Full text of R.C. Sproul’s sermon titled “Love The Lord Your God With All Your Mind” which was delivered at the 2012 National Conference.
Listen to the MP3 Audio here:
TRANSCRIPT:
R.C. Sproul – Founder of Ligonier Ministries
I remember several years ago being invited to speak at a college to the atheist club, and why they asked me I’ll never know. But in any case on that occasion, I said before I give my address here where I’m going to try to answer the intellectual questions and issues that atheism characteristically raises against theism, I want to put my cards clearly on the table so you’ll know where I’m coming from, so you’ll know I’m not trying to fool you in anyway.
But at the outset, let me say to you that though you say you do not believe in God, and you want me to give a compelling argument for His existence, I know going into this discussion that in fact, you already know that God exists and that your problem with the existence of God in the final analysis is not an intellectual problem; it’s a moral one.
Your problem is not that you don’t know that God exists. Your problem is you can’t stand the God whom you know exists.
Well, I gave that speech before I read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. But I was telling them what the New Testament says: that because of their hostility in their corrupt condition to the things of God, that by nature we do everything we can to suppress and repress whatever revelation God gives of Himself to us. And that is not without consequences.
It says here in Romans 1:19, “For what can be known about God is plain, because God has shown it to them,” so that the creature on the judgment day cannot plead that if the student didn’t learn, the teacher didn’t teach, because the teacher in this case is the perfect omniscient God. And if the student fails to get the message from this pedagogue, there is no excuse, for he says, “His invisible attributes and even His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world. So they are without excuse.” (Romans 1:20)
Now here’s the crux of the matter.
Romans 1:21-24: “Although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks to Him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. They claimed to be wise, but they became fools, so foolish as to exchange the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal men, birds, animals, creeping things. And for this reason, God gave them over to their wicked inclinations.”
And in Romans 1:28, “Since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up.”
What a horrible judgment! What a terrible thing that God would give you up! And He gives us up to a reprobate mind, to a mind that now in its fallen condition doesn’t have a scintilla of desire to love God with the mind.
In other words, dear friends, in our natural fallen condition, there is nothing more repugnant to our minds than the love of God. So that when the great commandment sounds in our ears that we are to love God with all of our minds, we have such an antipathy by nature, such an allergy to such an idea that we choke at the very thought of it.
We wonder why it is that there are some people in the history of the world who have manifested such brilliance and intelligence, yet end their journey in a militant atheism. We say, “How can that be when God’s revelation of Himself is so plain, is so clear?
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Poneros is the Greek. Manifestum is the Latin. That the knowledge that God gives of Himself is not vague. It’s not obscure. It’s so clear that everybody gets it. And yet you see people like Jean-Paul Sartre, who is evidence of such brilliance, men like the philosophers of the ages, Feuerbach, Marx, others, Kaufmann, who in all other degrees manifest such brilliance that they miss this fundamental truth.
Now, How Does That Relate To This Noetic Effect?
In the damage that is done to the mind in our fallen condition, it does not mean that our ability to think has been annihilated. Pagan thinkers can still add two and two and come up to four. Pagan thinkers can still reason soundly with a syllogism and can spot errors of logic without any help of being born-again.
You don’t have to be regenerate in order to get a PhD in mathematics. The mind in its fallen condition still has the ability to follow formal argumentation to a degree, and that degree ends when the discussion begins about the character of God, because that is where bias is so severe and hostility so great that the most brilliant of men stumble before it.
I’ve said in the past that in fact if a person begins the pattern of their thinking at the outset by refusing to acknowledge what they know to be true, that is by starting with the rejection of the knowledge of God, the more brilliant they are thereafter and the more consistent they are thereafter, the further away from God their reasoning will lead them.
Again, it’s not because their faculty of thinking has been extinguished. They can still reason, and they can still argue, and they can argue consistently. But again, if their beginning premise is a denial of what they know to be true and a refusal to acknowledge what they already know, it is no wonder that their conclusions lead them to become shepherds of death.
All right, if this is our natural condition, what is the first of all the relationship between rationality, between thinking and faith?
The late great Augustine made the comment that there is a symbiotic relationship between faith and reason, one that is so important that if you try to have faith without reason, the faith that you will display will not be authentic biblical faith, because a faith without reason, Augustine said, is not faith but credulity.
It’s the kind of silliness that affirms that belief in the existence of little green men who live on the other side of the moon whose nonexistence as a negative can never be proven.
And you can argue saying that we’ve had people on the moon who have never encountered these little green men, and we have the Hubble telescope who have never been able to capture in their lens these little green men.
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And these people who are steadfast believers in the little green men will say, “Wow, that’s because these little green men that live on the other side of the moon have a built-in allergy to telescopes, to scientists, and to astronauts, so that they make themselves carefully hidden whenever a telescope is pointed in their direction.”
Well, they can argue their point, but their faith is credulity. It’s foolishness.
Now, Augustine says that there is such a relationship between faith and reason, and that it is no virtue to rejoice in an irrational faith.
No, faith, though it is the substance of things unseen, is not a leap into the darkness. God never calls people to make a blind leap into the darkness as an exercise in faith. In fact, the New Testament always and everywhere calls us to leap out of the darkness and into the light.
And again, there are those even in our day who think that there is some kind of virtue in proclaiming their faith in what is patently absurd.
No, the faith that is revealed to us in sacred Scripture is intelligible. It is reasonable, but it is not deemed to be reasonable by those who have this moral hostility to it.
Now, I say all of this in preparation to try and to address the topic here about loving the Lord our God with all of our minds.
Now in the first place, we can’t love the Lord our God with any of our minds while we’re still in the unregenerate state. We’ve just heard a magnificent exposition of Paul’s teaching to the Corinthians where we are told by the apostle that by nature men do not know God, and that seems there that Paul is contradicting himself from what he says here in Romans 1, where he says they do know God, and the reason for the judgment of God is because they know Him and refuse to worship Him, refuse to honor Him as God, nor are they grateful.
Well, what’s the contradiction here? Again if you look carefully in the New Testament, just as the Hebrews had different nuance meanings to the word to know, so in the New Testament sometimes the verb to know, (gnoskein), means “to have an apprehensive cognitive awareness of something.” That’s one kind of a knowledge.
Somebody asked me did I know Joe Montana. Joe Montana? I know of Joe Montana. I once spoke to him for five seconds, and I can say I know him, but it’s simply a cognitive awareness of this man who is recognizable because of his fame, that I can say, “Yes, I know him that way.”
But am I a friend of him? Am I known of him? If you would ask Joe Montana, “Do you know, R.C. Sproul?” he’d say, “Who?” He wouldn’t have a clue as to who I am.
And it’s just like in the Old Testament, when the Bible says, “Adam knew his wife, and she conceived,” it doesn’t mean that Adam was introduced to Eve, and he had this cognitive awareness of her presence and suddenly she was pregnant. That’s not what that means.
There the verb to know I should say is pregnant with meaning. It means far more than a mere intellectual apprehensive, cognitive awareness. It means a deep personal tender relationship.
And so on the one hand, Paul says through natural revelation we all have this cognitive awareness that God exists, but apart from regeneration, apart from the changing of the heart by the Holy Spirit, we don’t know Him salvifically. We don’t know Him personally. We don’t have a loving relationship with God.
BY NATURE, THE MIND DOES NOT LOVE GOD AT ALL
So we begin by understanding that by nature the mind does not love God at all, and it will not love God at all unless or until God the Holy Spirit changes the disposition of our hearts which He does supernaturally and immediately and sovereignly by the Spirit’s work of regeneration by which we are born again.
And here’s something we have to understand, dear friends, that regeneration is the necessary condition for loving God with your mind. It’s a necessary condition. Without it, there is no love of God.
Can we get rid of this idea that’s pervasive in the evangelical world that unbelieving people are seekers of God? Not only is that a mistake to think it, but to use it to design worship is one of the most pernicious errors that the church has ever fallen into…. (a little more…)
Now look here. Now wait a minute. You know, this applause is a nice kind of a thing, and I know that I’m a Presbyterian, but you know, you don’t have to clap your hands, just once in a while say, “Amen.” You’re among friends. All right.
The Bible says that natural man does not seek after God. So where do they get the idea that all these unbelieving pagans are seeking after God. I hear it all the time. And they’ll say, “Well, my neighbor is not a Christian, but he’s seeking.”
Thomas Aquinas was asked this question in the Middle Ages. He said the reason people assume that the pagan is seeking after God is because we look at that person, and we see that they’re seeking after the benefits that only God can give them. They’re looking for peace of mind, for purpose, for relief from guilt and all the rest. And so we assume that therefore they’re seeking after God.
They’re not seeking after God. They want the benefits of God without Him. They’re seeking after the benefits that only God can give them. All the while, they are running as fast as they can away from God.
Now that antipathy towards God is not instantly cured the minute you’re born again. The minute you are born again for the first time in your life, you are now disposed to the things of God rather than against them. Now you like to have God in your thinking rather than despising the idea of having God in your thinking.
But the residual effects and the power of your fallen human condition, all of that baggage to a certain degree comes with you when you are saved and is not eliminated entirely until you’re glorified in heaven, so that the whole pilgrimage that you go through in your Christian life in your sanctification is a pilgrimage by which we are seeking to increase the love of God with our minds.
Jonathan Edwards once said the seeking after God is no business of the pagan, but the seeking after God is the main business of the Christian.
AND HOW DO WE SEEK AFTER GOD?
Why does Jesus tell us that we are called to love God with all of our minds? Why does the Apostle Paul say that the only way we can have this metamorphosis that was spoken of before, this change, this transformation is by having a new mind?
You don’t get the love of God from a hip replacement, or a knee replacement, or even from a heart transplant. The only way you can be transformed is with a new mind. And the only way you can have a new mind is to pursue with all of your power and diligence the knowledge of God… the knowledge of God.
If you despise doctrine, if you despise knowledge, that would probably indicate that you’re still in that fallen condition where you don’t want God in your thinking.
But if you’re a Christian, what you want is God to dominate your thinking, God to fill your mind with ideas of Himself.
Isn’t it strange that our Lord says that we are called to love God with our minds?
You say, we’re still supposed to love Him with our strength and with our hearts and our souls and all that stuff. But how do you love God with your mind?
We don’t usually speak of love in terms of it being a cerebral or an intellectual activity, do we? In fact, most of our understanding of love in our secular culture is described in passive categories. We speak of falling in love, not jumping in love, but falling in love, like it was an involuntary accident. I didn’t slip. I wasn’t pushed. I fell in love.
If you remember the old songs, “Zing went the strings of my heart.” I had nothing to do about it. There’s was one popular song that gets at this point that goes back 50 years at least. “To know, know, know him is to love, love, love him, and I do. Yes, I do. Yes, I do.”
Alright? See, Randall, I can do rhythm and blues. To know Him is to love Him. And we want to love God.
BUT HOW CAN YOU LOVE HIM IF YOU DON’T KNOW HIM?
Nothing can be in the heart that is not first in the mind. And if you want to have an experience of God directly, particularly in worship where you bypass the mind, you’re on a fool’s errand. It can’t happen. You might increase emotion. You might increase entertainment. You might increase excitement, but you’re not going to increase the love of God because you can’t love what you don’t know. So that a mindless Christianity is no Christianity at all.
Some people said, “Amen,” and then you get this smattering of applause by doubled-minded people that don’t know… you know, they’re blown to and fro with every wind of doctrine.
There’s only two minutes left of the speaking at this conference, and I’m going to make the most of it, so stop applauding and stop amening.
If I want to love God more, I have to know Him more deeply. And the more I search the Scriptures, and the more I focus my mind’s attention on who God is and what He does, the more I understand just a tiny little bit about that, the more my soul breaks out in flame, the greater ardor I have to honor Him, and that that understanding of the mind, the more I understand God with the mind, the more I love Him with my mind.
What does it mean to love with the mind? It’s to hold in high esteem, to think about God with reverence and with adoration because the more we love God with our minds, the more we’ll be driven to do that other thing that is alien to us in our fallen condition, and that is to worship Him.
So I believe that the great crisis in our day in worship is inseparably related to the crisis in pursuing God with our minds. Again, to pursue Him with our minds, simply for intellectual enjoyment – though I have to say that the understanding of God that we get, the more we seek Him is the most intellectually satisfying thing we can ever have – but if we try to do that without the ultimate purpose of loving Him and of worshipping Him, we haven’t understood what it means to love Him with our minds.
To love God with your mind is to esteem Him. And the more you know about Him, the more glorious He will appear to you. And the more glorious He appears to you, the more inclined you will be to praise Him, to honor Him, to worship Him, and in the final analysis to obey Him.
Let’s pray.
Our Father and our God, we have not sought You with our whole minds. We have not loved you with even a serious portion of our minds. Our lack of honor, our lack of worship, our lack of adoration reveals how little we love you with our minds. And so we pray that Your Spirit, who is the Spirit of truth, who has quickened our souls, changed the direction of our will, might inflame our minds with love for You and for the truth that You have revealed in Jesus Christ. For we ask it in His name. Amen.
