Ep 15: I Think Therefore I’m a Mess

As we venture into our second primary problem, the Discipleship Dilemma, let’s dive into our first Heartview Indicator: our thoughts. How do our thought patterns help us understand the true ideas and desires in our hearts?  

Using a simple process of “Uncover, Determine, Immerse,” we take a look at some very powerful cultural and religious ideas that have taken hold in the West over the past 700 years that deeply impact our thought patterns today.

Just how much are our thoughts impacted by these “Ideas in the Air?” As it turns out, a whole lot!

TRANSCRIPTION

The Essential Role of our Thought Patterns

Welcome to the Soil and Roots podcast: cultivating deep discipleship in community. I’m Brian Fisher.

This is Episode 15: I Think Therefore I’m a Mess

Let’s Get Started

Season 2 is all about the Discipleship Dilemma: if we desire to grow into more of who Jesus is, we want to know Him better.  However, we also need to know ourselves better.  But in our current Christian ecosystems, we don’t normally like to talk about exploring our own hearts and understanding our own stories.  It may come across as self-absorbed.

Though the path of a deep disciple must dig into the ideas and desires that form us, and a great way to do that is to journey inward when appropriate. 

Unfortunately, most of us don’t take this journey to the bedrock of our hearts unless something in our life falls apart: a relationship fracture, an illness, a betrayal.  Sometimes it’s a question about God we just can’t get our arms around.  We hit the “Wall.”

Yet the deep end of discipleship and this path toward living a life of love pass through a time of self-understanding.  Why are we the way we are?  What relationships, experiences, assumptions, ideas, and instructions have formed us? 

In some Christian circles, this exploration may only focus on our sins, though heart formation is more complicated than simply making a list of things we screw up. 

There’s great news as we begin our exploration of our hearts – they give off plenty of signals about what’s really going on down there.  Each of us is wired with Eight Indicators – signposts that reveal our ideas and desires. 

Today, we’re going to dig into the first of our Eight Indicators, our thoughts, our thought patterns. Then, coming up, we’ll look at our emotions, health, behaviors, relationships, words, and how we use time and money. 

We call this ongoing process of evaluating our Indicators “Heartview.”  Because we’re complex creatures and our hearts are often fragmented, disoriented, and mysterious, Heartview allows us to uncover the hidden ideas and desires in our spirits. Heartview is essential in our journey to become more like Jesus.   Jesus was constantly inviting people to explore and understand their own hearts in relation to Him, and so should we.

Uncover. Determine. Immerse.

As I mentioned last episode, Heartview is not rocket science.  There are only three steps to it: Uncover, Determine, and Immerse.

1. We use our Eight Indicators to uncover our hidden ideas and desires in cooperation with God and trusted, safe friends.

2. We determine whether our ideas bend towards the Kingdom of Darkness or the Kingdom of Light

3. We immerse ourselves in cultures designed to transform those dark ideas into light.   

By the way, we naturally engage in these three steps in many other situations.  

Let’s say we uncover the fact that we can only type 10 words a minute.  Because we work on our computers every day, our boss helps us determine that typing 10 words a minute isn’t very good.  It negatively impacts our work.  So, we immerse ourselves in a culture designed to improve our situation.  We invest time in some courses, and we begin practicing typing every day.  With enough practice, instruction, and encouragement, pretty soon we’re zooming along at 70 words per minute.  Uncover, Determine, Immerse.

Heartview is easy to understand, but not always easy to do. It requires courage, kindness, and curiosity. 

And it may be painful. Heartview often means digging into our personal, individual stories. It means understanding our families and early childhood experiences to grasp how the Ideas in our Soil were originally formed.

Big, Big Fields of Study

Okay, three quick notes on these Eight Indicators before we dig into our first one:

1. All eight of these indicators are enormous topics, and all eight are complex fields of study in and of themselves.  Over the next few episodes, we’re just going to explore a brief overview of each indicator and provide you with some things to contemplate. 

2. Remember, God has placed us into four relationships: with Him, with others, with ourselves, and with creation and culture. The Gospel of the Kingdom proclaims that our King is redeeming and reconciling all four relationships, so we want to look at each indicator in light of all four relationships. 

For example, when we talk about our thought life, Heartview encourages us to consider our patterns of thinking related to God, others, ourselves, and our role as rulers of creation and culture.  Do we think about God according to His ideas of light or His ideas of darkness?  How about our thoughts about others?  Or ourselves? Does our thought life promote the idea that we are rulers of creation and culture, or do we think we are being ruled by it?  

To requote A.W. Tozer:

“That our idea of God corresponds as nearly as possible to the true being of God is of immense importance to us. Compared with our actual thoughts about Him, our creedal statements are of little consequence. Our real idea of God may lie buried under the rubbish of conventional religious notions and may require an intelligent and vigorous search before it is finally unearthed and exposed for what it is. Only after an ordeal of painful self-probing are we likely to discover what we actually believe about God.^[1]”

In other words, we should be mining our thoughts to get a handle on our hearts.

3. Jesus is the only human being who is fully integrated and fully unified in His Ideas and Indicators.  His thoughts, emotions, physical state, actions, relationships, words, and use of time and money perfectly reflect and embody only Ideas of Light.  The reason is that he is the Ideas of Light.

When we practice Heartview, we will encounter our own sin and (this is very important) the sins of those committed against us.  This is easier for some than others.  There is an authenticity to Heartview that often compels us to consider how people have wounded us, including people we’ve loved and trusted.

What is “Thinking?”

Let’s think about thinking.  How does our thought life point us back to the hidden ideas in our hearts? In 1637, René Descartes, the mathematician and scientist who is considered the Father of Modern Philosophy, famously said, “I think, therefore I am.”  Though he wasn’t correct, his statement has become a bedrock assumption of much of Western philosophy and culture, including the church. 

So, what is the act of thinking?  We do it all day, every day, but it can be hard to define what a thought actually is.  What’s going on in the brain that causes or impacts a thought?  

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a thought is “the act of thinking about or considering something, an idea or opinion, or a set of ideas about a particular subject.”[2] I thought we weren’t supposed to define a word using the word itself, so it’s funny that Cambridge defines “a thought” as “the act of thinking.”  Thanks so much. 

It’s obviously hard to pin down what’s actually going on in our minds when we form a thought.  Even the eggheads at MIT haven’t figured it out.

“The human brain is composed of about 100 billion nerve cells (neurons) interconnected by trillions of connections, called synapses. On average, each connection transmits about one signal per second. Some specialized connections send up to 1,000 signals per second. “Somehow… that’s producing thought,” says Charles Jennings, director of neurotechnology at the MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research.”[3]

Here’s Dallas Willard’s definition of “thoughts” in relationship to our discipleship:

“It is the activity of searching out what must be true, or cannot be true, in the light of given facts or assumptions.”^[4]

It’s the activity we engage in to make determinations of truth.  You see green, and you think, “That’s green.”  Your stomach starts growling, and you think, “I’m hungry.” 

If I accidentally eat asparagus, I think, “That’s one of the worst things I’ve ever tasted.” I’m searching out what must be true or not true, and, in that case, truer words have never been spoken.

Notice how Willard qualifies this search for truth – it’s an activity based on given facts or assumptions.  Remember how we define ideas here at Soil and Roots – “fundamental concepts, principles, and assumptions.”  So, our ideas are directly intertwined with our thoughts.  Our ideas drive and govern our thoughts.  In some way, our ideas sit underneath our thoughts.  These ideas we’re exploring are really, really powerful. 

One of the most quoted Bible verses about thoughts is in Proverbs 23.

“Do not eat the bread of a selfish man or desire his delicacies; For as he thinks within himself, so he is. He says to you, “Eat and drink!” But his heart is not with you. You will vomit up the morsel you have eaten and waste your compliments.”^[5]

Let’s note the phrase we commonly hear: “as a man thinks within himself, so he is.”  Our internal thoughts point us to our core, our hearts.  That’s why “Thoughts” is our first Heartview indicator.  What and how we think (and not what we speak) uncovers our true selves, our true desires, and our loves.   Our hidden ideas. 

Thinking about Thinking!

A while back, we introduced the word “metacognition.”  As humans, we have the ability to think about what we think about! 

That’s really the essence of today’s episode – developing the habit of asking ourselves why we think the thoughts we do.  What’s underneath our thought patterns? We uncover the why behind our thoughts, determine if our why is from the Kingdom of Light or Darkness, and then immerse ourselves in a culture that will help us transform our thought patterns from darkness to light. 

Here’s a simple example.  Let’s say you’re a woman who struggles with thinking of yourself as beautiful.  When you think about yourself or talk to yourself, you typically don’t address yourself as someone who is made in the Image of God, someone who’s beautiful. You often think you don’t measure up to some standard, or you fear how people perceive you.  You get on your own case for not being this height or weight or shape or body condition, and you’re constantly comparing yourself to the current culture’s ideas of physical beauty. 

You may never have stopped to think about why you think of yourself as someone who isn’t beautiful.  But a courageous step forward is to uncover the ideas that drive your thought patterns.  And this can only be done with God and a trusted friend. Why do you not think of yourself as a handcrafted work of a divine artist, singularly unique and beautiful? 

That’s the uncovering stage.  Chances are, your ideas of beauty were shaped by your personal story and your relationships.  You were immersed in a culture of formation as a child, and your family may not have considered you beautiful.  Or you were only beautiful when you performed a certain way or did certain things.  Or someone you trusted used you or exploited you, and your ideas of beauty became damaged and corrupted.  Or you made some harmful decisions, and you don’t think you deserve to be beautiful. 

Let’s say you’ve uncovered the fact that you don’t think of yourself as beautiful and you now have some sense of why, the next step is to determine if your ideas come from the Kingdom of Darkness or the Kingdom of Light. Spoiler alert – if you don’t address or think of yourself as an amazing, beautiful work of art, your ideas of beauty bend toward the Kingdom of Darkness. 

The way to train your heart and your thoughts so that you do think of yourself as beautiful is to immerse yourself in a culture that reinforces truthful ideas of beauty.  This usually happens over long periods of time in a specific type of community or family. 

Ideas in the Air

Our thought patterns are deeply influenced by Ideas in the Air. Ideas in the Air make up the entire universe of available ideas.  They come from both the Kingdom of Light and the Kingdom of Darkness, and they exist in creation and culture.  Ideas in the Air are, well, like the air we breathe.  They depend on things like the era in which we’re born, the area in which we’re born, our family of origin, our early relationships and experiences. Some subsets of Ideas in the Air seep into our hearts, and they become our Ideas in the Soil.

We live in a time where some Ideas in the Air seem to be changing at a breakneck pace, particularly our Six Core Ideas of Identity, Anthropology, Value, Power, Purpose, and Love.  We discussed the Idea of Human Value a few episodes ago, and if you pull up the episode guide from the website, you see just how fast the culture’s Idea of Human Value has changed in the last 50 years, even over the last five years.

But these seemingly rapid changes aren’t really that rapid. These changes have been in the works for hundreds of years.  So, in order to understand how Ideas in the Air, the ideas we’re born into, impact our thought patterns today, let’s take a brief stroll through the last 700 years or so. 

A Little Walk Down the History of Western Thought

Rod Dreher is a prolific author and commentator, and he wrote a somewhat provocative book called The Benedict Option. In it, he claims that the current tumult of ideas in Western culture is not a short-term mystery, but rather the somewhat predictable result of centuries of deep, fundamental changes in Ideas in the Air that subtly impact our thought patterns today.

He cites five major events dating back to the medieval period that led us to this moment. If you’re not a lover of world history, the medieval era lasted about 1,000 years, from around 500 to 1500 AD. 

1. In the 1300’s, we lost the belief in the connection between God and Creation.  Prior to that, it was accepted that God was evident and present in nature. Today, we don’t normally make that assumption. Modern Christianity struggles to see God as present and working in Creation.  Dreher writes, “In the mind of medieval Christians, the spirit world and the material world penetrated each other. The division between them was thin and porous…The only reason the material world had any meaning at all was because of its relationship to God.”[6]

2. The collapse of the religious unity and authority in the Protestant Reformation, which lasted from 1517 to 1648.  Though Protestants who know about the Reformation would likely consider it a positive event, Dreher examines its negative consequences. He cites its various theological and cultural schisms, as well as some of its downstream violence and harm.   

3. Fast forward to the Enlightenment in the 1700s, which further changed the idea of Christianity from an all-encompassing reality to a privatized religious life. Instead of Christianity being the reason for science, logic, philosophy, and culture, it was pushed into its own religious corner, supposedly for the weak-minded and socially needy. 

4. From 1760 to 1840, we experienced the Industrial Revolution.  This changed the face of Western society down to its very roots, as civilizations moved into cities, became far more transient, and emphasized personal success and wealth over tight communities and long-term relationships.

5.  And lastly, Dreher cites the Sexual Revolution, which picked up steam in the 1960s and continues today.[7]  Al Mohler calls it the Moral Revolution, and I think that’s a better term.  The Moral Revolution continues to advance at an unparalleled pace, redefining science, institutions, and accepted principles that have been in place, in some cases, for a few thousand years. 

Remember, we are integrated beings living in an integrated world.  This most recent stage, the Moral Revolution, has only been possible because, over the last several hundred years, we created fragments, segments, and divisions as we attempted to assume more and more divine characteristics ourselves.

Spiritual separated from physical, body separated from mind and heart, church separated from state, religion separated from science, and Jesus went from being the rightful King of every speck of the Universe to a “personal savior” with little relevance outside of Sunday morning. 

So, for the average Christian, does this 700-year change in fundamental Ideas in the Air impact our daily thought life? 

Without question.

1. Many modern Christians have little knowledge or understanding of the Kingdom of God.  I think this is because the unified, comprehensive nature of the Kingdom contradicts what many of us unconsciously assume, which is more of an Enlightenment approach that disintegrates and reduces the Gospel.  

Instead of the Kingdom of God being a cohesive, cosmic spiritual and physical reality, the “Kingdom of God” has become an obscure phrase some of us use to describe people who “accept Jesus into their hearts.”

The Kingdom of God presents an integrated reality that’s a foreign concept to many Christians.  For example, we consider scientific laws such as gravity and the first law of thermodynamics to be unchangeable and immutable, whereas we view moral law as malleable and fluid.  Or the person who claims that Christians shouldn’t engage in politics because it’s too “secular.” In the Kingdom of God, there is no such thing as secular. 

2. Another example: We struggle to understand that as King of Kings, Jesus is making all things new. He is reconciling everything. Many modern Christians have a shallow, incomplete view based on the idea that our faith is strictly personal, and most of the “benefits” of being a Christian don’t happen until we’re dead. 

3. Here’s another one. Unfortunately, the Christian community is like a pendulum, responding to cultural events by swinging too far in the other direction. In relation to God’s second book of creation, Protestants, in particular, have responded to environmentalism by neglecting to understand or teach how God reveals Himself in nature. Yet the discipline of science was started almost exclusively by Christians who sought to understand how God wove Himself into the created order. German Astronomer Johannes Kepler is credited with having said that the purpose of science is to “think God’s thoughts after Him.”[8]

4. We’ve boiled down our heart formation to a set of Christian rituals and instructions.  Instead of seeing ourselves as hand-woven works of a divine artist who are being formed into the likeness of the person of our King in a reality where God weaves His Ideas through every cell and atom, we self-direct our formation, largely through submitting ourselves to instruction.  And we segment our Christian life from the rest of our lives.  We have a church life, a career life, a hobby life, and a family life.

So yes, many of us suffer from thought patterns formed by hundreds of years of culture promoting a segmented, fractured reality, and we don’t even know that those underlying assumptions exist.  That’s the extraordinary power of Ideas in the Air. 

The Disintegrated Christian

Here’s another example. A few years ago, I was talking to a Christian nurse about using big data, technology, and science to help counsel women who struggle with unplanned pregnancies.  She became annoyed and argued that prayer and the Holy Spirit were all we needed to counsel women.  I mentioned Psalm 24, which says, “The earth is the Lord’s and all it contains, the world and those who dwell in it.” I asked the nurse that, if the entire earth belongs to God and we are stewards of it, should we not use every tool at our disposal to join Him as He increases His Kingdom? Is data somehow less holy than prayer?

Her underlying ideas suggested that only so-called “spiritual tools” should be used for Kingdom work, even though we live in a physical world that God created and gave us to steward!  In her mind, God only works in the spiritual realm, and the physical realm is somehow “bad” or “unholy.”  In other words, her thought patterns about God were based on the Enlightenment’s segmentation and fragmentation rather than on the Kingdom of Light. 

God created the natural order and pronounced the whole enchilada “good.”  Perhaps we should do the same. 

When in Rome…

The prominent Ideas in the Air right now are pulling us back to a Greco-Roman mindset.  The current underlying ideas are attempting to move us back to a social ethos where women and children are the property of men to do with as they wish.  At the time of Christ, men in elite positions of power were the sole beneficiaries of the ideas of the day. It appears we are returning to those underlying ideas. 

What do I mean?  How does Western culture treat children?  For the last 50 years, we’ve treated preborn children as property to be disposed of if we don’t want them. And children outside the womb are now being victimized at alarming rates.  Children are now the subjects of medical, sociological, educational, and biological experimentation. And it’s not for their benefit – it’s for the benefit of their parents or the state. 

And while our elites provide security and protection for themselves, the constant drumbeat of school shootings reminds us that school districts and institutions in power refuse to confront the evil in men’s hearts and so leave our children terribly exposed to life-threatening danger. 

The popular Ideas in the Air are trying to return us to a civilization that devalues children of all ages and treats them as property to be used for the benefit of those in power – typically men.   

What about women?  How are we reverting to a culture that treats women as property?  Whatever successes for women we can attribute to the # MeToo movement are quickly fading, and it will ultimately fail.  It cannot succeed given the conflicting Ideas in the air about how we think about women. 

On one hand, we can’t condemn a Harvey Weinstein and a Jeffrey Epstein for using women for their sexual gratification, while accepting the constant objectification of women in common culture, whether it be advertising, movies, streaming shows, or Internet sites.  We can’t, on one hand, say that Weinstein and Epstein were “bad” while consuming and endorsing media that promotes the underlying ideas that Weinstein, Epstein, and other men live out every day. 

We find Supreme Court Justices and people on the street are no longer able to define what a “woman” is.  One of the first steps in devaluing a people group is redefining it.  It’s not possible to sustain an effort to promote equal rights and value for women when we refuse to define who she is.  When we “undefine her” or redefine her, we mark her for exploitation and destruction. 

We hear a lot about women’s rights and the value of children in culture.  A lot of it is hogwash and marketing.  What’s really happening behind the scenes is that men in positions of elite power are redefining Ideas in the Air to accumulate more power and satisfy their own desires.  This is the way of every major civilization in human history. 

When society removes its boundaries and constraints, men always, always win.  And women and children always, always lose.  This type of exploitation works its way down into our thinking, our thought patterns, and the ideas and desires that govern us.

Alright, so those are some examples of how changes in the Idea in the Air impact our thought patterns and the ideas in our soils. Let’s close with one example of how our thought patterns are influenced by our close relationships.

Close to Home

Wounded hearts often develop very wrong, harmful, dark patterns of thinking.  Remember, spiritual formation works both ways.  The Five Elements of time, habit, intimacy, community, and instruction can bend us toward light, but they can also bend us toward darkness. 

The so-called “abused wife” syndrome is an example of spiritual formation bending a woman’s heart towards darkness. A wife is physically, sexually, verbally, or emotionally abused by her husband (he repeatedly sins against her), and over time, her heart becomes so broken and wounded that it desires the abusive relationship more than freedom. Her thoughts become so damaged, so corrupted, that she loses the ability to think good and true thoughts. 

Years ago, my wife and I were involved in a situation where a Christian woman accused her husband of substantial physical abuse and asked to be rescued. She believed her life was in danger. We offered her refuge for a few days, and she seemed willing to remove herself from what she claimed was a dangerous situation. But then she disappeared, and we discovered she had gone back to her husband.  He then accused those trying to help her of lying and manipulation.

Situations like this show us why spiritual formation is much more than just instruction, than simply sharing facts and information.  Several people tried to speak the truth to her.  We tried to share information, perspectives, and facts with her to help her reframe her thoughts, to reorient her thought patterns to the reality of her dangerous situation. 

But her heart was so deeply formed by her abusive husband and her past story that her thoughts were confused, disoriented, and corrupted.  She required a much more immersive culture of restoration than she was willing to engage with, or than we were able to provide. 

How you and I think about God, others, ourselves, and the world around us points us to the hidden ideas and desires in our hearts.  Why we think the way we do is the crucial question.

Practicing Heartview

So, let’s take a few moments and think about what we think about.  Do you think about God as a loving Father, or as a harsh taskmaster?  Do you think about yourself as a precious child of a King, or do you think about yourself in the way that those who harmed you think about you?  Do you think about creation and culture as oppressive, bad, and irredeemable? Or do you see them as gifts from God that He has called us to steward and rule? Does your thought life bend towards darkness or light?

Here’s a great passage to close our episode today. Listen carefully to Paul’s choice of words.

Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things. The things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.^[9]

Dwell on these things.  Think about them, contemplate them, ponder them, and abide in them.  Then Paul invites the Philippians to look at himself as an example, but let’s note his words: learn, receive, hear, see, practice. 

Huh. Sounds a lot like an intentional, immersive culture of spiritual formation, something like a Greenhouse.  Just sayin’. 

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^[1] Willard, D. (2002). Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ (p. 100). NavPress.

[2] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/thought

[3] https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/what-are-thoughts-made-of/

^[4] Willard, D. (2002). Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ (p. 104). NavPress.

^[5] New American Standard Bible: 1995 update (Pr 23:6–8). (1995). The Lockman Foundation.

[6] Dreher, R. (2018). The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (p. 24). Sentinel.

[7] Dreher. The Benedict Option (pg 23). Sentinel.

[8] https://apologeticspress.org/thinking-gods-thoughts-after-him-442/

^[9] New American Standard Bible: 1995 update (Php 4:8–9). (1995). The Lockman Foundation.