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The purpose of these blogs is to help you live for Christ.  In the last blog I explained that you need both a right heart and right beliefs in order to live for Christ. God wants a holistic faith, not just a superficial one.  It is now time to talk a little bit about Christian beliefs, but before we delve into specific doctrines, I ought to take a couple blogs to discuss some broad issues related to truth and doctrine.

Doctrine is a foul word to some people.  To them, it represents silly arguments that people have fought and died over.  Of course, sometimes this portrayal has been true, but we should not throw away the meat with the bones.  Healthy doctrine is central to a healthy faith.  The things we believe actually impact us, and our ability to be effective in any field depends on what we believe within that field.  If you want to be a good doctor, you must know good medical doctrine. If you want to be a good lawyer, you must know good legal doctrine. Being a good follower of Christ is no different.  You must know good Christian doctrine.

Christian doctrine does get at the intellect, but it is not solely about the intellect. Paul tells Timothy to stay in Ephesus so that he might “command certain men not to teach false doctrines.”  Paul then says, “The goal of this command is love which comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.” (I Tim 1:3-5)  In other words, good doctrine is necessary for real love, a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith.  If anyone wants these things, he should seek right doctrine.  Love and doctrine are friends.  Sometimes people say silly things like, “I would rather love my brother than believe the right things about God.”  They do not understand that they cannot love their brother as God wants them to until they first believe right things about God.

C.S. Lewis likened doctrine to a spiritual map.  Of course, any map is merely a picture and not the real thing.  And ultimately we want the real God and not the map, but it is the map that shows us what that real God is like.  We are fools if we engage in this lifelong journey without a good map.  The map is merely a tool, not the end, but if it is a good map, it helps us get to the end.  A hiker in the Alaskan wilderness knows the benefits of a good map.  If someone offered him one, he would not reply, “No thank you.  I am not interested in knowing how to get anywhere.  I’m interested in enjoying the beauty of this wilderness.”  We see the ridiculousness of such talk, but many people talk that same way about Scriptural doctrine.  They somehow pretend that doctrinal knowledge and enjoyment contradict each other when in reality just the opposite is true.

Good doctrine will not answer every question we have. In this respect it is like those maps of America that were made in the 1500s.  You can see the rough outlines of the Atlantic Coast.  Here’s New England, the Canadian Maritime provinces, Chesapeake Bay, Long Island, Florida.  You can make out a lot of things, but if you go inland any short distance, the map quickly dissolves into emptiness.  If someone from that time had looked at one of those maps and had asked, “What’s beyond these mountains?” no one could answer him.

Good Christian doctrine comes from the Bible. The Scriptures are the raw data, so to speak.  Where the Scriptures are clear, good doctrine needs to be clear.  Where the Scriptures are fuzzy, honest Christians may disagree. That Jesus has bodily risen from the dead is clear in Scripture.  To deny this is to cease to be a Christian.  What the end times will look like is fuzzy in Scripture.  Honest Christians may have differing opinions on this subject.

Some doctrines are more central to following Jesus than others.  That God fixes broken people through faith in Jesus is central.  That Jesus wipes away sin through the sacrifice of the Cross is central. That Jesus is our king, that you and I are sinful, that God is holy, that we must love our neighbor, that God calls us to righteousness, that people must repent, all of these things are central to the faith. They all get at the essence of what the Christian journey is about.

Some things, however, do not quite get at the essence.  Does communion represent Christ’s death or recreate Christ’s death? Should church governments be hierarchical or democratic?  Two people can be honest followers of Jesus and adhere to all of the central things above and yet disagree on the answers to these questions.  This does not mean that the answers are unimportant; it simply means that the answers are not part of what defines a follower of Jesus.  If a woman does not love, however, she does not follow God.  That is I John.  If a man does not think his sin to be that bad, he does not know God.  That is Romans 1.  If a woman lives in sexual immorality, she does not know God.  That is I Cor 6.  I suppose we could say there is a sense in which not all doctrines are equal, and this makes perfect sense, for not all parts of a map are equally crucial to your journey.

The heart is a wonderful thing.  I would not want to be married to Leanne if my heart did not love her, but my heart must be informed by the facts.  I want to be in love with the real Leanne and not with a creation of my own desires.  I also want Leanne to be in love with me and not with some image she has fashioned in her mind. I want my heart affections for my wife to be based on the truth, for they are richer when they are built on reality.

We have spent half a year in these blogs discussing heart issues.  Such issues are central to faith in Jesus, for without a right heart, no one will know God.  This is basic. God wants us to love Him as I love my wife.  And yet, the heart, by itself, is incomplete.  Jesus said we are to love God with “heart, soul, mind, and strength.”   Therefore, we must talk about more than heart issues if we are to talk about following Jesus.  Now is the time to transition to a different category.  It is time for us to begin discussing issues of the head, for we are called to love God with all our mind.

God made the mind, and He likes it.  He wants us to use it.  He does not want a heart divorced from the intellect.  He wants an intellect driven by a pure heart. When Brian “falls in love” with Courtney, his heart can prevent him from seeing clearly, but great will be his pain if Courtney has significant problems that he simply ignores.  If she is a flirt or has great consumer debt, and he ignores those things, he will pay later.  His heart may blind him to these facts or convince him that she will change.  He may push his head aside, but if he does, he will pay later.  Indeed, his heart will pay later.  If I buy a home solely because it is a pretty home that I would enjoy living in, but I pay no attention to the fact that I cannot afford it and that it is built on a flood plain, I am a fool.

In these situations, the mind is crucial.  When people ignore facts and plain reason, the heart suffers in the end. It is true that hearts must be right, but facts and reason must inform those hearts.  A right heart listens to reason.  If people wish to know God, God will insist they use their heads.

This relationship between the heart and the head is complex. Each influences the other, and the road that navigates this relationship is fraught with pitfalls and misunderstandings.  Here are two.

Many scientists and rationalists define reason in such a way as to exclude faith altogether.  These people would have you think that listening to reason would require you to reject faith.  The irony is that the force of their argument is not itself rational.  They simply declare faith out of bounds by definition.  If you were to examine their arguments, you would find them quite unable to show in a logical way that faith and reason are mutually exclusive.  Of course, once you think about it, their claim is a bit impossible to demonstrate. These “rationalists,” therefore, must bring in something besides reason to get to their conclusion. They exalt reason as the pinnacle of knowledge but to do so, they place it atop the shoulders of their assumptions.  And their assumptions sit squarely on the shoulders of their hearts.  This idea cannot stand on its own legs.

On the other side, however, reason has taken somewhat of a beating.  It used to be that truth was an objective fact that people needed to grasp; but with the postmodern shifts in philosophy and literary criticism, truth has come to be more a matter of personal perception.  Each thinker creates his own truth.  This idea has spilled over into theology, and many now believe that what you think about God doesn’t much matter, for one perception is as valid as another, and, after all, God is so grand and mysterious that no one can really know Him anyway.  To these people, it is more important to be sincere than right, and the concept of religious doctrine is a great turnoff.  This latter error is much more popular than the former, but intellectual fads come and go like the styles of clothing, and, no doubt, in a hundred years or so, the pendulum will swing back, and objective truth will become a trophy again.

These two extremes illustrate misunderstandings of the relationship between the heart and the mind. The rationalist attempts to use the intellect to squash out the heart, while the postmodern person attempts to use subjective hearts to squash out objective truth. Neither position is Biblical.  The mind does not, cannot, and should not stamp out the knowledge that the heart gives us.  Nor should the heart create facts willy-nilly.  Rather, heart and mind work together to complement each other.

A right heart is humble and open to reason, and true reason is perceptive enough to see that it is itself greatly influenced by the bend of the heart.  A right heart listens to reason, and true reason is clearer when it stems from a pure heart.  These are aspects of a Biblical relationship between the heart and mind, and they help explain why the Bible so strongly condemns hypocrisy in the heart and false teaching, and why it so adamantly calls God’s people to purity of heart and of doctrine.

These books will focus you in some way upon having a right heart before God.  Some will sing to your heart.  Some will explain the heart.  Some will challenge it.

a Kempis, Thomas.  The Imitation of Christ. 

My favorite devotional book.  This book warms the heart for God.

Brother Lawrence.  The Practice of the Presence of God. 

Lawrence was a 17^th century monk who wrote about continual prayer with God.  A series of conversations and letters.

Carmichael, Amy.  Toward Jerusalem. 

This book is a collection of Carmichael’s poetry.  If you are not good at reading poetry, you will find this a tough read.  If you like poetry, try it.  She writes poems about God.

Edwards, Jonathan.  Treatise Concerning the Religious Affections. 

This book is a harder read.  Edwards was writing in the 1700s, but this is thorough, insightful, and extremely influential on later Christian thought concerning the heart.

Piper, John.  Desiring God.    

This has become a contemporary classic.  Very readable.

Tozer, A.W.  “Worship:  The Missing Jewel.”

A pamphlet that puts worship front and center, where it is supposed to be.

Tozer, A.W.  The Pursuit of God. 

Tozer constantly points the heart to its God.  Read everything you can by Tozer.

Over the past months, we have discussed different aspects of a right heart:  peace, joy, humility, submission to authority, confidence in God, the fear of God, simplicity, and  more.  Because each discussion focuses on only one characteristic, we might think that these characteristics are somehow separated from each other as the stripes on a zebra are.  Such thinking would be a mistake.  The heart is a holistic thing. Its attitudes are the sounds of a symphony. They do not exist in isolation but interact together to create a concerto of the soul. Consequently, one of the best ways to tell a genuine heart is to listen to the whole symphony and not just to the cellos.

Satan can counterfeit godly attitudes. He can give false humility, false passion, false joy, false peace. Jonathan Edwards spoke of these counterfeits and said that one of the best ways to tell a godly affection from a phony affection is to see if it has a healthy balance with respect to the other affections.

False confidence often has little humility. Stu’s confidence in God becomes cockiness, and Stu has no brokenness over his own sin. He is too “confident” to be broken. Amanda has a great fear of God but little hope. Her fear dominates and squashes out other godly attitudes. Stacy, on the other hand, has great feelings of hope but no real fear of God or sorrow for her sin. She has grabbed the attitude she likes and conveniently left the more difficult ones aside. Dan has strong feelings of “love” for God, but he has little submission to the authority of Scripture. He does not understand that we show our love through our obedience (Jn 14:15). The confidence, fear, hope, and love expressed in these people is likely false.

In all of these cases, we see the genuineness of a heart attitude by looking at the other attitudes. When God grabs hold of a heart, He grabs the whole thing. He will mix confidence with humility in the same person. He will give hope and fear together. He will give a passion for purity and a love for Himself simultaneously. Satan is not capable of so thorough a counterfeit.

Having said all this, we must, however, leave room for sin. A right heart is holistic, but it still represents a fallen human being. An honest follower of Jesus still struggles with many of these attitudes. He does not always enjoy God. She still worries about her kids. He wrestles with his pride. She sometimes seems narrow minded. All of these failures are real life, and a right heart need not play perfect music.

In addition, the follower of Jesus develops as he matures, much as the faces on Mount Rushmore or the paintings on the Sistine Chapel slowly took shape. God takes decades to chisel away our pride and add the touches of joy.

The right heart is always on a journey to something higher. When you encounter a hiker in the mountains, you can tell whether she is going up or down by the direction she is walking in. You may find her at 2,000 feet or at 12,000 feet, but her intention is revealed not by her elevation but by her direction. You may find that she has tripped and fallen over a log or that she has scuffed up her knees against the rocks, but if she has gotten back up and is walking to higher ground, you know something about her.

Now the fact of the matter is that people with counterfeit attitudes are not generally interested in walking to higher ground. They cannot see past the attitude that dominates their lives and are often stuck in a dangerous gulch.

The following letter was originally posted on Jul 2, 2015.

My Dear International Friends:

I have gotten to know many of you over the years and am grateful to God that I know you.  Your presence in my life has greatly enriched it.   As you know, this past week the U.S. Supreme Court declared that people of the same sex may legally marry.  This decision will reverberate across American culture and eventually affect your cultures as well.  America exports more than just grain and goods.

I want to talk briefly about this decision and do so from a Biblical perspective.   I know that many of you have told me that America is a Christian nation.  You may be wondering, then, how a Christian nation can justify an idea like homosexual marriage.  Others of you may think that since America is a Christian nation, this decision shows that the Bible approves of homosexual relations.  After all, these “Christians” approved it.

Please, my friends, do not confuse American culture with Christianity.  I have said to many of you in the past that America is not a Christian nation, and perhaps this recent Supreme Court ruling will put to rest forever the notion that American culture and Christianity walk hand in hand.

I do not have time here to discuss the many Biblical texts that deal with homosexuality or with marriage.  Forgive me for not fleshing those out here.  Maybe that is another blog for another day.  Suffice it to say that the Bible in the clearest of terms commands God’s people to love, respect, and show kindness and grace to homosexual people, for such people are created in the image of God.  The Bible also, in the clearest of terms, condemns homosexuality as sin and defines marriage as the one flesh union of a man and a woman.  From a Biblical perspective, the idea of a gay marriage makes as much sense as a square circle.  The United States may now call such a relationship a marriage.  God does not.

The mantra you keep hearing in the media is that “Love Wins.”  But the “love” that won has nothing to do with Biblical love.  Biblical love “does not rejoice in evil” (I Cor 13:6).  Biblical love obeys God’s commandments (Jn 14:15).  Biblical love is not focused on personal gratification but on the glory of God.  Make no mistake.  The “love” that won has been divorced from righteousness, which means that it is no love at all.  Please do not confuse the language of love with the love of Christianity.  They are different things.  The love of God cares about holiness and obeys what God says.

In addition, if you have been listening to the narrative that the media has been feeding the public, you know that the culture repeatedly accuses us Christians of hatred and bigotry.  You know us.  You are intelligent enough to see that the accusation is nonsense, but it does show that the Christian side is not the only side that sees a great divide between American culture and Christianity.  Here in America, the culture at large acknowledges this as well.

Therefore, I ask you again, please do not confuse American culture with Christianity.  My concern in emphasizing this distinction is to preserve in your minds the purity of Christ.  I do not mean that you can truly sully Him.  Christ is holy, and nothing you and I do or think will ever change that.  But just because Christ is holy does not mean we see Him as such.  I want us to see reality.  But when we confuse American culture with Christianity, we tarnish Christ.  When we start to wonder if Christianity approves of things the Bible clearly condemns, we are on spiritually dangerous ground.  Please do not go there.

In saying these things, I do not deny the historical contributions Christianity has made to American culture.  Just as a good teacher impacts her students, so has Christianity impacted this nation.  But the students have grown up and gone their own way, and they now oppose their teacher without knowing truly how much they owe her.  And the teacher sees what has happened and weeps.

Sincerity is a wonderful thing.  But sincerity by itself is empty. All sincere people are always sincere about something. I have seen Mormons who were sincere about their Mormonism and communists who were sincere about their communism. I have seen sincere environmentalists blow up ships and sincere Muslims blow up buildings. Many Republicans and Democrats are sincere about their politics, but their sincerity causes them to push for opposing policies.  For all I know, Hitler himself was quite sincere about Nazism.

This should challenge the rabidly popular notion that sincerity is what makes a heart right. You’ve heard the idea. “It doesn’t matter what Sarah believes so long as she is sincere.” This idea is not from God. A right heart is more than sincere. A right heart is sincere about the right things. It has a right focus. A right heart never has its focus on any of the many good things in life. Instead it is focused on the one great thing. A right heart does not focus on pleasure or family, academics or business, world peace or a clean environment. Its passion is Christ. A right heart may enjoy marital sex, a family and an education, and it may take steps toward alleviating poverty or cleaning the environment, but these things never become the soul’s trump card.

God is a jealous God. He demands that He be center stage in our hearts. When we pursue our business more than we pursue Him, we are like a wife who pursues a handsome coworker more than she pursues her own husband. She is free to work with the coworker and to be friendly toward him, but she crosses the line when she begins to give him her heart. Only one man has the right to that privilege.

Too many sincere people are like that woman. God made the soul in such a way that He alone must be its Husband, but instead we give the central place in our hearts to things like jobs, pleasure, money, fame, and power. Many of us understand that these pursuits easily damage the heart when they become its main focus.  What we rarely see, however, is that feeding the hungry and raising a family equally damage the heart by becoming its main focus. The ultimate purpose of a human being is not to feed the hungry or raise a family.

Many sincere people are in love with the church or with ministry more than they are in love with God.  Many sincere people have given central place in their hearts and lives to helping the poor or pursuing social justice. Many sincere people worship true doctrine more than they worship the true God. These sincere people are committing spiritual adultery against their God, and their lives will never be what God means them to be as long as their own desires or their good cause dominates their life.

Jesus is Lord. He reigns. We are not our own. We are bought at a price. Jesus will not have substitute lords as His rival. A right heart understands this and cries out for the grace of God to make it happen.

Open the eyes of my heart to see that You, O God, are the source of all good things and fill me with gratitude for Your kindness.

The heart that sees God sees that we owe everything to Him.  The heart that sees God sees that every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father of lights (Jas 1:17).  The heart that sees God is constantly grateful.  It is grateful for simple things like a cup of tea.  It is grateful for weightier things like children, which are a gift from God (Ps 127:3).  It is grateful for spiritual things like redemption and joy.  It is grateful because it sees.

The heart without gratitude withers away.  It fails to see the source of our blessings.  In fact, it often fails to see the blessings as blessings.  It takes for granted the fact that we have food and clothes and friends and work.  But the heart that sees God knows that we have no right to any of these things.  It knows that our home and food are a gift.  It sees in every good thing the grace and kindness of God.

We have such a good God.  A grateful heart simply sees that fact and responds in the   most natural way.   When we show gratitude, we have joy.  Grateful people are joyful people.  Ingrates are not.  If we pay no attention to what God has done for us, we live in our own fantasy world, and whatever “happiness” we construct for ourselves is merely the product of our fantasy.  But the real world of God and His grace is so much richer and deeper than any of our self-centered fantasies.  It produces real, lasting, deep happiness, and gratitude is the heartfelt response to that reality.  Thank you, God, for the riches of Your kindness.

A walk in the woods with the snow falling.

A hot cup of coffee and a chat with a friend.

Diving under the blankets when the wind howls.

A warm sun.

A laughing baby.

A hearty bowl of stew.

These pleasures are all brought to you by God.

Mothers and fathers and children and families.

The tulips in April and the fiery hillside in October.

The watermelon and the raspberry.

Green grass and blue sky.

The starfish and the mountain ram.

These gifts are all brought to you by God.

Laughter. Sight.

Rain. Fresh air.

A mind. A purpose.

These wonders are all brought to you by God.

Peace for your soul.

Forgiveness for your sins.

Love from the heart.

Freedom from condemnation.

These marvels are all brought to you by God.

Father, grant me a heart that is pure and simple and devoted to you, and I shall be content.

The University of Texas is a sophisticated world.  Professors, thinkers, influencers, media.  Indeed, the University of Texas is quite proud of its sophistication.  But God is not necessarily looking for sophisticated people.

God wants a simple heart in His people.   A simple heart trusts God as a child does.  It laughs as a child does.  It rejoices in simple pleasures and is free.  Praise you, God, for the sunrise this morning!

A simple heart is content.  It does not require that we get accepted to the school we want or that we get our article published in the right journal.  It is happy in God.  Praise you, God, for giving us yourself!

A simple heart is focused.  It knows that ultimately only one thing matters, and it does not get distracted by a thousand different activities.  The schedule may be full, but the heart is still.  Praise you, God, for quiet on the inside!

A simple heart sees God.  It sees because it is pure, and the pure in heart see God. (Mt 5:8)  It is not cluttered but clean.  Earth has a way of cluttering our affections, but God has a way of clearing out the clutter.  Praise you, God, for making us clean!

Sometimes we are too sophisticated for God.  Sometimes we are like the teenage girl who thinks she knows what her parents don’t and consequently never listens.  She is too smart to listen.  A simple heart is never too smart to listen.  It allows us to know God.  That is why I have seen three-year-old children who knew more of God than Phd scholars at the University of Texas.    We learn God by trusting Him, not by studying subtleties.  It really is simple.