Reading: How Your Heart Shapes Your Mind (Slides)

How Your Heart Shapes Your Mind
by David Feddes

Is your mind a machine?

What shapes your mind?

• Your social setting: Whom do you fit (or fight) with?

• Your actions: What is your pattern of behavior?

• Your heart: What moves your inner self?

Heart affects knowledge

• An intelligent heart acquires knowledge. (Proverbs 18:15)

• The heart of him who has understanding seeks knowledge. (Proverbs 15:14)

• Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life. (Proverbs 4:23)

• My son, give me your heart. (Prov 23:26)

• Who can say, “I have made my heart pure; I am clean from my sin”? (Prov 20:9)

Your taste for a food item may change when your condition changes, even if the food is the same.

Masters of Suspicion

• Karl Marx claimed that economic factors determine our thoughts and ideals.

• Sigmund Freud claimed that unconscious primal urges dominate our minds.

• Friedrich Nietzsche said that a will to power is the motivation behind claims to truth and morality.

• These atheists were wrong to reject God, but they were right to see that many claims to rightness are a mask for hidden drives.

Cosmic authority problem

“I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God... It’s that I hope there is no God! … I have a cosmic authority problem… Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world.” (Thomas Nagel)

Heart motives

The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing. (Pascal)

• What desires move you?

• What worries or scares you?

• What are your inclinations?

• What makes you feel happy?

• What hidden hurts haunt you?

• What directs your decisions?

Inner light or darkness

• The spirit of man is the lamp of the Lord, searching all his innermost parts. (20:27)

• Haughty eyes and a proud heart, the lamp of the wicked, are sin. (21:4)

• If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! (Matthew 6:23)

• For out of the heart come evil thoughts. (Matthew 15:19-20)

Loving and knowing

• If I’m stuck on myself, I can’t understand things and persons outside myself.

• If I see things only in light of how they fit my agenda, I can’t see them as they are.

• If I’m trapped in my own viewpoint, I can’t understand a different viewpoint.

• Loving God and others is crucial for knowing God and others. We can really know person only if we care about them.

• A loving heart opens my mind.

Same seed, four soils

• Hard, shallow, cluttered, or good

•  Different hearts receive God’s Word in different ways.

• Good soil: “those with a noble and good heart” “hear the word and understand it”

What shapes your mind?

• Your social setting: Whom do you fit (or fight) with?

• Your actions: What is your pattern of behavior?

• Your heart: What moves your inner self?

Real knowledge of God involves a renewed heart, godly actions, and Christian community.