Inter-Varsity Press

About Thinking. Loving. Doing.

The Christian life is more than thinking—but not less. And it’s more than feeling—but not less. It’s more than doing as well—but never less. Healthy followers of Jesus engage their minds, hearts, and hands in glorifying him.

This volume, built on the 2010 Desiring God National Conference and John Piper’s recent book Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God argues that thinking and the affections of the heart are inseparable. Our emotions fuel our thoughts for God. Likewise, hard thinking about God leads to deeper joy in our relationship with him. And both, in turn, help us focus outward as we express a greater love for others.

Contributions by Rick Warren, Francis Chan, John Piper, R. Albert Mohler Jr., R. C. Sproul, and Thabiti Anyabwile bring a wealth of perspective and experience in calling for readers to love God and others with heart and mind and hands.

Contents

Contributors

Introduction

Think, Love, Do: In Gospel Perspective

David Mathis

1 The Battle for Your Mind

Rick Warren

2 The Way the World Thinks: Meeting the Natural Mind in the Mirror and in the Marketplace

R. Albert Mohler Jr.

3 Thinking Deeply in the Ocean of Revelation: The Bible and the Life of the Mind

R. C. Sproul

4 Thinking for the Sake of Global Faithfulness: Encountering Islam with the Mind of Christ

Thabiti Anyabwile

5 Think Hard, Stay Humble: The Life of the Mind and the Peril of Pride

Francis Chan

Conclusion

Thinking for the Sake of Joy: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

John Piper

A Conversation with the Contributors

(From the) Introduction

Think, Love, Do: In Gospel Perspective

David Mathis

The gospel has instincts. Part and parcel of the central Christian message is an impulse toward purity and an impulse toward unity. The purity instinct resists the compromise of the message, while the unity instinct is eager to link arms with others also celebrating the biblical gospel.

The reason purity and unity are, in this way, “built into” the gos­pel is that the God of the gospel is himself both a purifier and a uni­fier. No one cares more for the purity of the gospel—that his central message to humanity not be altered or tainted—than God himself. And, mark this, no one cares more for the unity of his church around her Savior, his own Son, than God himself. God is the great purifier and unifier.

So likewise, his gospel—which not only saves and sanctifies but is the richest, deepest, and fullest revelation of who God is—has both a purity impulse and a unity impulse “pre-packaged” into it, as it were. It’s quite simple on paper and gets terribly messy in real life.

How We Mess It Up

For those of us living this side of the fall as well as this side of heaven—sinners all but one—our purity and unity antennae inevi­tably function improperly. Some of us have lost the purity impulse altogether. We are happy to say things easy to hear and hard to mis­interpret, but none of the tough stuff. We are eager to bring people together—the more the merrier—but we have lost spine enough to speak the difficult, potentially relationship-threatening truths like our Savior does.

On the other hand, many of us—perhaps an inordinate number in the Reformed-evangelical community of which I am a part—have repressed the unity impulse. We can spot a supposed theological error from a mile away, and we have no trouble spinning out immediate shaming (and sassy) responses and calculated separations. Anyone different from us, in just about any way, could be a candidate for a verbal beat-down, or at least a relational snub. We have lost the heart to love like our Savior does.

And a third type creeps in among us reckless sinners: those of us inconsistent enough to swing back and forth between both mistakes, sometimes purifying with no concern for gospel unity, other times uniting without a care for gospel purity. We speak the truth without loving on Monday and love without speaking the truth on Tuesday—all the while falling short of Paul’s simple but nearly impossible chal­lenge for “speaking the truth in love” (Eph. 4:15).

The Good and Bad of “Unifiers and Purifiers”

The purifiers among us may thrive on “watch[ing] out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught”—and then excel at Paul’s next charge, “avoid them” (Rom. 16:17), but only after really dishing it out in person, or even better, behind the fortress of electronic communication. We might be eager to identify “a person who stirs up division” and may be even more eager to “have nothing more to do with him” (Titus 3:10). Some all-or-nothing purifiers are so focused on sniffing out the errors of other Christians that they don’t seem to pause long enough to con­sider whether they themselves are the ones causing the very divisions Paul is warning against. There is a beauty in the purity instinct, the beauty of preserving the gospel, but for us sinners a cluster of dangers can accompany it—arrogance, hatred, meanness, malice, slander.

The unifiers, on the other hand, glory in “how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity!” (Ps. 133:1) and remind us that Jesus prayed in John 17 that we “may become perfectly one, so that the world may know” (v. 23). The unifiers are eager to say with Paul, “May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 15:5–6). It’s the oneness texts that float the unifying boat—especially Ephesians 4:

[Be] eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. . . .

And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature man­hood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craft­iness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. (vv. 3–6, 11–16)

Is there ever beauty in Christian unity! And yet the cluster of dangers, due to our sin, that can attach to it include cowardice, practical-philosophical apathy, and doctrinal indifference.

Challenged in the Context of Community

One reality that helps us check our frequent blind spots and mis­judgments is Christian community. God rarely leaves us without a communal context in which some biblical purity and unity are simul­taneously functioning in small measure (or we wouldn’t have a com­munity), hopefully guiding us in such decisions. Those of us with an acute bent for purity need to hear often from the unifiers, and those of us typically leaning toward unity need the regular perspective of the purifiers.

As our finitude conspires with our sin, none of us sees any piece of reality from every perspective (as God does), and what we do see, we frequently misappropriate. So we benefit incalculably to know well the perspectives of others and run them through our developing grid of Bible-informed and Spirit-indwelt thinking, loving, and doing. …