Video Transcript: How Your Actions Shape Your Mind

Jean Jacques Rousseau was a very brilliant man. He had a very, very powerful  mind, and he's had a lot of influence on people. Let's look at a few of the things  that he believed that he, with his brilliant mind, thought to be the truth. He  thought that people are born good. We're essentially born with a very good  nature, but we're corrupted by family and we're corrupted by the social  institutions around us. But children just need that inner goodness to be able to  flourish and not be corrupted by family and not be corrupted by those other  similar social institutions. His solution was that children will do best in  government care. Children are going to flourish when they don't have parents as the primary caregivers, but when government is doing most of the training and  most of the educating. He also believed that the real will of the people is found  in its government, in its national government. And he also believed that sex  without marriage is healthy and right. These were some of the beliefs that  Rousseau held and that he taught, and that other people share in very widely  nowadays. Now, as we look at Rousseau's beliefs, I'd like to take a look at some of Rousseau's behaviors. Rousseau sponged off others for most of his life. He  did very little actual labor to earn a living, but he borrowed and lived off of  others. Eventually, he inherited his family's wealth and got the money from his  father. Before that inheritance, an old woman saved him from poverty four  different times. After he inherited the money and was quite wealthy, she fell on  hard times, and he let her die without helping her. He believed that charity was a one way street, and the street led to him, but not the other direction. He used his mistress for pleasure and not for love. In his own writings, he made no pretense  about that. He said she was just there for my physical pleasure. I had no interest in her as a person. But of course, she did have some children, and Rousseau  abandoned five children to a state orphanage where only 5% of the kids lived to  adulthood. It just had an extremely high mortality rate. Now consider these  behaviors. He was a lazy bones who sponge off others, who used them and  then didn't help them. In return, he used even his own mistress for pleasure, and he abandoned his kids. Now, if somebody acts like that, it's pretty handy to  believe that government care is the best care of children and not parental care,  because he didn't want to be a parent. He just wanted to ditch the kids, and so  his behavior helped produce his theory. His behavior led to certain kinds of  beliefs. Those beliefs were originally formulated partly as excuses, and they  became appealing to many other people because many other people behave  the same way and find it convenient if they don't want to put all the time into  caring for children, to let the government handle it, if they don't want to be  responsible for marriage, say, hey, sex without marriage is fine. I'm going to use  my various mistresses or men for whatever pleasure I want. I'm going to use  others, and I'm just going to consider that I'm naturally good, and it's just  wonderful that I'm able to use others because I'm such a good person. Well,  behavior affects belief. It shapes belief. And the Bible makes this very clear. It 

says the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day, when you're walking in the way of righteousness, it's  brighter you see more and more you live better and better the way of the wicked is like deep darkness they do not know over what they stumble to be wicked is  to make yourself more and more blind, To enter into deeper and deeper  darkness and to not know. Notice those words they do not know. Wickedness in  behavior can lead to not knowing in belief, evil men do not understand justice,  but those who seek the Lord understand it completely. Notice again, the  understanding is based on what kind of person they are and what they're doing.  Wisdom is knowing through doing. Throughout the book of Proverbs, there's this emphasis, again and again, on the practical nature of knowledge in Proverbs.  And so you know through doing, not just. Doing what you know, but when you  do stuff, it shapes the way you think. We sometimes think of it only as one way  traffic, where I think something and then I make up my mind based on what I  think. But very often, what I'm doing shapes how I'm thinking. And so the traffic  runs two ways. Knowing does shape doing, but doing also shapes knowing.  Now we've been looking at in a few talks about things that shape your mind.  Looking at social setting is one of those, the people you hang out with, the  people you fit in with, or occasionally fight with, and they're going to have an  impact on your thoughts and beliefs. And now I want to emphasize the impact  that your actions, that your pattern of behavior, has on your mind and on your  beliefs, on what you consider your knowledge. And then in another talk, we're  going to talk about your heart, the deepest motives of your inner self, and how  that too shapes the mind. The heart shapes the mind. But today we're going to  focus especially on how actions, patterns and behavior shape the mind. And so  let's focus on that in particular and see some of these things. Just to take a few  examples, you have a person who's a workaholic. He's always busy, he's always on the job, and he ends up being a business tycoon. And what does he believe? He believes that free enterprise blesses everybody. Do you think it might have  something to do with the fact that it made him a ton of money and that work,  work, work, work, work is his way of life. A slave driver back a century or two  ago, believed slaves were less than human, and that Scripture, the Bible, was in favor of slavery. You think that those beliefs might have had anything to do with  the fact that he was a slave driver and that he profited from owning slaves.  Today, many live in couples who just move in and shack up together, they  believe that living together makes a good marriage more likely, that if you  experiment, if you live together for a while first and then get married, you're a lot  more likely to have a good marriage than if you stay apart and don't get sexually involved until after the wedding ceremony. Now, this is an absolutely false belief. You would not have to believe the Bible. You just have to know a little bit of  sociology and the fact that the divorce rate is much higher among those who live together first. And also, of course, the fact that you live together first is almost 

like a divorce, when you tear tear apart from each other again. But anyway, they  believe that living together first makes a good marriage more likely, and they  believe it simply because that's what they happen to be doing. And so the  behavior leads to the belief. The belief is certainly not based on sound evidence  or data. Another example a man who is kind of a control freak and likes to run  everything and have everybody do what he says and wants his wife to be his  servant and his children always to do whatever he wants and never even think a different thought. Many people like that believe that the Bible teaches total  patriarchy, that the man is the complete leader in everything, and he does all the thinking for the household. Well. He holds that belief because it suits his pattern  of conduct. On the other hand, you can get children who believe their parents  are just very unfair, and some parents are unfair, but some children believe their  parents are unfair, even when they're not, because the children are rebelling,  they reach a certain kind of belief based on how they've been behaving lately,  and they need a belief that fits in comfortably with that behavior. You find people  who go off to college and they start partying like crazy, and they decide that the  Bible is outdated, and it might not even be anything that a particular professor  said to them, or any evidence that was brought their way, but they have just left  the home life where maybe they were taught some things from the Bible, and  now they want to live a different way, and all of A sudden, the Bible is outdated.  Well, it's their action that leads to a change in belief. There was a young woman  who was, I'm talking to a pastor about her own loss of faith after she had gone to college. She had grown up in a church going family thought she believed some  things. But now, after she'd been in college for the better part of a year, she  decided that the Bible pretty shaky at best and probably not true. Well, the  pastor asked her, when did you start to feel that way? Was there a particular  time you know, when you just kind of started to realize that the Bible isn't true?  And she said, yeah, it was kind of around last November. And the pastor said,  Well, if you think back to last November, is there anything else that kind of  happened in last November that that is of interest? And the girl thought for a  moment, and then she started to cry, and she said, Well, that's about the time I  started sleeping with my boyfriend. And the girl knew that the Bible said that sex  is for marriage. She knew she was going against the Bible. And so all of a  sudden, the Bible's outdated. All of a sudden it's hard to believe her behavior  changed before her belief changed to match it. Jesus made it very clear that evil doers avoid light and truth. Doers seek light. Jesus said the light has come into  the world, and people love the darkness rather than the light, because their  works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does  not come to the light lest his works should be exposed. That's how bad works  can lead to bad belief. When you're doing bad stuff, you don't want to get too  close to God. It's been said that either the Bible will keep you from sin, or sin will keep you from the Bible. But says Jesus, whoever does what is true, comes to 

the light so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in  God. When you're serving and working for the Lord, you enjoy coming into  God's presence. You enjoy coming to God and thanking him for his activity in  your life and the things he's been accomplishing in you, and you're less eager to come to God when you've been disobeying Him and you don't want to admit it.  Evil doers avoid light truth. Doers seek light, and notice that phrase they are  doing the truth. Whoever does what is true, don't we usually describe it as  believing what's true, or thinking what's true, or knowing what's true. Jesus says, Whoever does what is true there is doing the truth. You're a truth doer, and as  you're a truth doer, you become a stronger truth believer as well. It's kind of like  this. It's like driving with a windshield that has mud all over it. You are driving  through a very muddy area, and there's mud splattering all over your windshield, and your your wipers on the glass aren't working very well, and you've got mud,  and you've got a few streaks, you can still see a little bit, but, boy, there's a lot  that you can't see very well. That's what sin does. Sin splatters a whole bunch of mud on your mind. Filthy. Living gets your mind all messy, and you might try to  wipe it a little bit. And you still have a conscience, and there still are ideas that  may get through here and their ideas of truth, but many, many important facts  and truths of God are just not visible to you anymore because there's so much  mud on your windshield, so much filthy living has splattered mud on how we  see. And Jesus said, Men love darkness rather than light, because their deeds  are evil. We just can't see through our windshields because there's so much  mud on them. Sin blocks knowledge. Weak women, says the Bible, who are  burdened with sins and led astray by various passions are always learning and  never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth. Now, why is it that they've  always got ideas coming their way this particular kind of women, and they're  looking at these different ideas, but none of them ever sticks. They can't arrive at the knowledge of the truth, even though they're always trying to learn stuff. It's  because they're burdened with sins and led astray by various passions. It also  speaks of men, not just women, men who oppose the truth, and these men are  corrupted in their mind and disqualified regarding the faith and earlier, it  describes the wicked behavior of these men, and it is their behavior, their sin,  that's blocking their knowledge. When you yourself are thinking about, why am I  having such a hard time believing things about the Bible or about Jesus, you  may say, Well, I have lots of intellectual objections. I've considered the evidence. There's a lot of important things, and intellectually, I just can't swallow it. Well,  maybe, or maybe you've been corrupted in mind, and you're opposing the truth  because you've been sinning, or maybe you've been burdened with sins, and  that keeps you from arriving at the truth. And this is also very important. When  we're talking with other people, if you're a Christian and you're speaking with  someone else, and they keep trotting out various arguments and objections to  believing in Christianity, you might be able to help them with some intellectual 

things that are important, but you may also reach the point where you say, now,  let's just suppose, let's just suppose that I could show you that the Bible is true  and that all of your objections were phony. Would you become a follower of  Jesus? Then? Would you devote your life to obeying Him? More than once, the  answer that you might get, and it's happened often, is, well, no, they're playing  an intellectual game when they're debating the faith. But their real problem is  they say they've got intellectual objections, but even if they didn't, they would not change the way they live. Their sin is blocking their knowledge to see clearly,  your lens has got to be cleaned. If you're looking through a telescope and you  want to see the beautiful stars, you can't have that thing covered with fog and  mud. You're just not going to see anything. And so too, your very self is an  instrument for perceiving the things of God, and that self will be unable to  perceive those things if there's a lot of sin blocking your view, you need the Lord, and you need him to clean up that view in order to see clearly in the first place.  Another aspect of this, of doing the truth is you either need to follow it or you're  going to forget it. The apostle James says, If anyone is a hearer of the word and  not a doer, he's like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror, for  he looks at himself and he goes away, and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres being  no hearer who forgets, but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing, a  hearer who forgets, or a doer who acts. If you look in a mirror and you get up in  the morning and your face is a mess and and for a minute you notice, but then  you just head off into your day without changing anything that's very stupid.  Most of us need to act on what we see in the mirror, but if we don't, we'll just go  ahead and we'll keep on doing it, and other people might see it in us. God  certainly sees how we look, but we are just doing our thing, doing shapes how  we behave, and the one who does what is right is blessed. The one who does  what's wrong soon finds himself forgetting the things he was supposed to be  doing. It's that way in a lot of life, isn't it. 30 years ago, I learned the German  language. I was at college. I took quite a few courses in German. I learned to  speak German. I learned to read in German. And I know, almost no German  today. Why is that? You might say? Well, you're kind of dumb. You just don't  have a very good memory. Most people don't have a very good memory with  things that they don't use. And I haven't been using German, much Greek I  learned 30 years ago, but I use Greek when I study the New Testament, when  I'm preparing for sermons. I read some Greek in my private devotions, and so  Greek sticks with me because I use it. That's kind of a picture of what faith is  like. If you use the truth, it sticks in your memory because you're always paying  attention to it and you're living by it. If you go years and decades without living in God's ways, then even if you did have some knowledge, it gets weaker and  weaker, and even if it doesn't pass entirely out of memory, it seems less and  less real to you, because that's the way it is with truth. You use it, or you lose it, 

you follow it, or you forget it. Obeying aids, understanding. The Prophet and  statesman Daniel said, none of the wicked shall understand, but those who are  wise shall understand. He made it clear that God's revelation of what was going  to come would be available only to the ones who were living the Wise Life, and  not to the ones who were living the wicked life. And so sometimes you may say,  You know what? I would change my behavior. If I were persuaded that God is  real, if I knew for sure that Jesus rose from the dead, then I would change. But  what am I supposed to do if I can't believe? Well, how about this? Some cases,  if you have just the slightest glimmering or possibility of faith, start acting as  though you believe. Start acting as though God is real. Start behaving as though Jesus did die and rise from the dead as though he did pay for your sins and  overcome the power of death. Start acting as you would if all of that is true, and  as if Christ is real. And if you start acting as though it's real, you just might start  believing more strongly. Don't automatically assume that first you're going to  believe more strongly and then behavior will be improved. Of course, it's  important to believe, of course it's important to trust in God's promises and to  know the facts of the Bible, but sometimes behavior will precede belief. At least  behavior will get your belief to be stronger and stronger. Jesus put it this way, if  anyone's will is to do God's will, he will know whether the teaching is from God  or whether I'm speaking on my own authority. You need to be seeking God's will. You need to be doing God's will, and then and only then will you know whether  Jesus is just another guy speaking on His own authority, or whether Jesus really is God with us obeying aids understanding and we need to understand this.  Rousseau did not understand it. He lived a certain way and then spun out  certain beliefs that would fit the way he wanted to behave and and so it is with  many of us. When you start living the fruit of the Spirit, it becomes more and  more real to you the things of God. Jesus leaves no wondering about the  importance of belief and its relation to behavior. If you do not want to behave  according to the way of Christ. You will not be able to believe according to the  truth of Christ. Jesus said, I am the Way and the Truth and the Life. And when  you're walking in His way and living in his life, then his truth also makes sense to you. So it's very important as we think about what shapes your mind to take  inventory of my own behavior, to take inventory of your own behavior, and as  you seek to share God's truth with others, don't be silly. Don't be naive and think that all you're doing is helping them intellectually. At some point, you may need  to talk about the way they're living and get some sin obstacles out of the way  before they can believe the truth of God. This is a vital part of knowledge, doing  the truth.