I recently got into a conversation about "Feelings" vs "Intelligence" This became quite a friendly disagreement, but it got me thinking. How do we approach God? Do we use our brains, or our heart? I have always felt it is the latter, our heart, but how does our mind come into play?
Matthew 25:26 tell us: We walk by (the eye of) faith and not by (natural) sight" (The Message ). Now that tells me to think to much about our faith is in the "Natural way of living", but to "walk by faith, (notice The Message interjects "the eye of" here), is the right way of living.
In talking to my friends about this, I used the illustration that my eyes see the rain/snow outside, and I hear the thunder , see the lighting, see others walking around with umbrellas, raincoats, hurrying so they won't get wet, But until I go outside and feel the rain for myself I am not absolutely definite it is raining, I am pretty positive, but not completely. Have you ever seen it snowing outside, your excited,(I live in Texas, THAT is pretty exciting), you bundle up, put on your gloves, coat, hat, warm socks and go out in to it. Wow, snow angels, wow it is so white and pretty, wow that snowball almost got you........You see you feel the snow, you feel the cold, you feel the snowball whiz past your ear. So the point I am trying to make? We saw the rain/snow, we saw all the things that tell our brains that it is raining/snowing/cold/warm/very hot/ outside, but until we open our door and feel these things ourselves we are not 100% satisfied.
My friends were not impressed or persuaded by this point, they still felt Thinking was the way to understand God.
OK, lets look at education: When I was in school, science was not my best subject, Math was. Math was easy for me, because I saw everything right in front of me. The equations, the formulas, the problems they were all right there for me to memorize, solve, or not. If I had problem with one, my teachers could use that dreaded red pen and show where I goofed.
Science, on the other hand was hard for me. Yes there was that dreaded table with all the elements symbols, abbreviations or whatever we were supposed to memorize (Why not use the first letter of the element for the symbol? And if there were two or more with the same letter, use a number after it. Like Gold would be G, and grass (you see why I did so bad in science, I actully think grass is an element!), would be G1, but you get my point, unless you were one of those science geeks, I was a Math geek, oh well we were all "geeks" of one sort or another, I digress.) When we did experiments in Science, then my understanding started peeking, Oh , I SEE how that works.......You see when we use one of our senses to visualize something it helps our understanding, and of the senses "Feelings" wither emotional or physical are the strongest.
How can we understand God, well the Bible says "If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your HEART that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved (Romans 10:9 New Living Translation) Notice it doesn't say: Believe with your mind, or think about it for awhile,or mull it over in your head, or sleep on it, and think about all night. It Says "believe in YOUR HEART". That is where it is won or lost, isn't it. You can think a certain thing about whatever, but once that thing is in your HEART, it is not embedded in your soul. How are habits (good or bad) formed? Repetition. If you smoke, it is because somewhere in the past you started picking up a cigarette and lighting up, weather it be after a good meal, the first thing in the morning, before bed,,,,,it became a habit to smoke at certain times, then it just became a habit. Now a Habit is something you do without even realizing it. Your mind doesn't say :"Pick up that cigarette and light up, now inhale, now exhale, now shake off the ashes, now inhale......" You just do it.
When serving God, if our minds ruled then we would have to think about every single thing we do for Him, but since we serve God in our hearts, the things we do because we love Him are habits, we do them without even realizing it. We have no selfish thing to gain, just being obedient to Him,because we love Him.
Cults and Legalism start by getting into our head instead of our hearts. God becomes real to our hearts and then gets ahold of our heads. Don't try to think God into your life, there is NO WAY to do that. God is knocking at the door to our Hearts, not our heads. And I am glad about that.
Think about your Heads and your Hearts and let's talk more about this. I don't know if anyone is reading this stuff, have no comments, yet, but it is helping me get straight in my Heart what I do and do not believe. It is good to put down in words the things I have been feeling for along time. Later Chris
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