“So, my dear family, this is my appeal to you, by the mercies of God: offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and appropriate worship. What’s more, don’t let yourself be squeezed into the shape dictated by the present age. Instead, be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you can work out and approve what God’s will is, what is good, acceptable and complete.” Romans 12:1-2
I learned this verse many years ago, in my early Christian days. Sadly, over the years I think I marginalized it in my vigilant battle against “works-righteousnesss.” In his book, After You Believe, N.T. Wright writes about this strange happening in all camps of contemporary evangelical Christianity, reminding us that THINKING is a necessary and essential part of growing as a Christian. Listen to how he says it:
“Part of the problem in contemporary Christianity, I believe, is that talk about freedom of the Spirit, about the grace which sweeps us off our feet and heals and transforms our lives, has been taken over surreptitiously by a kind of low-grade romanticism, colluding with an anti-intellectual streak in the culture, generating the assumption that the more spiritual you are, the less you need to think.
I cannot stress too strongly that this is a mistake. The more genuinely spiritual you are, according to Romans 12 and Philippians 1, the more clearly and accurately and carefully you will think, particularly about what the completed goal of your Christian journey will be and hence what steps you should be taking, what habits you should be acquiring, as part of the journey toward that goal right now. Thinking clearly and Christianly is thus both a key element within the total rehumanizing process (you won’t be fully human if you leave your thinking and reasoning behind) and a vital part of the motor which drives the rest of that process.” P. 158
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