Focus: Think, Think, Think! (Pt.1)

Text: Gal.3:1,3

"O FOOLISH Galatians, who hath bewitched you… Are ye so FOOLISH? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?"

I was once told of a University in the Arab Emirates where THINKING is offered as a course, and I think that is very much suggestive of the deep need for us to recover the lost art and culture of thinking. As you are reading this, you are probably having a phone, a tablet or a laptop in your hand. That is the product of thinking. With a microscope you are able to see small objects not so visible to the eye, and with a telescope you are able to see into outer space and pick far off objects as clearly as possible. Those are instruments of creative thinking. Technology is advancing with so much rapidity, and thanks to the creative minds of our world. Thinkers are makers, and as one advert puts it, "Good thinking, good product." Solving problems often requires a great deal of thinking.

My worry is that church people are not really thinking. We are given to 'easy believism.' We have gradually moved from believing little or nothing to believing everything even without thinking. Everything seems believable to us. The words of Paul in Eph.4:14 clearly apply to us. He says, "That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive." The word 'children' is 'nepios' in the Greek, and it means, an infant who is still unable to speak intelligently. Is our spiritual brain still in its infancy? Is it incapable of developing, or still at the level of 'nepiotic' thinking?

From our text we learn how alarmed and disturbed Paul was, as he felt in his soul the gravity of the stupidity of the Galatian Christians. He didn't know the Galatian people to be daft or so mindless as their Christian counterparts were. As the Lord Jesus listened and weighed the level of reasoning of two of His disciples, He said to them, "O FOOLS, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken" (Lk.24:25). Jesus used the same word and exclamation that Paul used - "O fools…" "O foolish…" The Greek word is anoetos, which means lacking in mentality or absence of mind. It is like calling someone an empty head or a nincompoop. Paul felt that such a display of stupidity must have been caused by a wrong influence. He asked them, "Who bewitched you?" He could see that they were charmed away from the truth. Someone cast a spell on them to believe in a lie. They had been drugged with the wrong doctrine. O how wrongly fascinated and thoroughly deceived! They let others do their thinking for them and persuaded them otherwise, contrary to the truth they once upheld. In Gal.5:7, he says to them, "Ye did run well; who did hinder you that ye should not obey the truth?" They fell into wrong hands and into error. They let some deluded 'theological surgeons' perform a spiritual surgery on their heads, taking out their brains in the process, and putting in them another mind to believe in error.

Faith is not the same thing as foolishness. Believing God does not mean becoming senseless. Faith implies the acceptance of God's logic or sense and the decision to walk in His wisdom. God is not asking us to remove our mind, but to renew it. Paul says, "And be renewed in the spirit of your mind" (Eph.4:23). That means having a spiritual mind that agrees with the mind of Christ. The spirit is not mindless.

Do you know that God is able to do much more than you THINK, according to Paul in Eph.3:20? So why are you not thinking and giving God something to work with? God will do more than you think, but you have to think first. God always exceeds our expectations.

The thoughtless are easily deceived. So put on your thinking cap.

(To be continued)

by Bishop Moses E. Peter