The Role of the Mind in Worship

Grace Fellowship Church

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This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

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So this afternoon we're turning to 1 Corinthians chapter 14 and verse 13 as we inch closer and closer to the end of this first letter to the church in Corinth.

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And as we continue our study today, we again are going to find the

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Apostle Paul relaying instructions to the

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Corinthians about the use of spiritual gifts. When I prepare to preach,

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I often think out loud. And as I was preparing this week, Nicole, my wife, was painting in the hallway and she said, are we still talking about tongues?

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And the answer to that is yes. Paul is still harping on tongues. And if we remember from last week,

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Steve preached from the first 12 verses of chapter 14. And we heard

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Paul argue that the Corinthians should seek gifts that are most effective in building up the church, building up the people of God.

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Paul reiterated that this highly sought after gift of tongues, which these believers so much loved, was good for the edification of the individual.

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He said it's good for you in your own spirit, but prophecy, that is speaking

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God -inspired words, was even better. And it was better because it built up not just the individual, but the whole church.

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And so Steve rightly emphasized last week this need to build up the church, build up the church.

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We should always be seeking not to serve just ourselves, but the whole church as we build up one another in love.

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And we saw, I don't know, I can't remember if Steve pointed it out, but in those first 12 verses, Paul brings up that reference of building up or benefiting the church five different times.

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Verse 3, 4, 5, 6, and then caps it off in verse 12 with these words.

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He says, so with yourselves, since you are eager for the manifestation of the

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Spirit, since you want spiritual gifts, he says, where am

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I? Strive to excel in building up the church. So that's what

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Paul was teaching last week. That's what we heard last week in those first 12 verses. Now, I recap all of this.

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This is important. I recap all of this because Paul begins now our section in verse 13 with what word?

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It's that familiar word, therefore. One of Paul's favorite conjunctions, this word that he uses like an adhesive to build one thought upon another.

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And so Paul begins our passage with this word, therefore.

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And what this means for us today is that everything that Paul is going to say in our text today, this text that is before us, is meant to elaborate on this idea of building up the church.

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We're to build each other up. I think we got that message very clearly last week.

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We're to serve one another. Everything that we do when we come together is not just for our own good, but for your good and for your good and for everyone's good.

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Now, how do we build up each other in love? How do we build up one another? Steve gave us some examples and opportunity at the end of his sermon.

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Talk to one of us, we'll give you opportunities to serve. But Paul's going to answer that as well.

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And that might be a question, too, that some of you have asked. I know that I've spoken to some of you and in my company you've asked a similar question.

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When the church comes together, when we assemble as Christ Church, how can

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I build up my brothers and sisters in Christ? How can I be useful when

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I'm here? Not just a person and a pulse, but how can I be of benefit to God's people?

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And an equally valid question is this. When the church assembles, how are we to build you up in Christ?

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How are we to strengthen you and to make you more like Jesus? And you may or may not recognize it, but these are vitally important questions for us to ask and answer in the church because what this all boils down to when we get to the very bottom of it is that it speaks to the essential ministry of the whole church.

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What is the church's business? What is your role when we come together?

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What should this church and her members prioritize so that we can become more like Christ?

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If someone's coming from a different church, maybe that they have better music and a good light show and they turn the lights off when we start to preach.

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They might ask, what does edifying, spirit -filled worship look like?

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What should we do as Christians, what should we do and desire? I know

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I'm asking a lot of questions. In order to be better, to be more effective, to be more Christ -honoring

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Christians in the local church. These are important questions. If you left at the end of last week going, okay,

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I want to build up the church, but how? Now Paul's going to answer that question. This is how you can build up the church.

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I'm not going to hold us in suspense. I'll give it to you now, and then we will unpack it together.

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You know, I think I say that every week. So this is what Paul is going to show us in these verses, verses 13 to 25.

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Here Paul shows us that the best way that we can build up the church, and the best way that the church can build you up, is through the sanctified use of our minds, the brains, the organ that God has put between our ears.

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As Christians, we should emphasize the role of the mind in our worship as a church.

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Now that might sound too cerebral for you. You might doubt that, but I'm going to show you what

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Paul means. God has given us the capacity to think, to reason, to understand.

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And here we'll see that we should use and further develop, further develop this

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God -given intellectual ability that God has given us to pray, to sing, to speak, and to live in a way that engages all of our mental faculties.

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So today what Paul is going to do is he's going to speak about spiritual gifts, again, like Nicole asks in the hallway, are we talking about tongues again?

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Yes. And he's going to show us by contrasting prophecy and tongues, he's going to teach us a principle about the vital role of the

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Christian mind. If you want to summarize this, it's the role of the Christian mind in the worship of the church.

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Now for many of you already, I know that I'm preaching to the choir. I know that a lot of you guys come to this church because we address the mind.

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And so you might feel perhaps prepared to be a bit more passive in this sermon because I already know that I need to use my mind.

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But I want us to see this, that even though we see this inherent error in the church to emphasize emotions at the expense of the intellect, if we're really, really honest with ourselves, be honest with yourself for a second, if we're really, really honest with ourselves, we must confess that we are often intellectually complacent.

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We come and we hear the sermon, and listening to preaching is hard. Listening to expository preaching is hard.

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Listening to expository preaching from me is even harder. But we come here and it's easy for us to turn off our minds.

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At nine o 'clock at night when we're tired and our defenses are down, it's a lot easier to scroll social media than it is to read scripture.

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It's easy for us to endlessly consume shallow clips on a screen.

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It is easier to do that than to engage in a deep and thorough study of the attributes of God.

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If we're honest, we're often more inclined to be lazy with our minds than we are to love

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God as He commands us with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

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And this is, brothers and sisters, this is reinforced by the culture in which we live.

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I think you know that. The place that we live and move and have our being is an anti -intellectual age.

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There is no value in deep, rigorous, and careful exercise of the mind.

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And R .C. Sproul says this, we live in what may be the most anti -intellectual period in the history of Western civilization.

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I'm just going to give us a primer on the mind, just so you guys know if you're wondering where we're going. We must have passion, he says, indeed hearts on fire for the things of God, but that passion must resist with intensity the anti -intellectual spirit of the world.

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And this anti -intellectual spirit has, without a doubt, infiltrated our churches, and it has infiltrated your soul to some degree.

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It is, after all, the very air that we breathe in our workplaces, in our families, in our neighborhoods, especially in the media that we consume.

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It is an anti -intellectual air. I was reading a book this week by J .P.

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Moreland. The title of the book is, Love the Lord your God with all of your mind. And he says there, the contemporary

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Christian mind is starved, and as a result, we have small, impoverished souls.

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Another writer, a Christian author, who wrote a book entitled, Jesus Christ and the Life of the

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Mind, Mark Noll, he delivers this humbling, stinging death blow, it seems, to the evangelical mind.

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He says, the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.

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And it's true. It's true. And the world sees it. I was looking at an article, again this week, in the

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New Yorker, and this author in this liberal media outlet, the

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New Yorker, he wrote this article titled, The Wasting of the Evangelical Mind.

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And he compared, and he had a good understanding of church history. He compared the mind of, say,

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Jonathan Edwards, who wrestled with metaphysics and epistemology in his sermons.

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He referenced C .S. Lewis, who was a public intellectual, and was an apologist and an evangelist, trying to share the gospel with those who prided themselves as being higher thinkers.

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He referenced T .S. Eliot, who was a poet of the highest caliber, who intertwined theological thoughts with all of his art and writings.

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And then, about the modern evangelical, he says, evangelicalism in America, however, has come to be defined by its anti -intellectualism.

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The style of the most popular and influential pastors... Think about this.

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The style of the most popular and influential pastors tends to correlate with shallowness.

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Charisma trumps expertise. He's not a believer. He's wrong about Christ, but he's right about that.

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That we, naturally, in our own sin nature, are inclined to go the easy way.

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And we are inclined, in our own flesh, to remain mentally in neutral. That's why

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TV is so easy. That's why social media is so easy. That's why reading and praying and studying and thinking deeply is always hard.

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And that's why it's probably one of the biggest challenges in your disciplines right now. Because, I know it is for me, too.

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We live in this anti -intellectual, media -saturated age. And God wants us, he commands us,

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I say again, to love him with all of our mind. So how do we do that? What does building up the church look like when we use our minds?

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What we find, I think a helpful thing, is that this was the same deficiency that was in the

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Corinthian church. The Corinthian church wanted to have the big, visible gifts. They wanted to speak in tongues.

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They wanted the supernatural. They wanted to be skilled in speech.

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They even wanted to look wise and to be associated with the wise. But they overlooked this one fact that it is not through appearances, not through emotions, not through a big spectacle, but it's through the addressing of the mind that the church is built up.

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It is through the mind that we reach the heart. It is through the mind that we will even reach lost sinners.

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Now, long introduction. We'll get into our text. Let's see it for ourselves.

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1 Corinthians chapter 14 and verse 13. And Paul writes in verse 13.

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I'm going to read verse 13 to 15a, the first half of that 15th verse. He writes,

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Therefore one who speaks in a tongue should pray that he may interpret. For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful.

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What am I to do? I will pray with my spirit, but I will pray with my mind also.

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So here we see, as we look through this, you're going to notice this, that Paul addresses some of the main activities of the church.

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The main activities that we would be engaged in when the church comes together for worship. He mentions praying in verses 13 and 14, singing in verse 15, instructing, that's a reference to preaching and teaching in verse 19, and then evangelizing in verses 24 and 25.

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And in every instance that he addresses these activities, there's a common theme. And you can look at it afterwards, be a

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Berean, see it for yourself. But every single time, even as he talks about prophecy in tongues, he makes a reference to the importance of the mind in each of these activities.

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Paul writes in verse 13, that tongues that are not interpreted may be beneficial to an individual spirit.

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But if they are left uninterpreted, that is that no one translates for the benefit of others, they are of little to no value, he says.

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That is a point that many churches today miss. I'm not being critical of charismatic churches.

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It's just true that if you pray in tongues, Paul says, that's great. But praying in tongues is incomplete.

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It's even rendered obsolete. It's even unhelpful, unless there's someone that can translate that language.

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And here's the reason why. We see it in Paul's first point. When we meet together, when we pray in tongues, when we pray together, we're to pray with our minds.

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That's point number one. Pray with your mind, Christian, when you come to church on Sunday.

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And when you pray alone in your home, pray with your mind. When the

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Christians gathered for worship, when they prayed in tongues without an interpreter, Paul says that their minds were unfruitful.

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He uses the Greek word akarpas, which means useless or unproductive.

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And we need to see this. And respectfully to those other churches, they need to see this. That any praying in the church's public worship that is indiscernible, any praying that it could be another language, but if it sounds like Babel to me, it's a useless kind of praying.

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It serves no purpose. It produces nothing of benefit for those who join in. It does not prompt thanksgiving in the hearts of others.

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No one can say, Amen, as if to say, I agree. A prayer that does not actively include and engage the mind is an unfruitful kind of praying.

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Now you might say, Shane, that's not a problem in the church today. We don't really have to concern ourselves with that.

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And I see a smirk, and I plan to say this, that all we have to do is ask some of the brothers and sisters in this room, and they'll say that they've had that kind of experience firsthand, probably even this year.

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And it reminds me of an experience that I had, and I've shared this with some of you, but I remember I spoke 10 or 12 years ago.

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I was part of a conference in Edmonton, and I was a member of this conference's prayer team.

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And at the height of this conference, it was a three -day conference, Saturday night, they have the big speaker.

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Their last name is Graham. And they're going to preach the gospel. They're going to preach the gospel and call people to repentance and faith.

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And the prayer team was called together to intercede for this event, for this evangelistic message that was going to be preached to thousands of people.

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And the leader of the group, I remember this very, very clearly, brought out their Bible, turned to Romans 8 .26.

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And they read from there, Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what to pray for as we ought.

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We don't know how to pray, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.

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And then at this pivotal moment in the conference, with people's salvation, at least in our minds, hanging in the balance, we did not give our time to interceding for lost souls.

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We didn't pray that the person would preach with clarity and boldness and with the power of the

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Holy Spirit. We didn't pray that the Holy Spirit would convict these people of their sins and turn them to Christ.

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Instead, as a result of poor exegesis and misapplication of this scripture, the people, the prayer team, dozens of people in this room were instructed to essentially fall on the ground and moan and groan.

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And I sat there in the back of that room as a new Christian, wanting to crawl not just out of the room, but out of my skin as I watched people around me just moaning and groaning and repeating indiscernible words.

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I was so uncomfortable and confused. I could not join them in their praying.

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I could not say, Amen. For all I knew, they could have been groaning about the score of the Oilers game.

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It was indiscernible. It was unhelpful. In the words of Paul, it was a useless prayer meeting.

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It was useless. Instead, Paul tells us that when a person prays in the church, if you were called to pray in the church, when you come to the prayer meeting on Thursdays, we should pray with our spirit and with our mind.

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Pray with the help of the spirit. Romans 8 .26 is still true, even though that group got it wrong.

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The spirit does help us in our interceding, and we should seek the spirit's help. But we should also pray with our minds.

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We should engage the mental faculties that God has given us.

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Now, I'll come to another objection. Now, you guys might say, this is not necessary,

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Shane. We don't pray in tongues here. Most of us do not think that tongues is a present, current manifestation of the

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Holy Spirit. Or for those of us who do, we don't think it's a prominent manifestation of the Spirit.

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Does it really apply to us? Do I really need to be told to pray with my mind? And I'm going to submit that you do need to be told to pray with your mind, even if you don't practice praying in tongues.

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Think about what Christ preached in Matthew 6 and verse 7. He preached the Sermon on the

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Mount, and there he taught his disciples. He said, Matthew 6 .7, And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the

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Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words.

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Let me ask you, brothers and sisters, how often do you utter and offer up the same tired, mindless, empty phrases in your prayer life?

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How often do you think that you're going to be heard, not because you're thinking about what you're praying, meaning what you're praying, but just because you're offering up, in Christ's words, many words.

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Just offering up many words. We must confess that just as we're lazy in the evenings,

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I'm not going to put that on you, just because I am sometimes lazy in the evenings, and you might be too, we're mentally lazy in our prayer lives.

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Sometimes it leads to neglect of the prayer life, because it's mentally taxing.

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Sometimes we don't dig deep into our minds to think about what it is that we're praying, but we dig deep ruts that we just follow mindlessly.

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And I really started to notice this myself. I don't know if some of the dads or moms in the room have experienced this, or will soon experience this, but when you're tired, all of those defenses start to break down.

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And I remember when my children, especially when they were a bit younger, on more than one occasion, I would be praying with my kids.

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It's the end of the night, we're tucking into bed, it's that last goodnight prayer as we give our cares to God, as we make our last -minute intercessions, and then it's bedtime.

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And on more than one occasion, I remember my kids calling me out when I started, and they will, they called me out and said,

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Dad, what are you doing? Because I started my prayer like this. Father, thank you for this food, please bless it to our body's use.

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I was like, what? Wait! My kids are, what are you doing, Dad? I'll tell you what

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I'm doing. It's useless praying. It's not praying with my mind. And that's an extreme example, but we do that all the time.

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Vain repetition of words. Useless prayer. If you want to come to the meeting of the church, so here's an answer now, you want to come to the meeting of the church, the assembly of the church, and build up, and bless your brothers and sisters.

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First come. First come to the prayer meeting. That's a good starting point. But once you're there, pray with your mind.

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Be thoughtful in your praying. Write down a prayer request that was shared last week, and be praying for it this week, and then pray for it at that prayer meeting the following week.

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You're remembering people's prayers. It's not just your concerns, and we have a lot of them, but it's other people's concerns.

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We're remembering them. We're taxing our minds. We're digging deep to bring God's people's concerns to the

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God of the universe. Intentionally choose your words. Change up your words.

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If you're like me, and your mind often wanders in prayer, you're prone to just mindless repetition of the same tired words and phrases, then pray scripture.

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Many of us have heard the story of George Mueller. People hold George Mueller up as just the

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Yoda of prayer, just the prayer master par excellence.

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They hold him up for his remarkable prayer life. What's interesting, if anybody knows about George Mueller, he started orphanages.

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He had a love for orphans. He had a concern for them. But that's not why he started orphanages. He started orphanages because he said he wanted to show that God was still in the business of answering prayer.

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I'm going to run an orphanage. I'm not going to let my needs be known to anybody. I'm going to bring it to God and God alone, and I trust because God is faithful.

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He's going to answer that prayer. And so when the orphans need a home, and they need furniture, and they need food,

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God is going to answer that. And one of the blessings that we have is that George Mueller kept a detailed record of some 50 ,000 specific recorded answers to prayer.

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30 ,000 of those, he reports, happened either within one hour or one day of the prayer being offered up.

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That's one prayer answered per day for 60 years straight, to put that into perspective.

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And in today's dollars, if we were to transfer that amount of money that he received in support for the orphanage and in support for the missions, if we were to put that in today's dollars, he received some $500 million in support for the care of the orphans.

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He was a generous man. He was a prayerful man. He depended upon God. And what you might be interested to find is that George Mueller, when he began to pray as a new

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Christian, he was terrible at praying. He confessed that his mind would often wander, and he would spend 10 or 20 or 30 minutes.

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How many of us experience this? Be sitting in an area and praying for 60 minutes and find that I haven't prayed in the last 30.

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I've wasted my time. He had a wasteful prayer life. But then one day he discovered that he could pray in a way that was focused and effectual if he prayed through his daily

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Bible reading, just to pray through Scripture as he went along. And one biographer writes this. He says,

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But once he began the practice of conversing with God about what he found in the Word of God, he scarcely ever suffered with those problems in prayer again.

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Praying through a passage of Scripture as he went, walking about in the fields, was the uncomplicated method that transformed the daily experience of one of the most famous men of prayer.

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And so ask yourself, is your prayer life weak? Is your prayer life wanting? Is it inconsistent?

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Is it absent? Then do like George Mueller. Open your Bible. Pray through your daily reading.

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Pray through the Psalms. Pray through Paul's prayers. Pray the

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Lord's prayer. Whatever you do, pray with your mind. I need to speed up.

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Now, Paul writes this in verse 15b. He says, I will sing praise with my spirit, but I will sing with my mind also.

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Otherwise, if you give thanks with your spirit, how can anyone in the position of an outsider say amen to your thanksgiving when he does not know what you are saying?

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For you may be giving thanks well enough, but the other person is not being built up.

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The other person is not being built up. Here, Paul shows us that we should not only pray with our minds, but that we should sing with our minds.

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Christian, sing with your mind. What does that mean? I find it interesting that Paul, he's talking about, remember this, he's talking about tongues.

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He's talking about prophecy. Now, why is he talking about singing? Somewhere in between.

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What does singing have to do with any of this? I think it's often the case, and we'll see this, if you think about popular

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Christian music today, that the neglect of the ministry of the word and prayer, when we don't have mindful preaching, when we don't have deep theological praying, then we end up with shallow singing.

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A shallow word and prayer ministry will have a detrimental effect on the ministry of music in the church.

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Perhaps that's why we have such a pronounced lack of deep, solid Christian music in the modern evangelical world,

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I'll say. But here, Paul says that we should sing both, he says, with our spirit and with our mind.

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It's almost a direct parallel to what Christ says, if you remember Christ's words in John 4, 24.

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He says, God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.

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We must worship in spirit and in truth. In the church, we must sing in spirit, spirited worship and in truth.

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When the church comes together, we're to build each other up. We must sing songs of real substance.

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I know that you're not going to hear Hillsong from this little platform we have.

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You're not going to hear so many of the songs that you hear on the radio and it's because we can't condone the words in the songs and more importantly, we can't condone the theology that informs the words of those songs.

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We must sing songs of real substance. And I'll give those bands credit, they have catchy music and the instrumentation is usually very excellent.

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The very best artistry is applied sometimes to the worst theology.

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But we must sing songs of real substance. We must worship passionately and truthfully and the best way for us to produce heat, if we want white hot worship, is to unleash light.

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I've said it before, I'll say it again, that worship done aright is always a response to revelation.

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We need from this pulpit to preach and teach the whole counsel of God and we also need to sing the whole counsel of God.

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That's why when I read a psalm like Psalm 6 today, that might have seemed completely irrelevant to you.

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It was a big deal to that psalmist. But guess what, it's the word of God and it's a song from the

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Bible's hymnal and so we're going to read it because we need the whole counsel. Now let me ask you, do you come to church on Sunday?

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Do you come here on Sundays to sing, to really sing, to sing in spirit, meaning not to hum or not to whisper the words, but to raise your voice and let the people of God hear your words, hear the praises of God on your lips?

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Do you come on Sundays to sing praises to God with all of the breath that God has put in your lungs?

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Do you come to church every Sunday to build your brothers and sisters up both with intensity of worship and intellect in your worship?

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One of the best ways for us to sing with our minds on Sundays and throughout the week is not only to sing good songs, but to consider the words of those songs that we were singing.

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I made reference to that as I was introducing one of our hymns today. We shouldn't tune out when we don't know a song or even if our mind wanders, bring it back and look at the words that you're singing.

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Think deeply and feel deeply about the words in your hymnal. And often this takes advanced preparation.

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It means that we need to become students not only of the Bible, we should be students of the Bible first, but we need to also be students of hymnody.

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We need to be students of our hymnals. We need to know the words that we're singing.

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We need to be able to sing verse 2 in a hymn and go, oh, I cannot wait for verse 3.

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That anticipation. It was like I experienced it, I didn't plan on it, but our brother

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Sam played the opening line to Holy, Holy, Holy, and it was that exact same thing.

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The music, the music is wonderful, but what makes it even better is to know the first words that are going to come out of my mouth when we start singing.

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We need to know the words that we are singing. And I've heard it said, and I've often repeated it, that if I had to live on a desert island with only two books in my possession, they would be a

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Bible and a hymnal. The hymnal, I confess, is not my favorite book.

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I maybe would want to bring the pilgrim's progress, but a Bible and a hymnal because I need the Bible to fill my heart and my mind with the knowledge of God and then a hymnal to give me words to pour out that heart and mind in praise to Him.

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A Bible and a hymnal. And I think about Paul and Silas. If you can picture them in the

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Philippian jail. We're told it was midnight. The jailer had to call for the lights to be turned on when he came rushing into the jail room.

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In Acts 16 .25, it says this about Paul and Silas. About midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God and the prisoners were listening to them.

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Midnight. There's no lights. Even if they had a hymnal, they wouldn't be able to read the words on it.

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And so they had to have the words of those hymns stored up in their minds.

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They had to sing with their minds. Now ask yourself, if the authorities were to whisk in here this afternoon and cart all of us off to jail, maybe we even get the benefit of being in the same cell block where we can hear each other.

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Brother or sister, if PJ were to break out into a hymn, could you join him without your hymnal?

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Could you sing hymns for five minutes? Could you sing for ten minutes? In a year's time, would you still have those hymns in your mind?

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I encourage you. We need to sing with our minds, and to sing with our minds is to know the words that we are singing.

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We've offered it before. You have hymnals on your chairs. If you don't know your hymnal well enough, if you feel like you're not singing every

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Sunday with your mind, take one of those hymnals. We don't do it every week, but we have brand new hymnals and a

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Sharpie marker. Write your name on it. Take that hymnal. Make it your own. I got permission from PJ earlier today to put him on the spot like this, but I love our brother's relationship with his hymnal.

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I love that he picked up a hymnal on Thursday and said, Wow, this is stiff. That's a good indicator.

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Not to flatter you, brother, but if one of us were to take PJ's hymnal home by accident, we would get home, and almost immediately we would realize, this is

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PJ's hymnal. His name is all over it. He's marked it up. He has made it his own.

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He's learned the obscure songs, and if you're here on Thursday, you know that. We have no idea the tune of those songs, but the words are good, and our brother knows them.

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God does not require that we sing with a beautiful voice. He does not require that we have the musical ability of the first violinist in the

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New York Philharmonic, but what God does require is that we sing to him with a full heart, with spirited passion, and with a mind filled with praise for him.

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So, brothers and sisters, pray with your mind, and sing with your mind. Thirdly, Paul goes here.

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He says in verse 18, he says, I thank

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God that I speak in tongues more than all of you. Nevertheless, in church,

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I would rather speak five words with my mind, there it is again, in order to instruct others than ten thousand words in a tongue.

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Paul doesn't disparage tongues in this letter, nor is he envious of the Corinthians because he has the gift of tongues, or sorry, because they have the gift of tongues, and he does not.

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It's not because he lacked anything. This might surprise you. You might not want to own this, but Paul spoke in tongues.

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The Apostle Paul was, he says, more than all of you. So, find your most charismatic church, and someone who's speaking in tongues.

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Paul has them beat. Paul spoke in tongues, and yet, despite his love and his enthusiasm for speaking in tongues, and I'm not teaching, by the way, that tongues continue today.

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If you want my opinion, ask me after, but Paul spoke in tongues then, and despite his love and his enthusiasm for speaking in tongues,

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Paul shows us that an even better way, an even better way for us to build up the church than speak ten thousand words in a tongue.

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He uses the Greek word, murios. I'm pretty sure that's where we get our English word, myriad. It just means an endless number.

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If I spoke all of the words in the world in a tongue that was not understandable to you, regardless of the number of words, it would be worse than if I were to just speak five words that you could actually understand.

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Maybe that's a good point for a short sermon. There's just five words that you can understand rather than ten thousand words that you can't.

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And he says that these words are spoken to instruct. That's the Greek word, katikeio.

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If you recognize the sound of that word, our English word, katikesis, or catechism, to instruct, comes from that word katikeio.

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And what it means is to teach in a detailed, in a systematic way.

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It means to think deeply and then to teach deeply. It's to use your mind.

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It's to be consistent. It is to be, the word is escaping me, intentional in teaching.

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And if we're to build up one another at Grace Fellowship Church here, this must be the way that we speak.

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We speak with our minds. We instruct with our minds. We are, as Paul would say, we are instructed or instructing with our minds.

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Now, what does this mean from the pulpit? It means that we have an obligation. When I stand up here, or when

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Steve stands up here, or anybody, if you're given this opportunity, which is a blessed opportunity and a privilege and a fearful responsibility, you have an obligation to instruct, to teach, to catechize in an in -depth, in a systematic way that informs the head, the heart, and the hands, the whole person.

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I've said it already, and the best way to reach the heart, if you want to reach the heart, is to go through the head.

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It's to go through the mind and into the midriff, as Paul uses in this text.

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Like Paul said to the Ephesian elders from this pulpit, we're to preach and teach the whole counsel of God.

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And that's a fearful responsibility. When Paul told Timothy in 2 Timothy 4, verse 2, he said,

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In the sight of God, and in the sight of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, preach the word.

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You want to know how to find a good church that's going to build you up? Find a church where they preach the word.

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We don't do it perfectly here, and they don't do it perfectly anywhere else. But if you're going to leave here, find a church that preaches the word.

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And we will labor, and I will labor, in the sight of God, to do just that, to preach the word, to teach the word, to instruct in a way, hopefully, that you can understand.

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But the obligation doesn't stop there. Paul's not writing just to the leaders of the

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Corinthian church. He's writing to the whole church. He's writing to the whole congregation. So that means that you, brothers and sisters, you, beloved, have a fearful responsibility and an obligation to instruct the people around you.

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And we're not going to look at all the one and others of Scripture, but how many of them have to do with warning, with encouraging, with exhorting, with speaking a word to a brother or sister or an unbeliever in need.

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We have an obligation to encourage, to rebuke, to exhort, to teach.

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We have an obligation to disciple. What that means is that every person in this church has an obligation, not only to be a disciple, which

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I hope you are a disciple, you're teachable and willing to learn, but also you are discipling.

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So you can say, yes, I am learning from so -and -so, and yes, I am instructing others.

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It doesn't have to be 10 ,000 words. Five words in Paul's phrase.

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But to go up to someone and to say, hey, I heard you talking about this situation.

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Have you thought about this text? Have you thought about this Scripture? And what that means for us as a congregation, if we're to use our minds, if we're not to be involved in the scandal of the evangelical mind, that we don't have a mind, it means that we need to be people, men and women,

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Christians, that read our Bibles. And it's not just water going in one pipe and out the other, but it's reading and it's meditating, it's considering, it's studying, it's to hear a conversation where someone is taking a text of Scripture way out of context and to be able to say, hey, brother, with all respect, that's not what that text means.

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This is what it means, and this is how we know. We need to develop our minds so that we can build up the church.

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And so your responsibility, brothers and sisters, is to be diligent, prudent, judicious, to develop the mind, the mental faculties that God has given you so that you can come to the church and be a blessing and a benefit to others.

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We should be continuously sharpening our minds. Now, I've been listening to a biography on John Calvin over the last couple of weeks, and one thing that I find really interesting, even

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John Calvin's detractors would have to admit that he was one of the most influential men in the

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Reformation, one of the most influential men even in church history. Some would say the most influential since the

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Apostle Paul. There's a debate about that. But what's interesting about John Calvin is this.

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John Calvin had many, many, many documented faults.

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He had a bad temper. One biographer said that he was prone to poor judgment because of his anger issues.

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He was a workaholic. He died young. He was terrible on his body. He was, by his own admission, publicly confident.

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Now, you might say, Gene, I want to use my mind, but I'm awkward, or I don't know how to say it.

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John Calvin, by his own admission, was publicly confident. He could get up and preach, but then privately awkward and shy.

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It's lesser known, but Calvin was continually in doubt of his own effectiveness. One person wrote, this was

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Calvin's divided self. The confidence in his calling set against his ever -present sense of unworthiness and dissatisfaction.

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He was frequently dissatisfied with himself and was acutely sensitive to the great divide between what was, what he was, and what should be.

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John Calvin was mercilessly hard on himself, and yet what made

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John Calvin one of the greatest reformers in history was this.

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One person wrote, above all, it was the ability to interpret the Bible.

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He saw that God had spoken and that the judicious use of the mind was essential to understand it and to relay that to others.

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Calvin's desire, it was said, was to renew his mind according to the word of God, to know

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God personally, wholeheartedly, with heart aflame for God.

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You want a heart aflame for God? You want to be useful in Paul's terms, fruitful, productive?

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Then speak, instruct, and be instructed with your mind. Last point, and I will make it very brief, is this.

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Paul begins in verse 20, and what we're going to see here is that the

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Christian, as Christians we should evangelize with our minds. If you got the little handout, I'm sorry,

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I changed my way, my mind part way, and you can ask me afterwards what I was going to say about the whole mind being mature, but here we see that we're to evangelize with our minds.

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And Paul writes in verse 20, he says, Brothers, do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature.

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The Christian should be holy. The Christian should be righteous. The Christian should be innocent as babes.

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When he says, be infants in evil, babes, we need to be babes. When Ellie is a babe in evil, one day she is going to get better at it, but right now she is a babe in evil, and we need to be a babe innocent in our relationship with sin, but we're to be mature in our thinking.

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That's the word teleos, like telescope. We're to be complete. We're to be perfect.

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We're to be mature in the way that we think. D .A. Carson in this commentary says, Mature Christians do not vilify understanding, nor do they focus on self -edification, rather in the church's meetings, they build up each other's understanding of the gospel.

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They build up. They think with their minds, and they think in a mature way, and we should be that way, mature in our thinking.

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I think I've said it before, but we should be able to see Lord willing, our brother

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Matt, in 20 years, go, man, where he has gone in those 20 years, praise

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God, not Matt, praise God for all the growth that we have seen. I think the trajectory we often see in the

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Christian life, it's a blip, and then it's a plateau. We need to grow in our maturity.

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It needs to be an escalating growth, imperfect, riddled with sin, with my own faults, my own difficulty, my own failures, but growth.

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May that be the trajectory in our lives. And then, to continue, he says,

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In the law it is written, by people of strange tongues and by the lips of foreigners, I will speak to these people, and even then, they will not listen to me, says the

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Lord. And then he quotes from Isaiah 28, Thus tongues are assigned, not for believers, but for unbelievers, while prophecy is assigned, not for unbelievers, but for believers.

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If, therefore, the whole church comes together, and this would have been the Corinthian dream, the whole church comes together, and all speak in tongues, because tongues, you know, is the best gift, they would say.

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If all speak in tongues, what's going to happen? And outsiders or unbelievers enter, will they not say, you are out of your minds?

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But if all prophesy, and an unbeliever or an outsider enters, he is convicted by all. He is called to account by all.

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The secrets of his heart are disclosed, and so falling on his face, he will worship God and declare that God really is among you.

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If we want to evangelize effectively, I can't get into it in great detail, but speaking in tongues is a sign of judgment.

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What Paul is talking about in referencing Isaiah 28 is that the

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Israelites were to be judged by God by a people, the Assyrians, who spoke a different language.

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Even then, they would not heed it. When unbelievers come into a congregation, if we are not using our minds, if we are speaking in tongues, and we've seen it before, they will come in, and what does he say?

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They are out of their minds. And so what is the alternative to being out of our minds towards unbelievers?

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So when people come into this room, they don't think that we're just crazy for crazy's sake. He says prophecy.

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Now, we can translate that. We do not believe in the office of prophets today, but those who speak the word of God, those who come with the word of God on their lips, illuminated and empowered by the

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Holy Spirit, what this means for us to use our minds in evangelism is to be rich in the word about Christ, to have a mind filled with the gospel, to have a mind and a heart that are overflowing with the word of God.

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And what this means, think about it this way, how many of you, brothers and sisters, now that you're saved, if you think about yourself being unsaved, how many of you would want other people,

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Christians, to use their minds in whatever way possible to see you saved?

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How would you want someone in this congregation to use their minds to see your children saved?

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What this means for us, first and foremost, is that we need to know the gospel. We need to be students of the gospel.

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We need to be able to articulate it. We even, I would suggest, need to be able to answer when people have questions or contentions about the gospel.

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Now this doesn't mean that you need to be some great apologist. You don't need to be a

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John Lennox or a Norman Geisler. But what it means is that you're a person that you study the gospel, you read it, you meditate on it, you consider it, you look at it like a jewel at all of the different angles, the beauty of this gospel message.

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And it's filled your mind enough that when the opportunity presents itself or when you make the opportunity, you're able to articulate it so that, as Paul would say at the end of these verses, so that they are convicted, so that they're called to account, so that the secrets of their hearts are disclosed, and so falling on his face they will worship

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God. We need to use our minds to make worshippers of God, which is the mission of missions, to make worshippers of God.

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And we don't have to be perfect in this. And I'll finish with this illustration. It's the life of D .L.

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Moody. I think his life perfectly illustrates this. Charles Spurgeon has been called...

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You hear me talk about Charles Spurgeon every week. I can't not talk about him this week. He's been called the prince of preachers.

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And it's been said of D .L. Moody that he was the prince of evangelists. D .L. Moody was born in 1837.

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in rural Massachusetts. He was one of six children who grew up on his family's farm.

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He wasn't keen on education. He left school. Children, think about this. He had a grade 5 education.

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That was the extent of his formal education. And at 17, he moved to Boston to work as a shoe salesman for his uncle.

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He was not a public intellectual, as they called C .S. Lewis. He was an uneducated man by all accounts.

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And praise God, his uncle said, I don't really want to hire you. I'm reluctant to hire you.

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But if you come to church with me every Sunday, I will hire you. And so D .L. Moody struck a deal with his uncle.

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I'll go to church with you every Sunday. And in return, I'll get a job selling shoes at your store.

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And prior to his conversion, one of the Sunday school teachers at that church that D .L. Moody attended with his uncle said this about him.

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Imagine if this was said about you. I've seen few persons whose minds were spiritually darker than was his when he came into my

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Sunday school class. And I think that the committee of the Mount Vernon Church seldom met an applicant for membership more unlikely ever to become a

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Christian of clear and decided views of the gospel, of gospel truth, still less any extended sphere of public usefulness.

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So darkened of mind, no ability to understand the gospel, useless.

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That was D .L. Moody. No degrees, no academic credentials, nothing about him that was particularly impressive.

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But when Christ saved D .L. Moody through that same Sunday school teacher, don't give up hope.

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When God saved him through that same Sunday school teacher, God not only saved him from sin and death, but he illuminated his mind and immediately put him to work reaching the lost.

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And D .L. Moody became one of the greatest evangelists in the history of the church. People marveled. They would go to him and say, how can such an uneducated man attract such a large crowd and communicate the gospel in such a powerful way?

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And he reached people. It wasn't through the forceful appeals to emotion. It wasn't through the performance of miracles.

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He didn't heal the sick. Some people say, if we could just heal the sick, then they would believe. Christ did that.

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They did not believe. But it was through the clear and the powerful proclamation of the gospel aimed at the minds and the hearts of his hearers.

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Moody wrote this about his preparation of his own ministry. He said, if we read the word and do not pray, we may become puffed up.

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If we pray without reading the word, we shall be ignorant of the mind and the will of God and become mystical and fanatical, maybe like the

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Corinthians, and liable to be blown about by every wind of doctrine. Instead, he writes,

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I never saw a fruit -bearing Christian. You want to bear fruit? You want to bless? You want to benefit? I never saw a fruit -bearing

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Christian who was not a student of the Bible. If a man neglects his Bible, he may pray and ask

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God to use him in his work, but God cannot make use of him for there is not much for the

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Holy Ghost to work upon. And then he finishes with this. He says, we must have the word itself.

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We must have the word itself, which is sharper than any two -edged sword.

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Do you want to see people come here on Sunday and believe the gospel? Then use your mind and preach the gospel.

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Use your mind and speak the word of God. Be a modern -day prophet in the sense that thus saith the

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Lord is always on your lips. This is what God says. This is your problem. This is what

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God says. I know my Bible because I read it, because I study it, because I'm rich in it. This is what

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God says. That's how people are going to come to this church and be saved. So contrary to what people think, when we become

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Christian, we don't forfeit our intellect. We don't commit intellectual suicide To the contrary,

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God takes a depraved mind, a fallen mind. He redeems it, and then he puts it to use in his church.

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And if you're sitting here listening to my words, that means God has given you a mind. And he's given you a mind to build up your brothers and sisters in this room and to glorify him with.