Thinking

 

Last week at the end of our Sunday morning service, as I sat at my little table in the back of the auditorium, a friend came up to me and greeted me. She said she was reading one of my books. She said, As I read, it seems like I can hear your voice. You you write like you talk, and you think of things I’ve never thought of before. You must spend a lot of time thinking. I told her, Well, maybe I spend time thinking, but almost certainly not enough. I’ve often wondered if God were to come to me and tell me that today was the last day of my life, if he were to tell me that he was allowing me to preach or teach one last time to a group of Christian people before I died, but that I must limit my teaching and my sermon to only one word, one final word? What one word would I choose? Some might think I would choose the word Jesus, but Christian people, those people that really know Jesus, they would already know Jesus and have him in the center of their lives. No, for me, my one-word sermon would be the word think. John Ortberg in his book, The Life You’ve Always Wanted, says that, quote, we have largely traded wisdom for information, depth for breadth. We want a microwave maturity. That observation may be accurate. I don’t believe it would be the goal for most Christians that I know that they would trade wisdom for information. Most of us would hope that we can become wiser as our lives progress. But how do wise people get so wise? Solomon was the wisest person who ever lived besides Jesus. He wrote so much of the book of Proverbs and, of course, Ecclesiastes. God endowed him with the supernatural gifting of wisdom. And I believe that because he was so wise, he spent more than a little bit of time just thinking about life. The greatest deficit in my own life is not how much I don’t know. It’s how little time I actually spend thinking about what I do know, but fail to think about in ways that will transform my life. Maybe you’re like that too. We’re all terribly busy. We try to invest our lives in things that are worthwhile, important, even eternal. But no activity we engage in can replace the value we receive by investing time in a simple act. Thinking. And what might you ask, should we be thinking about? That’s the greatest part of just thinking. In order to decide what to think about, you’ll have to think about it. I’m convinced God didn’t give us minds simply to store up information. He gave us minds so that we can take what we already know and think about what that means. And what I know to be true ought to make a difference in how I live. The Apostle Paul tells us in Romans 12 that we’re to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Think about that. Transformation doesn’t begin simply because I’ve learned something new. It begins because God’s truth has changed the way I think about what I already know. The English Standard Version of Psalm 119, verse 15 says, I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways. Meditate, says the psalmist. There’s a wonderful word. It means more than simply reading something and moving along. It means lingering over it, turning it over in my mind, thinking about its implications, allowing God’s truth to find its way from my head into my heart, and eventually into my hands and feet. Thinking is a tremendous aid to implementation. Jesus said we are to love God with all our heart, all our soul, all our minds, all our strength. The mind God gave us is more than a place to collect information. It’s where we consider and ponder his truth, where we examine our assumptions, where we confront our attitudes, and where we ultimately make the decisions that will determine how we live. And that, my friend, is something worth thinking about, I think.