Think First

I’ve been lost in my own thoughts a great deal of late, wrestling with what the media is telling me is happening in the world and in my country, knowing that the media only ever provides a strongly biased report from one angle or another and that I can never really know the truth of what is happening. The only thing I am absolutely sure of is that chaos, anger, and a huge portion of emotionally charged rhetoric has become the status-quo for the American public in the twenty-first century.

It is difficult in the midst of so much noise to distinguish the voice of God.

How do we discern truth from pseudo-truth? How do we filter out the silt in order to find gems? Better yet, how do we know conclusively that we’ve found gold and not fool’s gold?

For some reason, the chorus of the old 80’s song Listen to Your Heart by Roxette has been playing on repeat in my mind for the last couple of weeks. I can guarantee you, the lyrics to that song are not true gold; they do not provide the kind of advice we should rely on as we’re trying to sort through the cacophony of information that accosts us from every angle.

Jeremiah 17:9 is often quoted as a warning against trusting your heart. “The heart is deceitful above all things…” “Heart” in this context, particularly considering the Hebrew concept of personhood, is a reference to much more than just a person’s emotions. Verse ten clarifies the concept when it partners “heart” with a Hebrew word that the NIV has translated as “mind,” but really comes closer to meaning “inner person.” Paired together, we can understand that the innerworkings of a person—both thoughts and emotions—are interconnected rather than disconnected one from the other. So while it’s not 100% false that a person’s emotions shouldn’t necessarily be trusted to lead in decision-making, they are not fully distinct from a person’s thoughts.

So can a person’s thoughts be trusted, either?

Romans 12:2 puts a stronger value on the intellectual aspect of human personhood: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.” How do we discern what is truth? Well, it appears that engaging our intellect is a key element of the process.

Here’s where I’m going to bring a little bit of philosophy into the conversation. St. Thomas Aquinas (13^th Century Italian monk) was both a theologian and a philosopher. His greatest theological work, Summa Theologiae, contains no fewer than 3,000 pages, and details his ethical theory known as Natural Law Theory. Part of that theory is the claim that humankind is created with an inherent purpose, or telos, which is to “live according to reason.”

In other words, we were created to be thinkers. To use our brains.

When you go to church, use your intellectual capacity to discern whether what you are hearing aligns with Scripture. But also, use that same intellect to discern whether the lyrics you’re singing have that same theological accuracy and depth. (In other words, don’t turn your brain off when the music starts.)

When you open your social media app and read a post or watch a video, utilize your ability to reason out whether what you are reading and seeing is true, how much bias it might contain, and how it is designed to enflame emotions before you allow yourself to respond or react to it.

When you encounter new information or just a new presentation of information, before you allow your emotions to react, allow your mind to sift through and separate truth from non-truth.

Emotions don’t need to be ignored or completely disregarded, but they definitely should be tempered by intellect.

But now let me give some qualification to this entire conversation. Remember that Jeremiah 17 shows us that at some level, a person’s thoughts are as fallible as his or her emotions.

Let’s go back to Romans 12:2 – “…be transformed by the renewing of your mind…”

While Aquinas taught that humans are created with a natural reasoning capacity and that certain "moral codes” are built into the human makeup, Romans 12:2 tells us that we have to do the work of educating our minds in order to have the framework from which to discern God’s will. Our minds are flooded every day with information, so we have to be purposeful about absorbing and assimilating the right kind of information. If we want to be able to distinguish truth from untruth, we have to know the characteristics of truth; we cannot simply decide from our own thoughts what we believe should be true and what shouldn’t.

Renew your mind. Through reading and study of Scripture. Through listening to trusted teachers of the Word. Through conversations with other believers who are also engaged in the same practices. Through willfully choosing to let your mind be formed in the ways of Christ.

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world…” Don’t allow yourself to become a person of empty, emotionally driven, reactive rhetoric.

“…but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…” Do allow your mind, your thought patterns, your worldview, your perspective to be formed by Scripture and by the wisdom of others who are sincerely engaging the Word.

“…Then…” (and only then) “…you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.”