In order for you to understand fully what I am about to say, you would need to know my wife, and moreover, you would need to visit our backyard and find out that my wife is a wild flower nut. Now you will be very careful to get exactly what I said. I did not say, exactly, that my wife has lost her marbles; but then again I guess I did hint that when it comes to wildflowers, she is nuts, crazy, bananas. She will bear any burden, pay any price, to find and of course transplant the perfect Appalachian wildflower. If it grows in the mountains, it seems to me, it ought to be left there, where God put it; but she wants it here too, in the unfriendly garbage fill - I mean soil - of Silver Spring. Thus just week as we came back from Charlotte, for example, nothing would do but that we take a detour into the wilds of V1rgnia’s Albemarle County and search for a fire pink; and never mind, either, that you can buy a perfectly fine fire pink at the nursery right here at home - better to spend four or five extra gallon of gas and nearly miss our evening appointments so that we can get a free one!
But of course the reason for all this wild flower craze, in part, is that it keeps us in touch with our Kentucky roots, and I do mean roots. It keeps ms reminded of the place we came from the, the place you were all privileged to view for two breathtaking minutes yesterday afternoon. And a good many of our wildflowers came from the days in which we lived in eastern Kentucky and spent our spare time laboring down mountain trails to find flowers.
It was on just one such journey into the wilds of Rockcastle County that my wife and her friends met Godfrey Isaacs. Godfrey Isaacs was in the valley manufacturing sorghum molasses in the old time way- grinding the cane between millstones turned by mule power. And since you do not see this sort of thing every day, my wife and her friends stopped to visit with Godfrey Isaacs. As it turned out, they were the first outsiders - the first people from outside that valley - that Godfrey Isaacs had seen or talked with in a long while. He lived in a place so remote, so isolated, that the school bus came through only once a week, in good weather. And it soon became apparent that Godfrey Isaacs, in this splendid isolation, knew absolutely nothing about what was going on the rest of the world. Wars and rumors of wars he had never heard of. Inflation, traffic jams, crime waves, presidential politics - of these he had no knowledge. And when someone asked him whether he ever saw a newspaper, he asked, "What’s a newspaper?"
So of course someone explained to Godfrey Isaacs that a newspaper was this very useful pub1ication that came out every day and told you about what was going on all over the world and how it got that way and what was probably going to happen next. All this Godfrey Isaacs studied for a moment, then he smiled and drew himself up to his full height, and announced, "Well, you see, I’m a Baptist preacher" (Always, always, be careful when somebody begins a sentence like that). Well, I’m a Baptist preacher, and I have my Bible. And my Bible tells me all I need to know. It tells me the past, the present, and the future. I don’t reckon I need a newspaper"
I have my Bible, it tells me all I need to know. How do you feel about that? What’s your reaction to that? I feel two ways about it, myself. I have two equal but opposite reactions. On the one hand, you and I know that it’s clearly nonsense. It’s nonsense in that no one can live and function in our kind of world without awareness of what’s going on, without some knowledge of culture and politics and arts and sports and science and literature and on and on and on. That we are certain about, and could easily point out that even Godfrey Isaacs in Rockcastle County needed more than his Bible to get by.
But I have another feeling, too; I have an opposite reaction. And that is that too few of us have seen what a resource the Bible truly is. Too few of us have taken seriously enough the claims of the Scripture to be inspired and profitable and able to cut through the smokescreens of our lives to the true and living word. Too few of us have seen the Bible as more than a convenient compendium of neat little sayings, to be hauled out to fit our moods. The Bible, I have the Bible, it tells me all I need to know. That’s not as far off base as it seems; it tells me all I need to know, in some sense, about my self. It tells me all I can handle, more than I can deal with, about my human condition. It tells me of the ways of the Almighty and it spells out the story of my redemption. It may not tell me in the same way the history books or the newspapers or the scientists do about my past, my present and my future; and I am quite sure that it does not tell me quite what it tells Godfrey Isaacs about his past, present, and future. But it is, this book, a penetrating discoverer of the destiny of this world and of the glories of Him who has overcome this world.
And so we come today to examine and reexamine this whole notion of Christian discipleship, and we come to a pair of intriguing Scripture texts. These two texts at first sound identical, they appear to be mirror images of one another; but they are not. There is a difference, a fascinating difference.
The Old Testament text in Deuteronomy 6 is one of the most important texts of the Bible. It was the statement of Israel’s most basic faith, “Hear 0 Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” And then the commandment: “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”
Does there seem to se something missing? Did I leave something out? I did not. I read it exactly as it appears in the Old Testament. But the day came when they tested Jesus and asked Him to summarize the law, and He said, He the living word, said, “Love the Lord your God with heart, and soul and mind and strength.” Love the Lord your God with heart and soul
and mind and strength. Love God with your mind. He added that. Isn’t that astounding? Jesus felt free to deal with the most sacred of Israel’s scriptures and to add to it a new dimension of obedience. Love God with your mind. Old Israel knew what it was to love God with heart, with an opening of the heart to God in prayer; she had experienced something
of what it might be to love God with the soul, with the relationships, to bear witness to the mercy of the Father. And she had pondered what it was to love God with her strength, to give to Him, to sacrifice for Him, to labor for him. But now in Christ there is a new dimension of obedience: Love God with your mind.
Of all the disciplines of the Christian faith, this one is at once the most demanding and yet at the same time the most rewarding. To love God with your mind is demanding, it means having to think, having to reflect; it means spending time and energy questioning, probing, wondering, reading, studying. But it also means new discoveries, new growth, new thrills. It means that the whole person truly becomes engaged in loving God, caring for the things of God. It is a new dimension of obedience.
These days, especially in Baptist life, I’m sorry to say, the Bible is more argued over than it is studied. The Bible has become the weapon of those who would prefer to force others into thinking the way they do rather than a resource for growth and change and development. But it does not have to be that way; not at all. God’s word is provided to us so that we may use it to love God with our minds. The Scriptures are ours; and we are called to study them, to know them -- not quite the way Godfrey Isaacs know them, I expect, but to know the Scriptures and their teachings over against the ways of the world and the thousand thousand ideas which bombard us day and night. A few years ago Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shock reminded us that every day, every single day, there pour off the printing presses of this nation literally thousands of pages of print, and that no one, no one at all, can keep up with even a tiny fragment of human knowledge. But what we can do is to find a center, we can find a sure and certain foundation, so that our minds might make sense of what’s happening around us.
Do you see it? Our God calls us in Christ Jesus to love Him with our minds. Old Israel lived in a less complicated age, a simpler time, perhaps, and like my friend Godfrey Isaacs she knew all she needed to know. But as our Lord comes and sees what the world is becoming, he summons us to put our brains to work, He calls us to a reflective, thinking faith. He sets out for us a new dimension of obedience. You shall love the Lord your God with your mind.
And so I would remind you today that this church provides a program of Christian education, where you may study the Scriptures and may see how they address your life and the life of the world. And so to love God with your mind might mean dropping
the old notion that Sunday School is just for kids and might mean that you take it seriously. .
And I would encourage you too to see the church library as a resource, and would encourage you to follow the suggestions for daily Bible reading that you can find in church literature.
More than that I would wonder aloud with you whether your stewardship of time, whether your following the Lord’s command to love him with your mind, might lead you to respond to some other sort of study group. What if we were to get together some folks who would like to read theology or study church history or discuss contemporary issues from a Biblical perspective? Would that for you be a way to get inside this new dimension of obedience?
Or others might prefer to study on their own, with nothing more than a bibliography and a chance to call the pastor up and ask a question occasionally. Nothing would please me any more than to be able to help someone do that, because, you see, I believe that would be a matter of loving God with your mind.
Old John Robinson, Pilgrim father, standing on the snores of Plymouth Bay in Massachusetts in 1620, exhorting his little flock to wait for and hope for and work for the truth that God would give, said to them, “God has yet more light to burst forth from His book.” Yes, I believe He does. And I believe it will burst forth in all its glory for those who will add to all else that they do a new dimension of obedience and will love the Lord their God with their minds.
