Mindful Discipleship: The Role of Thinking in Christian Faith
The following sermon was delivered on 18th August 2024 as part of our ongoing Being Human Series. In it, Darren Rowse delves into the importance of engaging our minds in our faith and bringing our minds to the greatest commandment of Jesus - to Love God with all of our hearts, souls, minds and strength.
If you prefer to listen or read, you can find audio and a summary article of the sermon below.
This week’s focus in our Being Human series is on the mind. For those who typically navigate life through feelings, diving into the topic of thinking might feel like a stretch, but it’s an essential part of spiritual growth. The mind is a gift from God, and Scripture has a lot to say about how believers are called to use it in their journey of faith.
The Mind of a Disciple
The word “disciple” means “learner.” Right there, in the very definition of what it means to follow Jesus, is an assumption that believers will engage their minds. The Greek word used for “disciple” comes from a root that means “mental effort needed to think something through.” This tells us that following Jesus isn’t just about what one feels or believes; it’s about bringing the mind into the process, actively learning and growing in understanding.
Sometimes, people might think of their faith as more about what they feel, but being a disciple is about putting in the mental effort to grow in understanding of God and His ways. It’s a reminder that loving God isn’t just a heart thing—it’s a mind thing too.
Loving God with Our Minds
When Jesus was asked about the greatest commandment, He said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). Often, people talk about loving God with their hearts and souls, but what does it mean to love God with the mind?
John Piper, a respected theologian, points out that loving God with the mind means more than just intellectual belief—it’s about fueling love for God by deepening knowledge of Him. The more believers understand God, the more they can treasure, cherish, and delight in Him. In other words, the mind doesn’t do the loving, but it provides the kindling that fuels the fire of the heart.
This idea challenges Christians to take the pursuit of understanding God seriously. It’s not just about feeling close to God; it’s about knowing Him deeply, and that requires engaging the mind.
The Call to Think Deeply
The Bible is full of encouragement to engage the mind. In 2 Timothy 2:7, Paul writes, “Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything.” Here, there is a beautiful partnership between human effort and God’s gift. Believers are called to think deeply, to grapple with Scripture, and to bring their minds fully into the task of understanding. And as they do, God promises to bring them understanding.
This dual approach—thinking deeply while relying on God’s illumination—reminds Christians that faith isn’t just about passive belief. It’s an active engagement of the mind with the truths of God’s Word. For those who naturally navigate faith through feelings, engaging the mind can lead to significant spiritual growth.
Warnings About Our Minds
While the mind is a powerful tool for growing in faith, Scripture also gives warnings about the potential dangers of thinking. The Bible speaks about minds that can become hardened, darkened, and even corrupted. This highlights the importance of being mindful about what is allowed into one’s thoughts and how the mind is used.
On one hand, there’s a danger in not thinking enough—of letting the mind remain immature and unengaged in faith. On the other hand, there’s a danger in over-relying on thinking to the point where it becomes an idol. People can become so focused on their thoughts and ideas that they forget to actually live out their faith.
Then there’s the category of distorted thinking—when thoughts go off track, whether through impurity, negativity, or simply falling into the patterns of the world. It’s a reminder to regularly evaluate who or what is governing the mind. Are thoughts aligned with God’s Spirit, or are they being influenced by the flesh?
Renewing Our Minds
The good news is that God is deeply interested in renewing minds. Romans 12:2 encourages, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” This transformation is part of what it means to follow Jesus—it’s an ongoing process where minds are made new as they align with God’s truth.
Colossians 3:2 adds, “Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.” As believers go through their daily lives, they are invited to continually reset their focus on God and His kingdom, allowing His Spirit to guide their thoughts.
Questions for Reflection
As the church moves forward in this series, here are a few questions to reflect on this week:
How often do you actively engage your mind in your relationship with God?
In what ways can you deepen your knowledge of God to fuel your love for Him?
Are there areas of your thinking that need to be brought under the Lordship of Christ?
How might you renew your mind daily by focusing on things above?
These reflections invite each person to consider how they can take these truths into the week ahead, asking God to transform their minds and deepen their understanding of Him.
transcript of this Week’s sermon
If you've been here for the last few weeks, you'll know that we're halfway through our Being Human series. Now, I have to be honest—when I first heard we were doing a series on being human, I thought, "I've got this. I've been human for 52 years." I think most of you in the room have been human for all of your life, so we all get it, don't we? But as Tim explained the series, I started to really wake up to the fact that this is going to be a really rich series, and I've enjoyed it a lot myself.
Recap of Previous Weeks
If you haven't been here, we've been looking at different aspects of our humanity. I think there are going to be eight different aspects. In week one, we talked about how we're made in God's image—we are image bearers of God. In week two, we looked at our physical bodies. In week three, Linda stepped up to the plate. I was supposed to preach that week, but my physical body wasn't doing so well, so she stepped in, and we explored the theme of being created for community. Last week, Tim talked about our emotions. I found it really interesting that Tim chose himself to talk about emotions because Tim is a thinker—anyone agree with me? Anyone who's heard a sermon from Tim knows that he is a rational, thinking kind of guy, and I am not a thinker. Yet, he has chosen for me to talk about thinking today.
Thinking vs Feeling
Has anyone done the Myers-Briggs personality test? One of the things it measures is whether you're on the thinking or the feeling end of the spectrum. I wonder if there are thinkers in the room—anyone who would see themselves as a thinker? And anyone who would see themselves more as a feeler? It's interesting; our ministry team kind of balances out. Roger says he's marginal, so Tim's right out there by himself. This is actually really typical in ministers—feelers tend to be more predominant. Males tend to be more on the thinking end of things; 60% of males see themselves as thinkers, and 60% of women see themselves as feelers. It changes a little bit depending on where you are located in the world; in some countries, it's different. But certainly, we are skewed one way in our ministry team.
Reflections on Last Week's Sermon
I found last week's sermon resonated a lot with me. It didn't really confront me too much, but I've spoken to a couple of people this week who are thinkers who found last week a real stretch. They felt like God had really spoken to them in it. Today, if you're a feeler, you might feel a bit stretched because I did in preparing it. I've actually had six weeks to prepare for this because I was supposed to give this sermon a few weeks ago, so I've had a lot of time to sit with this, and God has really done some work in me. As a feeler, as someone who navigates life through my feelings, who navigates my faith through my feelings, this has been a really stretching topic for me.
The Remarkable Human Mind
So, we have been given minds. This is a picture of your mind, and it's actually a 3D map that Google and Harvard have put together. What you're seeing there is just some of the dimensions of your mind. Did you know your mind has 100 billion neurons in it? That's the same amount of neurons in your mind as there are trees in the Amazon rainforest. Each one of those neurons is connected with other neurons thousands of times over. There are thousands and thousands of connections to each neuron—that’s as many connections in your brain as there are leaves on the trees in the Amazon rainforest. Our minds are just remarkable.
This is a picture of your mind—it’s an artist's impression of it. This is by a guy called Dr. Greg Dunn. I’m going to play a little video that he has put together, which shows you your mind in an animated form. We’ll just listen to it for a few seconds.
A Tour of the Brain
Alright, so I'm going to give you a little tour of the brain here. This is it in animation mode, and these are these neural circuitry kind of modules that we've created to show you what the brain might be doing. For example, in the parietal cortex here, as you're reaching out to grab something, where your vision and your sense of space are being integrated. Here we're coming into the somatosensory cortex to give you a sense of what it feels like to run your hand over your arm or something like this. Here we're getting into the motor cortex—this is right up at the top of your brain. This has some of the largest cells in the body—these layer five Betz cells, which are sending motor information down through your spinal cord.
Now we're getting into the frontal eye fields, where you're helping to track your vision to what is relevant in your visual field. You can see that this is the cortex of the brain—this is the outer, kind of walnut-like covering that's organised into these neural layers, which are sending information up and down. As we get closer into the frontal cortex—this is the part of the brain which separates us from other primates—this is what makes us human right here. This is the part of the brain which spins on its own; it's communicating without any sensory input really—I mean, it integrates it, but it's capable. This is what thinking looks like; this is what making decisions and planning your next move and using logic looks like. This is really the most evolutionarily recent part of our brain. One thing you might notice relative to the occipital or the rear portions of the brain (so we're right here now, by the way) is that there are a lot more interneurons. The noise of this region is much higher, and what you get when you have a noisier system is more of a potential for optimisation.
You can see it’s a beautiful video to watch. It goes for about 5 minutes, and he walks through all these different areas of the brain and shows how they’re different. Some of the later parts of it are actually quite different from the early parts. Our brains are just amazing, and one of the things that I've been struck by as I've pondered this and done a lot of reading about our brains is that I think they actually say a lot about God as well. We are image bearers of God, and our brains are amazing. Just imagine what this says about our God and His mind.
The Bible and Our Minds
So today, I want to talk about what the Bible says about our minds. It turns out the Bible actually says a lot about our minds. If you do a search for the word “mind,” you'll find quite a few references. But then, if you do searches for thinking, knowledge, understanding—these types of words—there are hundreds of references. We can't cover them all today, but I've picked out five strands of what the Bible says about our minds that I hope will be helpful to us. If you're a thinker, I hope that these affirm you in your thinking. You actually have a gift that some of us don't—it doesn't come naturally to us—and it's a gift that could actually be a gift to the rest of us as well. If you're a thinker, I want you to be affirmed in your thinking. But if you're a feeler, I want to encourage you to activate your minds in your faith.
Discipleship and the Mind
What does the Bible say about our minds as disciples of Jesus? Well, firstly, let's look at that word “disciple.” The word “disciple” actually means “learner.” Right there in the definition of what we are called as disciples of Jesus is an assumption that we are going to activate our minds. The word is mathetes (pronunciation is not my strength), but it means “a person who learns from another by instruction,” and it comes from the root word manthano, which means “the mental effort needed to think something through.” So, right there in the word that Jesus used to describe you as a follower of Him—if you're a follower of Him—is an assumption that you're going to bring some mental effort and that you're going to spend some time learning.
The Greatest Commandment and the Mind
That's the first little thing that jumped out at me. The second one is something that Tim talked about last week. He introduced us to the great command of Jesus. If you're new to Jesus, He left us a whole lot of teaching, but there's one command that He said was the greatest commandment, and that is to “love the Lord your God with all of your heart and with all of your soul and with all of your mind and with all of your strength.” Last week, we particularly looked at heart and soul, and soul is that place where our emotions come from. But Jesus goes on to say, “I want you to love God with all of your mind.”
Now, we don't typically talk about our minds when we talk about love. I have never in my life been told, “I love you with all of my mind.” No one's ever said that to me, and I've never said it to anyone else either. We talk about love coming from our heart, from our emotions. We talk about love in quite a passive way too, like it happens to us: “I fell into it—I fell in love.” But here, Jesus is saying, “I want you to be mindful with your love for God.” What does that actually mean?
Loving God with All Our Mind
As you would expect, the greatest command has been written about a lot, and a lot of people have a lot of different ideas about what it means to love God with your mind. One of the thinkers that I've dug into quite a bit over the last few weeks is a guy called John Piper. He unpacks this verse in a way I hadn't seen other people do. He says that there's a difference between the preposition or the word before “heart” and the preposition before “mind” and “soul” and “strength.” That word before “heart” actually translates as “from,” and it means “to come from the inside out.” So, “love God from your heart.” He talks about the task of loving God from your heart as being about treasuring God, cherishing God, delighting in God. He says you can't do that unless you know God.
He says that the words before “soul,” “mind,” and “strength” can be translated as “with,” which is what we have in most of our translations, or it can be “by.” He says, “Love the Lord your God from your heart and do it by or with your soul, your emotions, your thinking, and your strength,” which is everything else—the way you live out your life, the choices you make, and the way that you live. “Love God from your heart and do it with your emotions, with your thinking, and with your strength.”
This, for me, has really been helpful. The task of our minds is to know God, and when we know God, it helps us to love God. Piper puts it this way: “You can't love God without knowing Him. You can't delight in God if you don't know anything about Him. I take loving God in the great command to mean, most essentially, treasuring God, valuing Him, cherishing Him, admiring Him, desiring Him, and therefore loving Him. Loving Him with all of our mind means that our mind—our thinking—is not what does the loving, but what fuels the loving.”
He puts it this way: When we understand more of God, when we know more of God with our minds, it's like putting kindling on the fire of our hearts, which I think is a really beautiful way of putting it. The more we know God, the more we understand God—and we can never fully understand God, but He does reveal Himself to us—the more we put our minds to it, the more our love will be fuelled. It's the same with all of our relationships. You can't love someone unless you know them—that's called infatuation, loving the idea of someone but not actually loving them. The more you know someone, the more you're able to love them. So, we need to get serious about understanding God and learning about Him because that will fuel our love, and that love is what He called us to do—that's the greatest thing that we can do: grow in our love for Him.
Activating Our Minds in Faith
So, we need to activate our minds. The next thing that came out of Scripture as I was reading it this week comes from a verse in 2 Timothy, and again, John Piper kind of put me on to this one. This is a verse written by Paul, who is the great thinker of the New Testament. Read through any of Paul's letters in the New Testament, and you get that this guy leaves Tim for dead when it comes to thinking—he's on a whole other level. It's quite remarkable, really—he's writing these letters just years after Jesus, and already he has this theology that is just mind-boggling. He has put his mind to it—he's a great thinker. So here is the great thinker teaching and exhorting a young emerging leader in Timothy, and he says these words: “Think over what I say, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything.”
Here we see two sides of a coin—there's an exhortation to think: bring your mind to what I say, and he said a lot. Bring your mind to it, grapple with it, don’t just swallow it—pull it apart, ask questions about it, put your mind to the task, bring mental effort to what I say, for or and God will give you understanding in everything. It's not one or the other; it's both. This is what we're called to do, but this is what God promises to do. John Piper puts it this way: “Paul doesn't say God gives you understanding, so don't waste your time thinking over what I say. Nor does he say think hard over what I say because it all depends on you and God doesn't illuminate the mind. No, he emphatically makes God's gift of illumination the ground to our effort to understand.” In the very heart of God's nature is that He brings understanding, but He's given us a gift, and that gift can help us to have understanding as well. It's both of these things together.
A Personal Experience of Growth Through Thinking
I found this quite confronting this week because, as I look back over my life as someone who is a feeler who navigates my faith with my feelings and emotions a lot, I know that the times when I have most grown have actually been the times when I've brought my mind to the task.
When I was 20, for some reason, stupidly, I enrolled in Bible college. I don't really know why I did it—someone said it might be a good idea. I said I’d give it 6 months, so I went to Bible college, and I went to quite an academic Bible college. I enrolled in four subjects: New Testament, Old Testament, ancient Greek, and I don't even know what the other one was—it might have been church history. The first week in, I thought I had made the biggest mistake of my life—these people are making my head hurt. But by the end of that semester, I had discovered new things about God that I never would have learned before, and my faith was brought alive in ways that I am so grateful for. At the end of that six months, I said I’d continue and do my degree, thinking I’d be out in four years. It took me ten. It was really hard—I didn't impress my lecturers at all. I had to get an extension to finish the degree because it was supposed to be done in eight years, but I got there in the end, and I'm so grateful for that time. That was a time when my faith really went to new depths, and I learned what it means—what Paul’s talking about here—to think about what he says and to think about Scripture and to actually bring your mind to the task.
Now, that was 20 years ago, and there have been periods where I've brought my mind to the task since then. I've done further study at times, I’ve read books, I’ve been in small groups where people have challenged me in my thinking. But I have to say that I've gone back to my old ways of just feeling my way through my faith probably too much, and this week, as I’ve pulled apart this Scripture and again been confronted with this, I’ve realised that this is something I need to re-engage again in my mind—this is something I need to find a way forward in. So, think, but also God will bring understanding.
Warnings About Our Minds
This isn't the only place—Timothy is not the only place where we see this. We see the same thing in Proverbs 2. Proverbs 2 says this: “My son, if you receive my words and treasure up my commands with you, making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart to understanding, yes, if you call out for insight and raise your voice for understanding, if you seek it like silver and search for it as for hidden treasure, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God. For the Lord gives wisdom; from His mouth come knowledge and understanding.” We see here very clearly that we are to be active in the seeking of understanding. Understanding doesn't just arrive—there's a call here to receive, to treasure up, to incline our hearts, to seek it, to search for it, to be active in the pursuit of knowledge. But also, we see again the truth—the ground for our searching is that God brings understanding, God brings wisdom.
Now, I have to say, in all of the Scriptures about the mind, there are also a lot of warnings about the mind. We could go on for weeks in this sort of series, looking at the different warnings about our thinking and about the mind, and I didn’t really know what to do with all these warnings, so I just put them in a list. This is just some of them, and so I’ll kind of put them out there, and maybe the Spirit will lead you to one or the other. I’m not quite sure, but 2 Corinthians says our minds can become hardened or dull. Timothy talks about them becoming depraved or corrupt. Ephesians talks about our minds being full of darkness. Romans talks about dark minds and futile thinking. Corinthians talks about immature thinking. We've got ignorant minds, confused minds, anxious minds, restless minds, troubled minds, blinded minds, closed minds, cunning minds, doubting minds, warped minds, and puffed up and arrogant minds. It kind of feels like a bit of a downer at this part of the sermon, I know, but this is in Scripture, and these are some of the things that we see Scripture saying about our minds and the potential for our minds. As we've looked through this series, each of the things we've been looking at can bring us to God, lead us into light, and actually grow our relationship with God and help us to love God in new ways, but they can also take us away from God as well. It's really clear that our minds actually have the potential to lead us into dark places. I'm sure in the room today we can probably all see something of ourselves in at least one of these things. We all know that our minds at some point in our life either break or fail in some way. Sometimes we have blind spots, sometimes we get trapped in certain ways of thinking, and sometimes our minds go into patterns of thinking that really aren't godly. There are all kinds of times in our lives where our minds lead us into trouble in one way or another, and sometimes it's quite evident and we know what's happening, and sometimes it's quite subtle as well.
Three Main Warnings
As I've looked over these warnings, I think there are three main ones that speak to me, and maybe I'm just preaching to myself today. Here they are: the first warning, which we’ve already talked about, is not thinking. 2 Corinthians talks about when we don't think, when we don't bring our minds to our faith, that we become immature or we stay immature in our faith. Paul tells us in his writings to grow up, and part of the task of growing up is what we're feeding ourselves on—are we feeding ourselves on milk, or are we feeding ourselves on solid truths? So, we need to actually activate our minds if we want to mature in our faith.
On the flip side, and “overthinking” may not be the best word to use here, but I think there are also warnings about relying on our thinking too much. Thinking can actually become an idol. We can become proud of our thinking, and we can let our thinking become such a focus that we actually don’t outwork our thinking. We can spend our whole lives thinking, thinking, thinking, and not actually doing anything with the understandings that we have. So, there are certainly some warnings here, I think, for us in maybe relying on our thinking too much.
Then, there’s a whole other category, which I’ve kind of called “distorted thinking,” and this is where our thinking goes off track. Sometimes that is something we know is happening at the time—sometimes our thoughts go to a place that we know even in that moment is not of God. Our thinking is impure, our thinking is unholy, it’s not of God, and we know it. We all can think of times where that’s happened for us. But also, our minds tend to drift into those places sometimes too, and I think it’s because we don’t actually—we're not actually critical about the things that are going into our minds. We live in a culture that has patterns of thinking that become normal, and we don’t actually think about them as we move into them. We talked about this during the Sermon on the Mount series—I remember talking about this in the week of the Beatitudes. We live in a world where there are patterns of thinking that are very different from Jesus’ pattern that we see in the Beatitudes, and sometimes we actually need to put Jesus’ teaching up against what we see in our world and what’s happening in our minds. We need to have a change of mindset.
Who Governs Our Minds?
Romans 8 talks about this, similar to some of what Tim talked about last week: “Those who live according to the flesh or with a sinful nature have their minds set on what the flesh desires, but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace.” My question, I guess, that I have for us all today is: Who's governing our minds? Who's leading? Who's Lord of our minds? I think this is a question that we don't just need to ask once in our life—this is something we probably need to ask on a daily basis: Who governed my thoughts today? Because there are days where all of us will probably say, “Something of our world is governing my mind,” or “Something that is not of God is governing my mind.” We need to reset our minds again.
The Renewing and Transforming of Our Minds
This leads us into this last thing that I observe in Scripture: we worship a God who’s really interested in renewing our minds and transforming our minds. Romans 12:2 says, “Do not conform to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” That word “transformed” there is only used one other place in Scripture, and that’s when Jesus was transfigured. So what God is saying here is that He wants to do something really remarkable in us. Jesus is changed into this new—it’s amazing what happened, and that’s the same thing that He invites us to—to have happen in our lives. That happens through the renewing of our mind.
Colossians 3:1-2 says, “Since then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not earthly things.” It’s my prayer this week that this will be something that you meditate on and take into your week. I want to encourage you, maybe at the end of each day this week, to do a bit of a review of where your mind has been—where has your mind been focused? Who has been governing it? And actually ask yourself: Has it been on heavenly things or earthly things?
A Call to Renew Our Minds
One last verse, and this is something I want to encourage us to take into this last song, and maybe if the band wants to come up: “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things.” Turn your minds to these things, and maybe as we sing our last song, we can actually do that. As we sing, come before God and ask Him to transform our minds.
Closing Prayer
I wonder if you’ll stand with me, and I’d like to pray for us. I’m really aware that there’s a whole lot of areas I didn’t talk about today—I didn’t talk about when our minds are unhealthy in terms of mental health. That’s something I’ve grappled with over the years as well, and I know God wants to do a work in that part of us as well. I feel this morning as we're praying that maybe there are some here today who would like a blessing in that area. Our prayer team will be up here after the service if you’d like prayer in that area. I wonder if you’d just close your eyes for a moment, come before God, and let’s pray.
Lord God, we come before you this morning, and we want to lay our minds before you. We thank you for this remarkable gift that you have given us—the ability to think, to reason, to understand, to dream, to problem-solve, to be creative, and to have knowledge. You’ve given us something incredible, something so wonderful, and something that we catch a glimpse of you in as well. You are the all-knowing God. You are the God of truth.
Lord God, we confess that sometimes our minds wander into places that don’t honour you. Sometimes, our thinking is quite the opposite of what we have just read in Philippians. Sometimes our minds are focused upon what isn’t true, what isn’t noble, what isn’t right, what isn’t pure, what isn’t lovely, what isn’t admirable. Sometimes this sinful thinking is there in ways we’re aware of, but sometimes it creeps in as well. Lord God, we pray that you would help us to wipe our minds of these things and to focus upon you. We confess when we get off track with this.
Holy Spirit, we thank you that when we let our minds be governed by you, you lead us into life and light—that’s what we want. We place our minds into your presence today. Guide us to pure thoughts, and let your wisdom shape our understanding. Lord God, when our minds are heavy with anxiety or fear, bring your peace. When our minds race and are unsettled, may you calm our thoughts. When our minds feel foggy and we’re unsure and confused, bring clarity. When our minds battle addiction or are trapped in negative patterns of thinking, we speak the name of Jesus and ask you to bring freedom. Holy Spirit, we invite you this morning to do your work of transformation and renewal in our minds. Amen.