Matthew 18:1-4

 “³ Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.⁴  Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”

As I survey the evangelical landscape, there has been a tendency to emphasize loving God with all your heart, while loving God with all your mind has been put on the back burner. Certainly, we should love God with all our heart, but “mind, soul, mind and strength” are involved as well. We do a much “better” job at differentiating between all these than God does. Which is a polite way to say, perhaps we should see reference to the “heart” in Scripture as referring to intellect, emotions, and will rather than limiting it to emotion. Our thinking should shape our feelings, and too often we allow our feelings to shape our thinking, which is more of an indication we align with the cultural relativity of our day rather than truth as revealed in Scripture.

I have often erred on this front. Thinking critically and having well, thought-out conclusions take time and energy. There have been many times where I have avoided this hard work by falling back on having “child-like” faith as stated in the above Scripture. This is not an indication of spiritual maturity, but intellectual laziness. I believe this trend towards anti-intellectualism has hindered us from properly engaging in evangelism. If we do not think through all we belief, hold to, and treasure, then will really be ready to give an account for the hope we hold so dear. Is blindly believing an indication that we don’t really treasure things things at all? As a professor recently told our class, we should question everything, because if it is true, then we have no reason to fear questioning it? What we should really be afraid of are the aspects of life and faith that we are unwilling to question.

To this end, blind faith is not to be preferred over well-reasoned faith. As noted scholar J.P Moreland rightly points out, faith is relying on what you have good reason to believe is true and trustworthy. The challenge of Jesus in the text above is not to blindly believe. The challenge is to be humble like a child. The challenge is not to avoid using our intellect. The challenge is to be like a child in the sense of depending upon God. Children are not self sufficient and neither are we. The opposite of a child is not someone who lacks intelligence and intellect. The opposite of a child is someone who is arrogant and seemingly dependent on no one.

More and more, I am trying to take my dad’s advice to me (trying to fix the wheel of a tractor while I was growing up in Haiti) and apply it to my spiritual life, “God gave you a brain, so use it.”