what some of the leading theologs also have to say.

So here's what I want to say.

I believe that God has called us to an intellectually deep, historically faithful, robust faith.

Let me say that again.

I believe God's called us when we talk about loving God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength, that Jesus is advocating to us an intellectually deep, historically faithful, robust faith that engages our minds.

That you've been given a mind that can, okay, here's the heresy, think.

T H I N K.

I'll guarantee you it is easier for me to get a group of men together to split wood with an axe that's not very sharp than it is to get a group of men to think.

We don't like to think.

We like to be told what to think.

And yet here's the irony.

The irony is that you control people through their thinking.

Satan knows this.

That he can control you by the way you think, and largely the way you think is related to the way you were told to think.

So I may be challenging us a little bit this morning about how we think.

Because here's what I keep discovering the more I do research and the more I hang out with younger folks is that this generation coming up doesn't just want to know who to believe in or what to believe, but they want to know why they believe.

And so, church, that's what this is about.

This is about why we believe and understanding that we can have an intellectually deep, 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 Bible.

So let's look first.

Seems a little bit odd to start here, but I want to start with Romans chapter 1.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

So if you have your Bibles, turn to Romans chapter 1.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

And I've chosen Romans chapter 1 because there's this one passage at the beginning of what we consider to be the theologically, probably the theologically most deep book letter of the New Testament, Romans, in which he makes some very surprising statements.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

Romans 1, 18 through 28 has some surprising statements.

I'm going to try to accentuate those.

But I believe this is a good starting point for our discussion here this morning.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who, and this is what I've underlined, you might want to highlight this, who suppress the truth.

Who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

Because what may be known, underline that, known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them.

Verse 20, for since the creation of the world is invisible, attributes are clearly seeing, and here we go, being understood by the things that are made, even as eternal power in Godhead, so that they are without excuse.

Because they knew God.

Underline that, circle that.

Circle this, their thoughts.

Futile thoughts.

And their foolish hearts were darkened.

See how the heart follows the mind?

Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man and birds and four footed animals and creeping things, speaking of idolatry here.

Therefore, God also gave them up to uncleanness in the lust of their hearts to dishonor their bodies among themselves.

Verse 25.

Who exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed forever, amen.

For this reason God gave them up to vile passions, for even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature.

Likewise also the men leaving the natural use of the woman burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error, which was due.

Verse 28.

And even as they did not like to retain God in their circle knowledge, God gave them over, and this is where it's building up to the main point of what Paul is trying to communicate to the Romans.

God gave them over to a debased mind to do those things which are not fitting.

Interesting passage.

In the book, Classical Apologetics, published 30 years ago, there was a mistake made by the publisher.

The spell check kept catching and then printing poetic effects of sin.

Poetic effects of sin.

I don't know that there's any poetic effects of sin.

I guess there's no rhyme or reason for that.

Spellcheck.

The term that the spellcheck kept tripping over was actually a theological term.

The author wrote of the noetic effects of sin.

The noetic effects.

Anybody heard of that phrase?

Noetic effects of sin.

Okay, a few of you.

The noetic effects of sin is a theological term for, quote, the effect and impact of sin upon your mind.

The faculty of thinking or reasoning that has been negatively impacted by sin.

Men and women, there's something seriously wrong with our minds before we get saved.

You can't think right.

Have you ever watched a debate?

Let me just say this.

Whatever you think about it, did you ever watch a presidential debate?

Okay, that's a side.

I just thought I'd throw that in.

But have you ever watched a debate between an atheist and a Christian?

It is amazing to watch, and I've seen a few of these, that here before us is a really, really smart guy.

Maybe a PhD in philosophy or a PhD in mathematics.

But the reasoning ability is off.

It's faulty.

Something's wrong.

That's a noetic effect of sin.

And we see things happening both politically or something happening where there is an issue at hand, uh, it might be related to abortion or something like that, and you begin to reason with someone, and they cannot see it.

They can't understand what you're saying.

It's the noetic effect of sin.

And I believe 90% of atheists know there's a God.

And their issue is actually not intellectual, it's moral.

The problem is not whether God exists, but rather it is with the God who does exist.

Let me say that again.

The problem is not whether God exists, but rather it is with the God who does exist.

The New Testament says that we have a natural hostility to God.

We do everything possible to regress and subvert everything we know about God in our natural state.

And the Bible says we have no excuse.

God is clearly perceived through creation.

God is purely and clearly perceived through those things that God has given us.

But claiming to be wise, we become fools.

And then God gives us over, verse 28, to a debased mind, the noetic effect of sin.

So listen, naturally, we cannot love God with our minds.

So let's just start there.

Naturally, you cannot love God with your mind.

You have an allergy to God in your natural state.

It's interesting in philosophy how many smart people hate God.

From John, Paul, Satura, Rawls, Chalmers, Marx, this noetic effect of sin has not affected these philosophers from the perspective of being smart.

They still could have a PhD in mathematics.

They could still have a PhD in philosophy or even theology.

Karl Marx studied to be a pastor at one point and studied theology.

But there is a moral issue of the heart.

There is a moral issue of the mind.

It's not an issue of the intellect of one's IQ.

Let me just say this as a sidelight that when I came to know Christ, before I came to know Christ, I was not very good at math.

And after I got saved, I was not very good at math.

Okay, so we're not talking about the intellectual state, we're talking about the moral state of one's mind.

It was St.

Augustine who said there is a symbiotic relationship between faith and reason.

You can't have faith without reason.

Faith without reason is not faith but credulity.

And to define credulity, credulity would be defined as little green men live on the moon.

Faith and reason are symbiotic.

It was Augustine who summarized this fact in his famous dictum I believe in order to understand, and I understand the better to believe.

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

Faith and reason go together.

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

You can't love God with your mind if you're still in an unregenerate state.

If you haven't given your heart and mind to Christ, you can't love him.

Now you can know about him.

Look at Romans 1, verse 19 again, because it's an interesting passage where Paul says, what may be known of God, and we could also translate what could be known about God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them.

Romans 1:19

So to know, listen, church, to know in the New Testament has two meanings.

One is to cognitively know something, to know about something, and the other refers to know as intimacy and understanding at the heart level.

So someone could ask me, well, you live in Colorado, do you know John Elway?

And I would say, Well, I know about John Elway.

But I don't have a personal relationship with John Elway.

That's using the term as he's meaning it here.

You can know about God, but you might not know God.

I think our pews and churches are full of people that know a lot about God, but they don't know Jesus.

And so.

The Bible says Adam knew Eve and she became pregnant.

Now, I don't believe that meant that God the Father introduced Adam to Eve, and then in the introduction she suddenly became present.

But no, in the Bible has this idea of intimacy.

It has this idea of connectivity, heart, soul, and mind with Jesus Christ.

That's not what he's speaking of here.

He says they know a lot about God, but they have a debased mind.

So when I met Liz in China, and we were on this bus together, I began to learn about Liz.

As I got to know her, I knew her like, a little bit about her likes and her dislikes.

I knew where she was from, I knew where she went to school and how much she longed to have gone to the University of Georgia, but wasn't able to.

She could only go to UCLA.

But as I got to know, listen, as I got to know about her, I started to fall in love with her.

So, church, don't miss this.

You have to know about something to truly know something.

Some of you young people that haven't gotten married yet, and you've dated, and you remember the initial maybe relationships you've been in where initially you're kind of like, oh, I'm in love.

And uh, and then you know, two or three months later, I'm I hate that person.

That was infatuation, that's not love.

And and so love grows.

Love builds, but it builds on knowledge and experience.

Both.

So loving God with our mind is knowing about God, but it's not staying there, it's going deeper through worship, through meditation, through through prayer, and especially and most importantly, being in the word.

You can't know about God without being in the word, and you can't start to have an intimate knowledge of God in a dynamic way without being in the word.

This is our knowledge.

This is the love letter of God, but it's also the historical documents of who God is.

So oftentimes when we get in discussions related to character or related to even moral issues, when I'm talking to someone who doesn't know the word, it's extremely difficult.

We're just, we're not going to be able to connect.

Because they're getting their cues from the culture, and I'm trying to get my cues historically, theologically, and biblically from what God's given me to work with.

And we're not hitting on the same page because the culture is always in antipathy to the scriptures, always has been, and always will be.

So let me start there.

The natural man cannot seek God, the natural mind cannot think right thoughts about God.

So here's what I want to start with.

And it sounds like really remedial, but I'm gonna start with this anyway.

The starting point for loving God with all of your mind is you've got to get saved.

You've got to come into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

And I've been pastor and missionary long enough to know that there are many of you here that are not saved.

You're even a little upset that I'm even tackling the subject right now.

Because your mind is still unregenerate, it's not renewed.

It's the weirdest thing.

God's ways are so strange.

I can tell you, like it was yesterday, that one day I couldn't stand this book.

And I had a red one.

I didn't I didn't like the color either because it just was so, ah, it was so bright.

But I had this red Bible that had been given to me at confirmation when I was confirmed in the Lutheran church by my grandmother.

Still have it.

Only Bible I had at that time.

And I just, I think I opened it the day it was given to me and never opened it again.

I think they gave Joshua 1 9, I think was the my confirmation pass.

Be strong and courageous.

I'm like, oh, that's kind of cool.

It's got a real masculine sound to be strong and courageous.

That's probably the last time I'd opened it.

It was boring.

I was sat in Sunday school classes hour after hour, day after day, week after week, year after year, just like bored, out of my mind.

In Sunday school class in the Lutheran church.

Good confirm, three years of confirmation class.

My dad teaching at least two of the three years, and I was bored out of my mind with the content.

And then I came to know Christ.

And then I gave my heart to Christ that freshman year, and it came alive, folks.

I couldn't get enough of this book.

And like two years later, I said to Dad, Dad, why didn't you teach me any of this stuff, man?

When I was going through confirmation class.

And he goes, I did.

No, you didn't.

Yes, I did.

And I and he came out with a box of my notes that they had pulled out of some drawers in my room, and they cleaned out my room, and they were making their last move.

And I looked at it, and he had great stuff.

I mean, even for a Lutheran.

He had great stuff.

I couldn't think.

I was mentally, I was spiritually, mentally retarded.

And I couldn't put A plus B equals C, I couldn't put it together until the Holy Spirit came and gave me new life.

So if you're bored with the book, if this kind of stuff that I'm talking about makes no sense to you, it could be you're still in a debased mind, and it's time to give your mind to Jesus.

Give your mind to Jesus and your heart will follow.

Give your mind to Jesus.

That's the starting point.

Loving God with all of our mind means we give our mind to Jesus and we truly get born again.

It was Jonathan Edwards who said this the seeking after God is not the business of the sinner, but it's the main business of the Christian.

Of all the knowledge that we can ever obtain, the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves is the most important.

This growing love for God comes through a growing mind where we understand who God is with your thinking.

You men and women have been given a new mind.

You have been given the mind of Christ if you're born again.

If you're not born again, you don't have the mind of Christ yet.

This book doesn't mean anything to you.

And I'm going to give you a chance today to receive Christ and start to see the flame of the power of the Holy Spirit start to give you the mind of Christ.

So how do we love God with our mind?

Well, we have this phrase, I fell in love.

It's almost like we fell down the steps.

I fell in love.

Nobody falls in love, not real love.

We fall into infatuation, we fall into emotionalism, we fall into feelings, but the feelings of the heart that last come from the transformation of our thinking about whatever that thing is.

So we grow in love.

We don't fall in love.

We may fall into an emotional experience in the early stages of relationship, which is awesome.

I think that's great.

Same with Jesus.

We first come to know Christ, there's an emotional connection that is beautiful and it's awesome.

But then God calls us to grow in love, and we grow in love through our mind.

The heart follows the mind.

The more I focus on who God is and what he does, the more I understand through reading the scriptures, the more my heart and soul is revived.

When you have your mind and heart engaged in love with Jesus, that's true revival.

So we talk about praying for awakening in our country.

We talk about praying for revival.

This is true revival.

True revival is an inflamed heart and an inflamed mind for Jesus.

That's what revival is.

And so reading and studying, and I've put a group of books out in the um outside in the in the uh lobby for you to look at.

Those are some of the books.

I just grabbed a few kind of in my apologetic section of my library and the most modern ones that I could get, and I'll speak of those in a moment.

Why is this important?

Here's why it's important, church.

Because we have an evangelical church in the arena of worship that seems often to fall into two categories.

Both, they're not wrong, but left to themselves, we miss an element of who Christ is.

The first is emotionalism, it's this over abundance of emotional connection without using our mind.

And I would say in worship songs, those would be worship songs, contemporary worship songs primarily, that are geared for you to have just an emotional experience.

And that is missing the inflammation, as it were, of the mind.

The other is intellectualism.

So there's emotionalism, but there's intellectualism.

And some of you in this room and in our churches, you have a highly academic intellectual mind, which is awesome.

But you can't connect emotionally with the Lord.

And you don't even know what I'm talking about today when I talk about an emotional connection of loving God with your heart.

I mean, you understand intellectually.

You understand intellectually.

But you don't have a heart connection with Jesus.

Pretty rare that you have that.

And you struggle there.

Here's what I advocate.

I advocate we need hearts and minds on fire in worship.

This is why, this is why lyrics really matter.

And when Carly and I talk, and when other worship leaders come and say, pick some robust lyrics to these songs.

I don't mind every once in a while a song that just, you know, where you, like I love you, Lord.

I mean, there's a there's an emotional connection there.

I love you.

I love that.

I mean, I love, I love, I love you, Lord.

Um, I love that song.

But if that's all we're gonna sing for 30 minutes is I love you, Lord, I love you, Lord, I love you, Lord, our minds are not going to get engaged.

And God wants an engagement mentally and spiritually and emotionally.

That's how you grow into maturity in Christ is lyrics that are deep and they're theological and they're biblical and they're historical and they're powerful, but I like a good melody too, don't you?

We do not have a pipe organ here.

We will not have a pipe organ ever on my watch.

I think pipe organs are cool.

I really do.

First of all, we can't afford it.

But but second of all, the pipe organ had its day.

It had its place.

And I just say if you like pipe organs, then you're definitely in the wrong church.

I mean, if you like it in worship.

I'm not saying you lie, because I like pipe organs in and of themselves.

I think, seriously, all I do nowadays is listen to classical music when I'm going around.

Classical music so calms my spirit.

Plus, I've got a son who's a classical piano major at DU, so I've been inundated with it for like a hundred years.

Classical music.

I think it'd be beautiful if we could have more classical music, not through the pipe organ though, but classical music within our worship.

Why not?

Why don't we wed the two?

Why don't we have electric guitars, drums, as well as a classical sound all in the same set?

Now, I'm not a musician, and probably the musicians out there go, Steve is really off his rocker, he's got a debased mind.

But I'm telling you, without a vision, the people perish.

So why not?

Why not take the best of classical music?

Why not take the best of rock and roll?

Why not take the best of contemporary worship and turn it toward Jesus?

We're going to talk about that in October when Carly and I lead that meeting.

If you have any desire in worship, come to that meeting.

We'll be talking about these kind of things.

We call it outlier worship.

Not too long ago, a professor in an Ivy League school made this statement.

It was published around the country.

Quote, let me summarize my views loudly and clearly.

There are no gods, there are no purposes, there are no goal-directed forces of any kind.

There is no life after death.

When I die, I'm absolutely certain I will be dead.

That will be the end of me.

There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no will for human beings either.

What an odd statement.

If nothing matters, then why make a matter about it?

If nothing's important, then why make an important statement about it that's published in newspapers?

Interesting.

But that statement explains the intellectual elite in our universities in North America.

So, I don't know if this was in response, but soon after that, a group of 16 scholars in Ivy League schools came out with their own open letter.

And I'll just quote some parts of it.

In this open letter, they said, open-mindedness, critical thinking, and debate are our best antidotes to bigotry.

That a bigot is a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices.

And that the only people who need fear, open-minded inquiry, and robust debate are the actual bigots, including those on campuses or in the broader society who seek to protect the hegemony of their opinions by claiming that to question those opinions is itself bigotry.

That's a powerful statement, church.

That's a bunch of guys that get it.

That's what the university is about.

That we go in with open-minded debate.

And I say, let's get spirit-filled, whole-hearted, whole-minded believers in the debate.

So let's begin with apologetics.

What is apologetics?

We have two classes that I would classify as apologetics in our outlier university right now.

Apologetics is not apologizing for something, by the way.

Apologetics comes from the Greek word apologia, which means to defend as in a court of law.

Let me say it again.

Apologetics comes from the Greek word apologia, which means to defend as in a court of law.

Giving reasons for believing and responding to objections against it.

Fundamentally, it means helping people to love God.

That's what it really means.

Apologetics is not winning a debate.

Apologetics is helping people clear away the debris to believing and loving God.

I would say when I was growing up through different apologetics classes that I took at different conferences that I would attend, there was there was a little bit of a pridefulness to it of winning the debate.

And what I love with what's happening with guys like Sean McDowell and others today, Josh McDowell's son, is there's less emphasis on winning the debate and more on winning the heart.

I watched too many debates where I actually agree with the guy on the left, but I don't like his attitude.

And then I disagree with the guy on the right, but he just seems humble.

We need humble, winsome witnesses for Jesus.

Here's what I found.

The more you know, the less defensive you are.

Let me say this again.

The more you know, the less defensive you are.

That if you know your subject well, if someone comes up here and challenges you, you know, you don't know anything about reformed theology or Armenianism.

And I go, Oh, I don't.

I'm not gonna get defensive about that because I know this guy's blowing smoke.

And I can't wait to have a discussion, but I don't have to get upset about it.

You know, you can be defensive without having a defensive attitude.

You can come with love in your heart.

So apologetics is learning how to defend your faith.

It's helping people, it's guiding people to pull away the obstacles to them having a love relationship with Christ.

It's 1 Peter 3.15, which says, always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you.

Loving God with all of our mind means to love Him with our reasoning powers, as Augustine has said.

It is engaging our mind and knowing God and being able to share with others this faith that we have received.

So, examples are some books that you'll see on the coffee table in the lobby, A New Kind of Apologist, edited by Sean McDowell, my good friend Jeff Myers, up here at Summit Ministries, just came out with a book, Secret Battle of Ideas About God.

That's out there.

I had a pre-release copy.

You can look at that, it's on the table.

Timothy Keller's books are national bestsellers, The Reason for God and Making Sense of God.

And this one little book that I would say all of you should get, this one little book called More Than a Carpenter.

Been around for, I don't know.

I don't even want to tell you how long it's been around because it'll date me so much.

But that book, we've probably my wife and I have given away hundreds of copies.

Really small book.

It's called More Than a Carpenter.

So, why must we love God with all of our mind?

Okay, I've gone already way past my time.

So, so I'm gonna just I'm gonna say one more, I'm gonna say one more reason, and then the next time we come together, I'll give the others.

But here's the first reason.

Here's why.

Listen closely.

This is why you must love God with all of your mind.

Here it is.

We are in a spiritual war for the hearts and minds of other people.

We are in a spiritual war, a spiritual battle for the hearts and minds of people.

So turn in your Bibles to 2 Corinthians 10.

And we have before us in 2 Corinthians 10 the explanation of why it's so important that we love God with all of our mind as an antidote to what is happening in our world today.

It's happening with your Aunt Susie.

It's happening to Brother Joe, who do not want to have a discussion about anything spiritual because there's a stronghold in their mind.

There's actually a stronghold in their mind.

So 2 Corinthians 10, starting at verse 3, Paul writes to the Corinthians this for though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh.

So we're not going around shooting people.

We're not going around uh uh carrying on domestic terrorism, we're not smashing windows and trying to burn down Berkeley.

We don't wage war that way.

Rather, verse 4, the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, and then he's gonna explain a little bit about what a stronghold is, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought, that's loving God with your mind, every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.

Don't forget what I said early on.

The hardest thing to get people to do is think.

We don't want to think.

That's why the boob tube, the TV, is so popular.

Because you are being entertained.

Entertainment.

It comes from the word muse.

It means to not think.

One thing we can say about the whole issue about the national anthem and the NFL is it's actually causing some people who watch football to think.

And hopefully, in some cases, to turn off the boob, too.

So there's a spiritual battle, and a stronghold is an idea or theory that undermines the knowledge of God.

That's what he means here.

It's an idea or a theory that undermines the knowledge of God.

There are strongholds and ideas in Western culture that work against the knowledge of God.

Apologetics, on the other hand, helps provide an argument against that idea.

That's why I believe it's primarily a local church responsibility.

It's not seminaries, it's not Bible colleges.

As much as those are important, I'm I'm for all those.

I did all that.

But the reason we have seminaries, in many cases, is because the church isn't doing its job.

We do more entertaining than we do equipping.

So you can come and just check your brain at the door.

You can put it right there on the little site, but just take your brain off and just put it down on a chair as you walk in, and then let me tell you everything you're supposed to think.

That's entertainment, folks.

I want you to think.

I want you to use your mind.

You've been given a God-given mind to love God with your mind.

Some of you are so smart.

There's a genius born every day.

Encountered a P.T.

Barnum who said there's a sucker born every day.

And by the way, there is a sucker born every day, too.

We need smart people who love God.

We need foolish people who become wise because they know they're foolish and they humble themselves, and God makes them wise.

God uses dumb people to change the world.

That's us.

Start off, I'm dumb.

But in Christ, I have the mind of Jesus.

When that starts to happen, when there's humility in the heart and intellect in the mind, we can change the world.

So there's strongholds, and these strongholds, they come from culture, and we can't think because a dominant culture is there to control our thinking, and the way they control our thinking is through worldview.

Worldview.

We are the most divided our nation has ever been since the Civil War.

And it's not an issue of politics, and it's not an issue of race, and it's certainly not an issue of sports, and it's not an issue of gender, it's an issue of worldview.

Now let me define worldview.

This is really important you get this today.

Worldview.

In the simplest terms, a worldview may be defined as how one sees life and the world at large.

In this manner, it can be compared to a pair of glasses.

How a person makes sense of the world depends upon that person's vision, so to speak.

The interpretive lens helps people make sense of life and comprehend the world around them.

Sometimes, the listen, sometimes the worldview lens brings clarity, and other times it actually distorts reality.

Worldview, how you view life.

So I want to give you, we're going to close with this, the three major worldviews today.

Now there's probably about eight, and uh in my, in Jeff Myers' book, he gives you five, but I'm gonna give you three to simplify it.

I've kind of an amalgamation of a couple of these real quick.

Number one, and this is the dominant view in Western culture and on the university level, and that is scientific naturalism.

Number one worldview is scientific naturalism.

Now, you guys are gonna kill me because I'm gonna give you two more words.

If you don't know what scientific naturalism is, I'm gonna give you two more words that I'm sure you don't know.

Okay, so here they are: epistemology, epistemology, and ontology.

Okay, there you go.

I'm not trying to be smart, I'm just trying to help you understand what scientific naturalism and why it fails.

Here's what epistemology is epistemology is one's view of knowledge.

The epistemology of this view is the idea that you can only gain knowledge through testing it with your five senses, through using the scientific method, as in the laboratory, where you can through a laboratory test, like we'll be an example, like uh ivory soap floats.

Ivory soap floats.

Well, you can test that.

Throw it in a bucket of water, it floats, okay.

Yeah, ivory soap floats.

That's the scientific methodology by which scientific naturalism is built.

The problem with scientific naturalism is that it's self-refuting.

That means it refutes itself in that you can't prove through the five senses that scientific naturalism is true.

So you can't prove the statement that scientific naturalism is true using the scientific method.

Here's why.

Because scientific naturalism is great for the hard sciences, it's great for physics, it's great for chemistry, it's great for biology.

But has anybody figured out, anybody's been married for very long, that life is a little more important than just what you feel and understand in your five senses?

It's called love, virtue, forgiveness, kindness, those cannot be physically approved.

This is well summarized in a speech written but never given at the Scopes Monkey trial.

Quote, science is a magnificent material force, but it's not a teacher of morals.

It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of machinery.

Science does not and cannot teach.

Listen, brotherly love.

A popular book by, in his own words, an ironclad atheist and neurosurgeon, Paul Kalinithi, who begins his book arguing that the problem with Christianity is its lack of empirical evidence, but in his personal study and writing his book, he found that much of what really matters in life is not based on the scientific method.

He writes, if everything has to have a scientific explanation and proof, then this is to banish not only God from the world, but also love, hate, meaning, which is not the world we live in.

Kalinithi concludes, quote, scientific knowledge is inapplicable to the central aspects of human life, including hope, love, beauty, honor, suffering, and virtue.

Through his study, he not only came to believe in God, but in the central values of Christianity.

He concluded with this, and I quote, the central values of Christianity, sacrifice, redemption, and forgiveness, I just found too compelling.

His mind changed his heart.

So that's the first worldview.

Second worldview, postmodern relativism, postmodern relativism.

All truth is relative to your culture.

There's no reality, there's no such thing as masculinity or femininity, there's no such thing as gender.

If you feel, even though you got the body parts of a man, if you feel like you're a woman, then you're a woman.

That makes a lot of sense.

I'll tell you what, after my last elk hunting trip, I came back thinking I was an elk.

But praise God, my wife found out that that was not true.

So postmodern relativism basically defines reality as whatever the culture, the popular culture, how they define it.

Again, it's self-refuting.

Because absolutes, listen guys, absolutes are self-evident.

I'll give you two.

Two absolutes that every person in this room would agree with, and probably anybody in the university.

The first is torturing little babies is wrong.

The second is that kindness is a virtue.

Most of the time, almost 99% of America would agree that kindness is a virtue and torturing little babies is wrong.

That's absolutes.

And then if you say that relativism based on the culture is always true, then you just concluded with an absolute.

So it's self-refuting.

And then the last is supernatural Christianity.

Supernatural biblical Christianity, and that's what we're here for.

We're here to learn and to grow.

We can love God with our mind in the culture.

So my son, as I told you earlier, has been at Denver University.

I'm a classical piano major.

So he's in the arts at DU.

Need I say much more than that.

So right after the election last year, as a freshman, he entered a class and there was a there was a conflict that occurred.

There was a there was a discussion that occurred, and we've we filmed him.

I want you to see how he engaged the culture, and um it was really it's gonna be harder than what you're gonna perceive from what he says because we had to keep this short.

But this is what I mean about apologetics.

This is what we mean by engaging the culture with supernatural biblical Christianity.

So here's Samuel, my son.

My name is Samuel Holt.

I'm a sophomore at the University of Denver.

It was two days after the election, and it was a Thursday.

I was heading into my class, it was my freshman seminar class.

And obviously, because of the election, a lot of people were very emotionally charged and very frustrated.

When we got into the class, the teacher said instead of starting kind of with the normal materials, he said he wanted to talk about what happened to the election and ask if anybody had anything they wanted to share.

And so one of the students started talking about how frustrated she was with the election, and it kind of became a dialogue basically between the student and the teachers back and forth.

Everybody else was pretty quiet.

And then one thing led to another.

I'm not even sure how it got to this point, but they started talking about the Bible.

She referenced a verse in Leviticus, and she said it was a verse in Leviticus that talks about how you shouldn't be selfish, and she talked about how, in that same book of the Bible, it talks about how men cannot sleep with men, and how because we don't follow one, but we follow the other, that it's not valid.

The teacher kind of chimed in and was like, Well, yeah, I totally agree with that.

You can't take the Bible literally because the Bible endorses slavery in the New Testament.

I honestly didn't even know where these verses were, and so I was very, I was very caught off guard by the whole situation.

I didn't say anything, and I wasn't sure if that was wrong.

I just didn't know what to say, I didn't know how to respond.

And I really felt like the Holy Spirit told me that I needed to say something in the next class.

So I did some research on those verses, figured out where they were in the Bible, and then I kind of did research on the context of those verses.

And so I did a lot of research on the Old Testament and when it talks about the difference between civil, ceremonial, and moral law and how it pertains to the Old Testament.

I did research on slavery at the time of the Bible and how what the context was of that verse in like the New Testament that talks about slaves should obey their master.

And then came to my next class, which was I think four days after that initial situation, and I raised my hand before class started and I asked the teacher if I could respond to something that bothered me in the class of this.

And he said yes.

And so I started talking about the difference between civil, ceremonial, and moral law, and I talked about how the civil and ceremonial law was made void by Jesus dying on the cross, and how moral law still pertains to today, it still pertains during the times of the Old Testament, during the times of the New Testament.

And that's why I kind of explained the difference between this shellfish verse and the mention of sleep with the men verse.

It was really cool because after I shared what I had researched and what I had said, some students raised their hand and said, I totally agree with what he just said.

And I felt like in the last class, the material and what was talked about in the last class went way too far.

And it was really cool because I felt like there was some camaraderie.

I was able to support them in kind of sharing and kind of rebuttaling what was said in the last class, but I was able to also be encouraged by them agreeing with me and saying, Yeah, we agree with what he says.

So it was really cool to have that happen.

And the teacher was actually pretty cool about it.

He said, Thank you for sharing.

Like, does anybody want to share anything else?

It was very scary.

I definitely was scared at first, and I prayed a lot before him.

It was just like, God, give me the courage to do it.

And he definitely did.

I was so proud of I was so proud of Samuel.

And he took it on, man.

And uh, and it was neat because there were like five or six people in the class who came up afterwards and uh asked him questions, and and he didn't know answers to those questions either, but but he's growing, and that's how you learn in the in the arena of ideas.

So, church, love God with your mind.

God's giving you a bright mind, some of you brighter than others.

Sometimes that can be your biggest problem is because you got more pride than you do humility.

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

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