An Understanding Mind

Scripture: 1 Kings 2.10-12, 3.3-14; Ephesians 5.15-20


There is a stereotype in our culture of the simple-minded fool with the heart of gold. Think Forrest Gump. But in reality, lack of intelligence goes hand-in-hand with bad morals and bad character. Enter the dumb criminal.

Chicago – a man is wanted for throwing bricks through jewelry store windows and then making off with the loot. He was arrested last night for trying to throw a brick through a Plexiglass window. The brick bounced back off the window, hit him in the head, and knocked him out cold until the police arrived.

Ann Arbor – a man walked into a Burger King in Ypsilanti at 7:50am, flashed a gun and demanded cash. The clerk turned him down and said he couldn’t open the cash register without a food order. When the robber order onion rings, the clerk told him they weren’t available for breakfast. The robber, frustrated, walked away.

A man walked into a convenience store, laid a $20 on the counter and asked the clerk for change. When the clerk opened the cash register, the man pulled out a gun and ordered the clerk to give him all the cash in there, which the clerk did. The robber ran off with the cash but left his twenty on the counter. The amount of money he made off with - $15.


Daniel Goleman wrote an influential and best-selling book in which he argues that effectiveness in life is based not nearly so much on cognitive intelligence as on what might be called “emotional intelligence.” This is what can cause people with high IQs to end up in failed marriages or frustrating vocations.

One of the qualities of emotional intelligence is hope. “Having hope means that one will not give in to overwhelming anxiety, a defeatist attitude, or depression in the face of difficult challenges or setbacks,” Goleman writes. Hope has healing power. In one study, 122 men who had suffered their first heart attack were evaluated on their degree of hopefulness and pessimism. Of the 25 most pessimistic men, 21 had died eight years later. Of the 25 most optimistic, only 6 had died! Loss of hope increased the odds of death more than 300 percent; it predicted death more accurately than any medical risk factor including blood pressure, amount of damage to the heart, or cholesterol level. Better to eat Twinkies in hope than to eat broccoli in despair. Emotional intelligence.

Another characteristic of emotional intelligence is delayed gratification. A classic study of this is called “the marshmallow test.” A four-year-old is in a room with some marshmallows and told that the experimenter has to run an errand. If the four-year-old can wait till the experimenter returns, he can have two marshmallows. If he wants to eat right now, he can – but he only gets one. This will try the soul of any four-year-old. Kids in this experiment develop all kinds of strategies to enable them to wait – sing songs, tell themselves stories, play with their fingers. One kid actually bent down and began to lick the table, as if the flavor of marshmallow had transmogrified into the wood.

What is really amazing is the impact of this character trait displayed at four had later in life. A Stanford University team tracked these children for many years. Those who were able to wait as four-year-olds grew up to be more socially competent, better able to cope with stress, and less likely to give up under pressure than those who could not wait. The marshmallow grabbers grew up to be more stubborn and indecisive, more easily upset by frustration, and more resentful about not getting enough. The marshmallow waiters actually had SAT scores 200 points higher than the marshmallow grabbers! Emotional intelligence. It’s important.

Now let’s say there’s a kid who has been born into wealth and royalty, you know, a silver spoon in his mouth. At a young age he becomes king of a very strong and wealthy nation. The young man is set for life. He can have anything, anything, he wants. No itch need go unscratched. What will he want? What will his heart desire. We could guess how this is likely to go, how this young king’s life will be lived.

But our young king is different. He prays to a God who he believes is his king. The Bible tells us this young king named Solomon “loved the Lord.” One night as Solomon is praying God tells him, “Ask anything you want and I will give it to you.”

Solomon answered, “Lord, I am a dumb kid. I don’t know what I’m doing as king of this great nation, your people. So Lord, I’m going to ask you to give me wisdom, an understanding mind to be a good ruler for the people and for you.”

Solomon was praying, I think, for spiritual and emotional intelligence. He was praying to understand his life and world by faith, through God’s eyes.

God is pleased with Solomon’s request. “I will give you a wise and discerning mind.” Some translations read, “a listening mind.” The Hebrew word here can be translated “heart” or “mind” but the emphasis is on understanding and listening. The Hebrews believed in the connection between heart and mind.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all those who practice it have a good understanding. His praise endures forever.” Psalm 111.10

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord, and turn away from evil.” Proverbs 3.5-7



What did the Israelites call guys with high IQs who didn’t follow God? Dummies.

In our culture today we are missing the connection between heart and mind, soul and intellect. G.K. Chesterton lamented that the wise men of his day had turned their back on God and denied the possibility of basic morals altogether. Chesterton called them “intellectuals without intelligence.” C.S. Lewis observed the same phenomenon among his contemporaries, the disconnect between head and heart. He called his generation, “men without chests.” In other words, they were men who had not the will to do the right thing for the right reason.

I was watching television the other day and happened upon a program in which a group of people were sitting in a restaurant somewhere having a discussion about faith. What made it interesting was half the group were Christians and half were agnostics or atheists. They were talking about ways they offended each other and ways they could better understand one another. They cut to a story on atheists who had served their country in the military. These men declared themselves to be “atheists in foxholes.” The atheists in the restaurant declared themselves to be as nice and kind and forgiving as any person of faith. I listened to that and thought to myself, “Maybe so. Maybe those atheists are as kind and nice as anybody else. But if so, they are much better men than I am. I know that without God, my prospects for a good and virtuous life are bleak indeed. I doubt my ability to be good (and wise) without God. I have a lot of evidence from my life to back this up. Trust me.

I’ve talked about the story of John Nash before. Nash was the brilliant mathematician and physicist, professor at MIT who would go on to win the Nobel Prize. But what makes Nash truly remarkable is that he battled mental illness all of his adult life. He heard voices and saw people that weren’t really there. The voices made him paranoid caused great damage to him and those who loved him. Yet through it all, Nash’s wife stuck with him, didn’t give up on him. Over time, Nash learned discernment, the truth from the lies. He learned not to do what the imaginary ones told him to do. He learned to wrest control from the false voices.

“I’m not so different from you,” Nash said. “We all hear voices. We just have to decide which ones we’re going to listen to.” Even through mental illness, Nash found understanding and wisdom.

Toward the end of his life Nash was awarded the Nobel Prize. In the movie based on his life, A Beautiful Mind, Nash makes these remarks in his acceptance speech:

“I’ve always believed in numbers, in the equations and logics that lead to reason. But after a lifetime of such pursuits, I ask, what truly is logic? Who decides reason? My quest has taken me through the physical, the metaphysical, the delusional, and back. And I have made the most important discovery of my career, the most important of my life:
It is only in the mysterious equations of Love that any logic or reasons can be found.”

And then Nash looks directly at his wife, sitting in the audience, and says,
“I’m only here because of you. You are the reason I am. You are all my reasons.”


Love is reason of its own. A life lived for God in service to others, that’s the smart choice. That’s the path of wisdom that gives life now and forever.

“Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil. So do not be foolish but understand what the will of the Lord is.” Ephesians 5.15-17

It’s Not About Me

Scripture: John 6.35, 41-51; Ephesians 4.25- 5.2


If you had to live on just one kind of food for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Steak, chicken, pasta. . .ding-dongs, cherry pez? My friend Jim says it would be “bread” for him. That’s probably as good a choice as I can think of. Bread is good food.

“I am the bread of life,” Jesus says.

This, in John chapter six, is one of several “bread” discourses that Jesus gives us. They’re kind of broken up in the gospel, but remember what we read a couple weeks ago? The crowds had followed Jesus to the isolated place, thousands had gathered, and it was supper time and the disciples urged Jesus to send the people away to feed themselves. Jesus said, “You feed them.”

And then by faith, the disciples witnessed the miracle of the loaves and fishes. The bread was somehow multiplied. Jesus gave everybody what they needed – bread to eat.

We were reminded that Jesus doesn’t give us what we want but rather what we need.
Certainly, if we can recognize and live out this distinction between what we want and what we need our lives will be both simple and fulfilling. But even this truth does not go far enough. If we think that Jesus is God’s way of satisfying our needs and keeping us content, then we have missed the Gospel message.

We live in times of plenty and convenience. If we want, we can have one stop shopping. Wal Mart, Target, Sheetz. We can get gas and have a meal, gourmet coffee, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. Some of us are salivating over the opening of the Logan Town Centre and all of the specialty shops that it will deliver. But with all these choices and convenience, for some reason, we are not satisfied.

Jesus reminds is audience of their own history. “Your fathers had bread rain down from heaven everyday to satisfy their need,” and yet they weren’t satisfied. This bread didn’t save them. They died. I will give you a kind of bread that if you eat of it you will never hunger again.

Maybe this crowd was looking for another miracle smorgasbord, Jesus wanted them to think beyond their appetites. He wanted them to consider that maybe their lives were about something else other than their appetites.







Will Willimon tells the story of a student he had in a philosophy course at Duke University. The student came to him upset about his grade. The student accused him of being unfair and not liking him personally. Willimon pointed to the student’s poor attendance record and the fact that he had handed in his papers late. The student’s final grade reflected his coursework accurately. But the student didn’t see it that way. He suggested that Willimon had a problem with his racial background (he was Korean-American). Willimon was surprised by this suggestion, saying that all his dealings with people of this ethnicity had been positive. Finally, Willimon said this,

“I thought this course was about philosophy. That was all I intended by your grade. Your final grade is my assessment of how well, or poorly, you mastered material in this course in philosophy. You act as if this grade is personal, as if this is my attempt to give you my assessment of your personality. This grade is not about that. This grade is about philosophy. This grade is not about you.”

People sometimes ask me before a service starts, “Are you going to talk about me today?” Or after a service is over, someone will say, “You were talking to me today weren’t you?” And, invariably, I say yes to those queries because I think it will help.

But maybe, once in awhile, we need to say, “No, this really isn’t about you.” Not everything that happens in the course of your day is about you. That driver ahead of you that you think is driving too slow on purpose just to spite you, well maybe they’re not. That person that you just talked to that you’re now wondering what they are thinking about you, well maybe they’re not thinking about you at all.

When we feel that alien lump on our bodies, or we get that illness that won’t go away, we may ask ourselves, “Why did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this?”

Well, why not you? Like one person said to me recently, “We all get sick. It’s going to happen. Pick your disease.”

Do you think God has singled you out to punish you? If God does, then He isn’t very efficient in his punishments is he? This is not about you!


A turning point, a conversion point if you will, for all of us is when we begin to act like our lives are as much about others as they are about ourselves. We become better friends when we begin to act like this. We become better husbands and wives when we begin to act like this. We become better workers when we begin to act like this.

Israel was a people formed by the commandments given to them from God

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” Deuteronomy 6.4-5

The commandments were given “so that your days may be long. . .so that it may go well with you.” In other words, these commandments are not as much to rule your life as to give you life. Jesus added a second great commandment to the first one:

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Matthew 19.19

The church is here to remind us that life is not about us. The church does not exist is provide the preacher and staff with a good income. The church does not exist to suit your personal preferences or make you feel good. When we make decisions about how to be church we would be wise to err on the side of giving preference to those outside the church rather than our own preferences.

But here’s the thing – the church really is about Jesus. We are Jesus’ body. Nothing else. We are here to visibly demonstrate to the world that Jesus is Life. Jesus is what Life is About.

Our song to the world is “Turn your eyes about Jesus, look full in his wonderful face and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace.”

Soul Friend

Scripture: 2 Samuel 11.26-12-13a; 1 Samuel 20.17

David and Jonathan were friends. Jonathan was King Saul’s son, and Saul was jealous of David, and was, off and on, (but mostly on), trying to kill David. Jonathan tried to calm his father, defend David, and when things got really bad, warn David of when his father was about to strike. A close bond grew between Jonathan and David. They were not afraid let each other know that. I told each other, “I love you.”

This may seem unusual to us in this day and age. Mostly, men don’t express their feelings toward other men, even their best friends. Guys are different from girls. (Yes, you heard it here first).

I was reminded of this not long ago watching a girl’s softball game. I was immediately struck by how different the game sounded from a boy’s game. The girls were more chatty and spirited. When their team was up to bat, all the girls on the bench were together and staging elaborate call and response routines. They sang songs to support the girl in the batter’s box. When there was a lull in the action, they started doing major Broadway Shows.

At a boy’s baseball game, things are different. The bench looks like a wrestling match. It never occurs to boys to support their teammate in the batter’s box with “a song.” The best they usually muster is the chant, “We want a pitcher not a belly-itcher.” Not exactly Les Miserable.

All of which is to say, boys don’t express their feelings as readily as girls do. So when we read about David and Jonathan’s friendship, in our diminished age we read all kinds of things into that. Don’t. Rather, listen to these words:

“And Jonathan made David swear again by his love for him; for he loved him as he loved his own soul.” 1 Samuel 20.17

The Christian Celts used to talk about “soul friends.” David and Jonathan were soul friends. What I mean by that is not that they had everything in common, the same hobbies or liked the same sports teams, but that they opened their souls to each other and didn’t hide important things. They told the truth to each other and found that the truth brought them closer.

Jonathan dies. David no longer has his soul friend. He may have friends still, but nowhere are we given any indication that David has anyone in his life nearly like Jonathan. What happens in David’s life is not coincidence. As David becomes more powerful he also becomes more isolated. No one questions his decisions anymore. David’s relationship with God also suffers. God stops questioning David, maybe because David stops listening.

We have heard the David and Bathsheba story. David tries to cover up adultery with murder. The sin is pretty brazen. But I bet that as David is going through that descent into temptation and evil, he doesn’t see brazenness, he sees subtle distinctions. He tells himself that Bathsheba is too beautiful for Uriah; she deserves to be with the king. David tells himself that he deserves whatever he wants. He doesn’t, at first, intend to kill Uriah, but he does try to “manage his temptations” and that’s where it leads.

In other words, David has an excuse for every bad and sinful decision he makes. David is virtually alone with his excuses. Maybe sin, and our excuses for them, are the only things that grow in isolation. David is alone with his sin and excuse because he has no soul friend. He has no friend to tell him the truth.

Up to this point, God has been pretty quiet about the whole affair. But there is this:

“When Bathsheba heard that Uriah her husband was dead, she made lamentation for her husband. And when the mourning was over, David sent and brought her to his house, and she became his wife, and bore him a son. But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.”

That last sentence should give us pause. David was doing what he wanted to do. No one, not even God, was interfering. David was king – he was managing his temptation as he saw fit. No one was going to question him. No one was going to stop him. Maybe, he thought, it didn’t matter to God.

That’s the danger of managing temptation. We tell ourselves that one more step doesn’t matter. The fact that we’re not struck down immediately by bolts of lightning confirms for us that it’s not really that bad. “See, even God must not think so.”

There’s a scene in the move, “O Brother Where Art Thou” where the three companions pick up a hitchhiker, a young black man carrying a guitar by the name of Tommy Johnson. They ask him what he is doing out in the middle of nowhere. He tells them that he had to be at those crossroads last midnight to sell his soul to the devil in exchange for a special talent on guitar.

“Oh, son, not your everlasting soul!” Delmar exclaims to Tommy.

“Why, I wasn’t using it,” Tommy says in explanation.

That pretty much sums up our approach to sin management. Our indifference to sin is explained by our indifference to eternal consequences for sin. When we shut down our souls by not listening to the truth, then we’ve no use for them really. Sin, Hell, eternal souls- is that even real?

But remember, God thinks all these things are real. He worries about our souls. He doesn’t so easily leave us to our foolish indifference. He doesn’t give up on us. God didn’t give up on David. He sent a truth-teller, a prophet, to David. Nathan described how things were to David in a story. Through this story Nathan is able to open David’s eyes to the depth of his wickedness and the consequences that entails. And by doing so, Nathan saved David’s soul. There would still be consequences in David’s life for his sin, but the weight of eternal consequence was lifted. “You shall not die,” Nathan tells him.

We don’t easily tell the truth about ourselves to others. I mean, what will even my closest friends think of me if they know the truth about me, my wicked thoughts and selfish attitudes? How could they still like me? Will they yet love me?

But I can tell you the joy and freedom of bearing your soul to a friend is worth any embarrassment or shame you might feel. It’s like a great weight is lifted off your shoulders. Your soul becomes lighter and yet more real to you. You feel right again.

“So that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro. . .by the cunning of men, by their craftiness and deceitful wiles. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, in to Christ. . .” Ephesians 4.14-15


What good habits must we form in our lives so that “speaking the truth in love” becomes habitual? What friends do we have in our lives today? What is the depth of these friendships? Do our souls at least occasionally touch as we live our lives together?