SE030208
THE D WORD
1. Mental Discipline
Many of us, when we think of the “D” word, we think about physical discipline and what comes to mind is the epidemic of flabby bodies today. But the truth is there’s another flabbiness epidemic in our day – but it’s of the MIND.
Flabbiness is being driven by one value which dominates our thinking today:
Tolerance.
Now, before I explain, let me give this disclaimer: tolerance is a good idea! John Locke in the 1600’s was one of the first to teach us that the way to have a PEACEFUL society was to value and uphold tolerance, especially in matters of religion. His ideas lead to the US and our freedom of religion and separation of church and state.
Up until that time it was mostly assumed by Europeans that the way you have a PEACEFUL society was not to value tolerance, but to enforce conformity of belief on everyone. If everyone thinks the same, they won’t bicker. There’s some sense to that. But the conformity idea has fatal flaws:
- A) It always leads to unleashing the Thought Police which usually encourages rebels to dissent against orthodoxy.
- B) Oh, ya, it leads to all kinds of trampling on people’s rights, Death Camps, Inquisitions, Siberian Gulags, Gestapo’s that kind of thing
You might find this interesting – the first instance of Legislated Tolerance was from a Christian: Emperor Constantine, who signed the “Edict of Milan”, which guaranteed religious freedom in the Roman Empire.
However, tolerance no longer means to us what it meant to Constantine or to John Locke.
- To us, it doesn’t just mean that we put up with all sorts of people with all sorts of different ideas on God and Religion and Philosophy. Nope.
- To us, Tolerance has devolved to mean, that I must accept every idea as EQUALLY true.
And THAT is what has lead to flabby thinking. It’s caused us to turn off our brains. And it’s caused a whole lot worse:
Think about the logical conclusion that people draw when they’re told that tolerance is the only moral that matters, and tolerance means accepting all ideas as equally truth. When people are told that over time, they just start to look at life as if there is no objective standard outside of us to judge our behaviors against. And that means anything can be justified as me just living out “my truth”.
Now, men and women, this isn’t some ivory tower issue that doesn’t relate to us regular blue color folk in Marysville. Mental discipline matters to all of us. Because here’s what happens when we demand robust thinking in science, but demand flabby thinking in ethics and in religion:
- 70% us both outside AND inside the church not longer believe absolute truth exists. Which means: no standard of ethics, no higher law than what’s expedient to me in the moment.
- More than 50% of us say that the only thing that can be known is what you experience.
It gets worse:
- Most students (75%) will not reserve sexual activity for marriage
- 750,000 will get pregnant this year.
- 33% have cheated in school in the last 3 month
- Over 20% have physically hurt someone in the same period.
- 1 in 100 American adults is in prison – the highest rate ever.
9 years ago, in New Jersey a pregnant 17 year old and her boyfriend, from progressive, well to do homes, took off across the state line and rented a motel room. In this room, the girl delivered her baby, and then strangled him to death. Then they put the dead baby in a dumpster which police later found.
What’s disturbing about this trend isn’t the crime. It’s the thinking behind it. Journalist Rowland Nethaway comments on this:
“This is different. There have always been kids who would go off the track. But they knew where the track was and what was wrong. Many of today’s youth don’t seem to know right from wrong. Children are robbing, maiming, and killing on whims and with no pity or remorse.”
It crops up everywhere… obese brains that have never been disciplined to think.
- It crops up at home: How many of you parents aren’t concerned just a little, about your child’s inner moral compass?
- It crops up at church. As a pastor I see people who will accept all the ideas of Christianity. But they take them as privately held beliefs, there’s practically no distinction between them and the world around them – see no problem!
- It crops up in society. We soon won’t have enough tax money to pay for the prisons – or risk turning violent offenders back out to the streets.
The result of having no mental discipline are far reaching. You’re going to send your kids to college they will be told in no uncertain terms: God, family, ethics, are all subjective feelings. A biological trick. There is no TRUE truth, just impressions. Cultural biases. You tell me how long will they hang on to Christianity in a place like that? Not long unless we teach them and show them a robust intellectually satisfying Faith.
But you see, it’s often the church that’s the biggest culprit with mental laxity. We allow the idea of tolerance devolve into thinking:
- God is only interested in our experience
- the God realm is subjective
- Nothing can be known for sure in spiritual matters
- Relationship with Jesus mean I turn off my brain…
But Jesus said, in Luke 10:27…
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength and MIND.”
To love God, you must engage your MIND. So intellectual growth IS spiritual growth! We bring all that we are, including our reason and our best thinking to our relationship with God. Intellectual honesty. We love Jesus (who said, “I AM THE TRUTH”) by seeking Truth relentlessly.
Some Christians are deeply afraid of this. If you start using your mind you might come up with all sorts of questions and doubts: You might actually INCREASE the chances of defecting from the faith! A weak, totally experience driven, subjective faith is bad, but at least there’s still some faith.
But you tell me, what is such a faith worth? A faith that divorces belief and behavior? A faith that is so “personal” it doesn’t correspond to the TRUTH of who God is and what he wants in any way?
It might feel good, but it’s a lie.
So intellectual honesty is a must, EVEN if at first it’s troubling or may cause doubts. Why would I, as a pastor encourage this? Because God is TRUTH and ultimately a search for Truth will lead us back to him. Francis Bacon said:
A little or superficial knowledge or philosophy may incline the mind of man to atheism, but a farther proceeding therein doth bring the mind back again to religion…”
Now, how can we love God by getting our minds in shape? How do we work our brains and encourage our children to do the same? 3 ways.
1. REJECT THE IDEA THAT FAITH, ETHICS, AND GOD ARE RELATIVE
Some see the foolishness of saying that all ideas are equally truth. But they have a favorite analogy they use to justify how this might still make sense:
ELEPHANT ANALOGY.
It’s the idea that all religions and truth claims are like a bunch of blind men touching a different part of an elephant. They don’t realize because they’re blind and the elephant is so big that they’re REALLY touching the same thing. That’s how two ideas can be mutually contradictory and still somehow true.
The problem with the elephant analogy is that it’s self refuting.
Think about it. Who KNOWS that we’re all blind and that we REALLY are all describing the same thing? Whoever it is, this person sees truth with a capital T. And their understanding is meant to be accepted as REALLY true, unlike everyone else’s vain, subjective and blind attempts to describe God.
Get it? Everyone is blind, EXCEPT the person telling you that everyone is blind - that person sees! Who is this person? They are ommited from the analogy! They got revelation from "on high" somehow. But how could that be, since i thought we were all blind men? If they are ALSO blind, then their elephant analogy is ALSO merely a subjective idea, not to be taken as true Truth. And yet that’s exactly how they mean it to be taken, as OBJECTIVE, reality.
You see, if we just put our thinking caps on, we’re see that moral relativism is an intellectually bankrupt, self refuting idea: the only truth is the truth that there is no truth!
Even without a prior commitment to the Bible’s reliability and authority, CS Lewis shows in a profound chapter in Mere Christianity, that natural law points to objective, real morality that points to God.
We get evidence that truth is objective all around us. Think about how people bicker. What do they say?:
- How’d you like if someone did the same to you?
- That’s my seat, I got there first!
- Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm!
- Come on, you promised!
- That isn’t fair!
Now, why do we argue like this? Is seems a those two people, who may not even know each other, are appealing to some law or rule book that they book agree to and know about. When someone says, “that’s not fair”, do people usually respond, “who cares?” No. Usually they’ll list the reasons why, in this instance it WAS fair.
But as to whether FAIR is good or bad, objectively real and something we OUGHT to pursue, they are both agreed that it is.
It’s baseball season once again. We’ve all watched the players yelling at the umpires. What do you suppose they’re saying? You don’t have to read lips to know at least a few of the choice words being spoken… but here’s what they’re NOT saying”
Ump, you can’t call a strike on that play, because I don’t believe in strikes. A strike is so subjective, isn’t it? I have decided that the pitcher must pitch to me at no more than 65 mph and belt high over the center 6 inches of the plate. That’s my truth. I don’t acknowledge your rule book.
No. More likely they’re saying:
Ump, a strike is over the plate and that wasn’t over the plate! And yet you called it a strike. So, my good man, on the basis if our shared understanding of the strike zone, and the rules of MLB, I beseech you in the spirit of good sportsmanship to overturn your prior judgment and restore justice and fair play.
Or something like that - with more swearing. The point is, they both AGREE to the rules. The debate is not over one’s man’s truth vs. another man’s truth. The truth of the rules as an objective standard is assumed. The debate is over the misapplication of the rules, not the rules themselves.
The fact that this is true of humanity the world over, points to the fact that there is an objective truth out there that we all implicitly know we OUGHT to do. Now people have heard this argument before and they say, well morality is just those behaviors that happen to be convenient for humanity, or help us the most.
But of course that’s not true.
- If I’m on a full bus and there’s one seat available and I rush there, but another man beats me to it, I’m upset but not indignant with that man.
- But if on the same bus, someone moves my backpack with my back turned and when I go get it they try to steal my seat, I AM indignant with that man – even if he doesn’t succeed in his plan.
The one man inconvenienced me more, but the moral law kicked in with the other man who inconvenienced me less!
The moral TRUTH isn’t merely about convenience. In fact a traitor in extremely convenient to me in war, but even though I pay him and use him, I still think he’s the lowest of human scum.
We also can’t say that the law is about those behaviors which pay. Because the law we all know inside calls us to choose:
- Honesty – even if lying gets us more money.
- Faithfulness – even if cheating gets us more sex.
- Fairness – even if exploitation gets us more power.
Friends, if we keep our heads on, we keep coming back to this idea of RIGHT and WRONG. It’s either real and objective and the truth or life is absurd. But the whole force of our culture is trying to teach you and your children an absurd way to do life. And then more and more people go around with lives that don’t work (and our prisons are filling up) and we wonder why.
So mental discipline means we reject this lazy idea that morals are relative. We may debate about their application, that’s fine. But when we give up on the very idea that the truth is out there to be discovered, we get intellectually lazy and worse yet, we justify the worst behaviors you can imagine, because it was “true for me” or just being “true to myself”. – sex.
2. REJECT THE IDEA THAT FAITH IS OPPOSED TO EVIDENCE
I want to speak to those of you investigating faith today, because many of you maybe under the impression that faith is BLIND FAITH. That Christianity calls you to have an uncritical belief in belief and that God really hates it if you ask the tough questions.
A book made the rounds last year, “Letter to a Christian Nation” written by Sam Harris and it said:
Faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.
Is that your view?
Well let me say this very clearly: Unquestioning Faith is NOT a Christian virtue. The Bible frequently appeals to reason, empirical facts and experiment.
- Ps 34:8 Taste and see that the LORD is good
- Isa 1:18 Come now, let us reason together," says the LORD. NIV
- Ps 119:66 Teach me knowledge and good judgment,
So why have FAITH at all? You should believe what you believe based on evidence and logic and reason, or don’t believe it. Faith shouldn’t apply!
But you’re assuming our minds are always ruled by logic and reason. And they are not. Example: When I went sky diving last year, my logical mind told me I had all sorts of good reasons for jumping out of an airplane:
- The parachute is sound
- The Instructor is skilled
- The history of the sport has proven to be relatively safe.
But someone want to guess if, at 14,000 ft., with the door open on an airplane speeding at 140 mph, whether those were the ONLY voices in my head? They were not. There was another voice. What was the other voice saying? Let’s see: AHHHHHHHHH! Yeah, that pretty much sums up the gist of it, I think.
Now, what’s another way of putting this? At high altitude, under the pressure of fear, I was losing my faith in the evidence. Now, was it logic and reasons that convinced me to panic? No. It was
- my circumstances, and
- my emotions and
- my imagination and
- my irrational fears.
So hear this Allen Creek, reason and faith work TOGETHER.
I come to conclusions based in reason and I hang on to them based in faith.
In fact, you can’t live a well balanced life without faith. If you think your whole life is driven by total reason and evidence only, you’re not being intellectually honest. The fact is you trust so many things: you trust your memory, your wife, your children, your colleagues, some engineer in Detroit who made your car not to blow up.
No one has absolute certainty of evidence on anything. In fact, the way we get evidence itself, requires faith. How do you get evidence for the world, your relationships? Through your senses and your mind. Even the most ardent atheist takes his brain pretty much for granted on FAITH. How could he prove the trustworthiness of his mind? Only by using, HIS MIND!
So we reject this idea that faith is blind faith. It’s not. A Christian believes the things he accepts based on reason and evidence and experience… not just because someone told him.
And I challenge you, if you have yet to grab hold of Christ in a way that satisfies both your heart and your mind… then listen to the invitation of Jesus:
Matt 7:7-8 Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.
I freely call you to ask, seek and knock. If you think the evidence is weak… then I don’t ask you believe something AGAINST your reason. But I only ask you to ask yourself if you’re embracing the mental discipline to approach Christianity with an open mind and not just see what you WANT to see.
3. REJECT THE IDEA THAT GOD HATES DOUBT
There’s a man in the New Testament who had faith in Jesus Christ. John the Baptist. He believed that Jesus was the Messiah not IN SPITE of his reason, but BECAUSE of his reason. He had some compelling evidence. SO he goes about his ministry of preaching repentance with this belief.
However, as part of his preaching for repentance, John called out the King. And I can just say, the King didn’t appreciate his absolutist ideas about morals. He lived by our “all truth claims are equally valid” idea. So he promptly had John imprisoned.
Now in prison John the Baptist... doubts! He sends his friends to go to Jesus and just ask him straight up:
- Are you the Son of God, the one I was to prepare the way for?
- Or did I get it wrong?
- Should we expect someone else?
This is what circumstances and emotions can do to faith. They test it, they push it, they tempt you abandon it, to doubt. There will come a moment for you, like John, where
- there is bad news, or
- you hear a counter argument, or
- you’re living among a lot of people who don’t have faith,
- and all at once your emotions will rise up and carry out a blitz on your belief.
Or other times, there will come a moment when you
- really want to have sex with that person who is not your spouse or
- want to tell a lie or
- get impatient or
- give in to pride or
- acquire some shady money –
- a moment when it would be really, really convenient if Christianity were NOT true. And once again your emotions and imagination will carry an all-out blitz on your faith.
In both situations, you will doubt. And you know what? God can handle your doubt. He’s OK with your honesty and your hard questions! He can take it. If he’s True and if you’re truly seeking, with ALL your heart… you’ll find your way back to him eventually.
Having faith in those situations is not about turning off your brain and whistling in the dark. Having faith is doing what John did. He didn’t turn tail and run, didn’t just fold like a house of cards, he didn’t say, maybe it’s all relative! No. He asked the questions, pursued answers, and got in Jesus face, to reaffirm the thing his reason told him was true.
And what does Jesus tell him?:
Go back to John and tell him about what you have heard and seen – the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life, and the lowly are learning that God is on their side!
In other words,
John, I’m so glad you’re hanging on to what God showed you in the light, even though right now, you’re in the dark. So, once again, taste and see. Here’s the evidence, for you heart and you mind.
CONCLUSION
Just look at our culture. In divorcing faith from reason, we’ve come to this place where people’s moods totally dominate what they believe about God or the spirit world or marriage or love or anything. We’ve become a culture of muddy thinkers, all our beliefs are dependant on the weather or our indigestion.
BUT, if we have mental discipline, loving God with all of our MINDS, we learn to balance REASON and FAITH. We use our minds to come to truth and we hang on to Truth, by Faith, through mood blitzes and circumstances and things that seem like contrary evidence at first but which don’t stand the test in the end.
