well let me Begin by saying that um it's a delight as we say in English to have you to be here with you and I thought tonight I would treat a very common L theme this is something La has been stressing for 50 years and for many of you this will be familiar perhaps but my my sense is that the theme of tonight the lordship of Christ over all of life is one that the church still desperately needs to hear and I don't think we can be complacent for a moment as we look at where
the church is today now the great Abraham Kyper the uh the Dutch President president in the early 20th century he said there is not a single inch of Life over which Christ does not say mine or we could summarize Kyper by saying simply Jesus Christ is the Lord over all of life do you agree with that statement I would say I'm glad you agree with it and I don't think there's a Christian in the world who would reject the statement No Christian would want to limit this idea that Jesus is Lord of all in fact
in Romans 10 Paul defines a Christian as someone who declares with their mouth and believes on their heart that Jesus is Lord every believer believes the lordship of Jesus but here in this talk I want to demonstrate that we very easily put limitations on Christ lordship very easily we can diminish the lordship of Christ and when whenever we diminish Christ's lordship the consequences are devastating now I want to make a connection tonight between the diminished lordship of Christ and what I call a weakened mind now when I use the word weakened mind I'm not talking
about a lower power of IQ by weak I mean the loss of a Christian mind if we limit the lordship of Christ we also limit the way we engage the world through our mind so tonight I want to put forward an equation for your consideration diminish lordship equals weak mind to honor Christ for his full lordship equals a strong mind in my sense perhaps for the Brazilian church is that this has to be strengthened just so you know the same is for the British church too often we have a diminished lordship and therefore a weak
Christian mind so let me look at this one first now I've already asserted that no Christian would intentionally limit the lordship of Jesus there are however certain pressures that lead us to diminish the circle of reality in which we acknowledge his Rule and we do this through the creation of of several dualities by which we recreate reality I call this The Divided reality model could you take me to the next slide so you have two columns in the divided reality model left column right column spiritual material sacred secular Redemption creation many many Christians diminish Christ
lordship through this divided reality model now this divided reality it presses us to two obligations in terms of how we live Christians we assign a higher value to this column and we only secondly acknowledge Christ's lordship here his full lordship is here not so much over there so here in the left column You' put prayer reading the Bible evangelism Church attendance so these are the kind of activities related to the soul to the church and to redemption in the right column you'd put your work your study eating sexual activity Leisure activity those who belong to
the right these are the activities related to the body to Creation to the world now because of the activities of the left column have a higher value we assign Christ lordship much more here than we do over there we see a privacy of lordship towards the spiritual the church and [Music] Redemption and we assign a lower value to the right so Christ lordship here is less important than Christ lordship over over here now I believe the majority of Christians live in this model and we should understand the attraction of this model why for us as
Christians we like to live like this this actually in some ways simplifies life for a [Music] believer in a world where we have so many choices this act offers parameters for how we make choices it helps us set our priorities we must have a priority of evangelism over our work a priority of commitment to the church over commitment to our local community and these priorities help us determine where Christ will be the Lord so we say Jesus will be the Lord of all of this and we give everything to it we can really be focused
and then we leave this as a less priority now I want to take a few moments now to put this divided reality model in its historical context many people would see this divide is actually coming out in Enlightenment but I think if we read history carefully we see that actually this divided model preceded the enlightenment it goes back to the mid 17th century this is just after after the religious wars of Europe and a kind of second Reformation was taking place and this Reformation is a type of theological scholasticism and this scholasticism is very intellectual
in its character and there is a reaction to this [Music] scholasticism this is a counter movement known as pism now there was a man called spenner who's credited for starting pism and spenner called for the reformation and renewal of the church and there's a very strong emphasis on being practical and the Practical was primarily in devotional activity now this is somewhat of a simplification the pietists were also philanthropic and social in their vision and as a movement it did an enormous amount of good and the influence of pism went very far there is no Evangelical
in the world today not deeply influenced by pism now there was some very significant strengths in pism there was also some significant weaknesses I said the psts were reacting against the Scholastics they said perhaps correctly the Scholastics pay too much attention to the intellectual side of faith and not enough attention to the experience so they counter this tendency by putting an emphasis on experience to the expense of the Mind the Pires actually saw saw reason as something which weakened experience sorry the pirst saw reason as something which weakened The Experience so they started to undermine
the importance of thinking so the the experience of the individual became the Cornerstone of good faith could I have the next slide if you could read read this quote there you see this in Brazil this tendency here yeah you see it everywhere they had a very strong influence no no that's not yet um now what I'm saying is that this pietism is part of what created the divided reality the personal experience of God becomes spiritual activity and this spiritual experience in the reading of the Bible in the prayer in the sacraments and preaching this becomes
more important than anything over here so all the activity which AIDS religious experience is separated out from the other functions of human life just so prayer and preaching set apart from thinking from work from sex and all the other activities so religious experience is the controlling Paradigm for what defines the important things and the spiritual things so what's not TI to religious experience is p over into the unspiritual part of life now I think that this actually fed into the privatized dimension of religion which is part of modernity today if you give priority to the
devotional you're giving priority to the private experience of the individual before God so I think you can also blame pism for privatized ReliOn so this priority of the individual experience led the church to gradually remove itself self from all spheres of public life so no longer do you engage the lordship of Christ in the Public Square where where much of this is over here now in the mid 19th century the p this movement gave rise to what I call an Evangelical activism the middle of 19th 19th I think Charles fin could be credited as the
founder of Evangelical activism now again we need to start by stating the positive Dimensions here Evangelical activism is a call to implement much more aggressively the Great Commission so there's a strong emphasis to the priority of mission and evangelism in fact it set off a whole new age of mission both home and abroad now like the original PST these people also put their finger on something very valuable the pirst emphasizing the importance of personal experience of God the Evangelical activist the centrality of mission these are important things to emphasize however if it becomes one-sided in
the divided reality model you end up with a problem and in the late 19th century the church began to Define its mission to the world as evangelism only because of the divided life model evangelism is seen as a spiritual activity so evangelism belongs to the left column and belonging in the left column evangelism is reduced to the mission of saving Souls it's a natural consequence of this divided model the body and the Soul exist on different sides so if evangelism is on this side Souls on this side evangelism is about saving the soul so this
is where the energy of the church is is focused now this Evangelical activism contributed hugely to this growing divide between these two sides so priority of the Soul over the body so evangelism is all about how to save a soul priority of the Sacred over the secular that means evangelism is all about getting people into the church and it's ultimately about Redemption over creation Jesus comes in into the world to rescue people from creation creation is the problem so Christ comes to rescue and take people out of creation Now all those emphasis meant that we
abandon Christ's claim to lordship over here so that's a brief summary of the modern story of diminished lordship now I want here to develop the connection between this diminished lordship and the weak mind my point is this that under the influence of pietism with the divided model It produced the the importance of the Mind was lowered remember the PST said that reason weakens experience maybe we can you can do the next now that now I speak at this point as a European this lowering of the importance of the Mind was an absolute disaster from from
for the context of of my life chur yeah for the culture for the whole culture of Europe this was a disaster for disas why well at the same time that the pietists were denigrating the importance of the Mind scientific materialism was in the making the enlightenment was taking place so while the enlightenment is taking place the intellect is being put to the side so that me the church had no means for for challenging the Enlightenment and it's very ironic historically that Germany is the place where pism took place and the enlightenment started both in the
same place but nothing between them so in the 18th early 19th century this is the catastrophic disaster in terms of the failure of the Christian mind there was no Christian Minds to challenge the assumptions of the Enlightenment [Applause] that's because of this divided life model Mark n an American church historian wrote a book called the scandal of the Evangelical [Music] mind let me quote to you off the top of my head the first sentence of the book very memorable the scandal of the Evangelical mind is that there is no Evangelical mind Harry BL blamar in
his wonderful book old now called the Christian mind said this har for he feels this with some weight as blamar and I think given this divided life reality model it's not overstated you see given that Jesus is Lord of the left column our intellectual life is only focused here so intellectual life is focused in Doctrine in missions in church in evangelism and spiritual disciplines almost nothing here that so we abdicated our responsibility to think how Christ lordship impacts the other side the whole of reality things like the markets psychology philosophy alternative medicine the Arts education
the list goes on and on like the Korean sing it brothering brother you're the best so you see how diminished lordship leads to the weak mind let me move now to to the second part of the equation how full lordship leads to the strong mind and let's look at the first half of the equation full lordship of Jesus Christ to ackowledge Jesus as the Lord of all of life is to resist the dualities of this divided life model is to acknowledge he is Lord of both columns there is one circle around both and if the
columns exist and I think they probably do they exist as two Realms of one reality and Jesus is the Lord of all of it now the question is how do we resist this Duality which is so strong in terms of its appeal to us and I think the only way to resist this is within a theological missile you and for me yeah I think for me the missile is looking at the relationship of Jesus Christ to both creation and Redemption you see I think at the the root of diminished lordship is an incorrect understanding of
how Christ is related to both creation and Redemption because in the divided reality model they're separated and Redemption is given a priority over creation that is our most Christians think and this is not biblical in fact I would say it's heretical get cuz when you look at the Bible you see that the fundamental category in terms of the relationship between Christ and a person is not savior saved it's Creator creature and that's so often how the church presents a primary relationship it's savior saved but when Christ came into this world to saved Sinners it was
not with a view to replacing the category of creature with saved Jesus came to redeem the creature not to replace him or her as Hans Rook marer put it oh Hans is in the library um he said Christ didn't die to make us Christians he died to make us human he came to redeem our creatureliness and for me the flip side of this is that we don't worship Christ firstly and primarily as Savior we worship him as creator we owe Christ our worship first as the one who created us Colossians 1:54 Christ is the author
of creation his work towards us starts there as the Creator and he is the Lord of all of this because he made it now this divided reality model tends to ignore this emphasis this biblical emphasis it sees Christ and His glory as the Redeemer and tends to ignore him as the Creator but if Christ is the creator which he is say all things owe him proper respect and it's interesting when you turn to the Book of Revelation you see that in heaven Christ is worshiped first as the Creator Revelation 4 the first 11 verses is
worship to Christ as the Creator then in the next chapter Revelation 5 he's worshiped as the Redeemer now the thing I love in Revelation is that you see that he is forever worshiped as both there is no divided reality so we respond to the Lord Jesus as both Creator and Redeemer and to Bow before Christ's lordship is to Bow not only as Sinners the redeemed but also as [Music] creatures and the reason Christ redeemed is because he has bound himself to what he first created now for me this lack of a creational emphasis is the
greatest weakness of evangelicalism and it's brought about by this divided life reality model and I think we need to see that Redemption is nonsense without creation and to emphasize Redemption at the expans of creation I believe is a heresy Mr rudol Li worker man of the Bible do you have a Bible with you have my room not here does anybody have a Portuguese Bible for my oh one one there's a Bible in the room good good turn to First Timothy chapter 4 first the first five verses and I just made a big heavy comment I've
just said that to deny creation is a heresy listen to what Paul says here for you see what he's saying to deny creation is a doctrine of very very serious thing so that means if to acknowledge the full lordship of Christ we it must involve a full engagement with his creation and we must just engage with a limited dimension of it so there is no sacred secular no Body Soul divide no creation Redemption divide as Francis schaer put it all of life is spiritual except for sin now I think this was wonderfully reflected in the
16th century in Holland Reformation was was was worked out beautifully in Holland and I found out recently that in all the churches of Holland in the 16th century from Monday to Saturday they used to lock the doors you think why would you lock the doors of a church well they wanted the people to know that you didn't only have to pray in a church you could pray outside a church it was just as spiritual this was something recovered at [Music] the lock the doors of the church Monday to Saturday some of you would say maybe
keep it locked on Sunday too so my my point is this that if we're going to deal with this divided life model we have to remap the relationship of Christ to Redemption and creation he is both Creator and Redeemer and these two are not separated now how does this link to a strong mind full lordship equals strong mind well when we acknowledge the full lordship of Christ over all of his creation it opens the door to a full engagement with it and one of the keys to how we engage reality is by means of the
mind and when this division is removed the engagement of our minds is not prioritized to the left column now it's the whole of reality and that's what a Christian mind is it's a mind that is engaged with the whole of reality not some little part of it and I think it's essential if we are going to honor Jesus as Lord of all that we engage the whole of reality with our minds a Christian mind under the lordship of Christ engaging the whole of reality is what I want to call a Renaissance mind now it's not
Renaissance in that word intellectual experts in every area of life that's impossible but it's renissance in the sense that it's a mind engaged with every part of life that's what it means to live under Christ's full lordship so you want to take every thought you encounter and make it captive to Christ to make sure that you're thinking his thoughts after him to make sure your mind is being informed by his truth now there's another text here which I think is very important 2 Corinthians chapter 10 10 verse 3 to 5 now this is this is
a text these verses all about spiritual warfare and it's interesting when I came to Brazil two years ago in SE aollo they had this huge March through the city hundreds of thousands of people's incredibly big event and they were on the March for spiritual warfare and this is what Paul is talking about here spiritual warfare now what does he say about Spiritual Warfare 3 5 3 [Music] so spiritual warfare is not prayer or prayer marches spiritual warfare in these verses is taking every thought captive to Christ we demolish arguments and every preten pretention of the
mind that sets itself up against the knowledge of God so spiritual warfare is in the realm of ideas which of course this divided reality model sees as unspiritual but Paul is saying that it's the Mind where the real spiritual battle is taking place and to lose this battle for the mind is a spiritual failing that's what he's saying so this is how we're meant to fight in our world with our minds so my point is that the Christian mind is a mind under Christ full lordship covering this whole circle now with these thoughts in mind
let me close by highlighting three qualities of a Christian mind just very briefly firstly a mind which is in complete submission to the word of Christ we can only take each thought captive to Christ when we submit our thinking to the words of scripture for this is the primary source for the mind of Christ and if our minds are not submitted to Christ Revelation in the Bible they're not Christian Minds we may have a broad mind a creative mind but it's not a Christian mind if it's not under this revelation the second quality of a
Christian mind is that it's a mind with a passionate commitment to truth if Christianity is true it must involve the mind and a passion for truth means we want to discover the full breath of Christ lordship so how does Christ mind relate to the full array of human life and experience so we want to see how it touches every branch of the Sciences including narot technology philosophy economics information art culture keep it going brother Rolph keep the L's going brother sing it brother sing it keep it going absolutely Brazilian barbecue and then the third quality
of the Christian mind is that it's a mind that's Universal in its scope
