Word of Encouragement (5/20/2020)
This morning, I want to share with you a very simple but helpful definition of faith. Vos says, “Faith is here [in Heb. 11] but another name for other-worldliness or heavenly-mindedness.” I prefer faith as “heavenly-mindedness” because it is even more specific about the content of our faith. Vos seems to prefer this, too, since he titled his sermon, “Heavenly-Mindedness.” We can learn a lot from this one-hyphenated-word definition of faith.
First, faith is a mindedness. Faith is what occupies and preoccupies our mind, or our consciousness. Some things simply add to our knowledge base. Most of the things we learn are like that. They expand our knowledge or they make our knowledge more specific. They “flesh out” the frame of our present knowledge. But there are certain things that we learn, which revolutionize and reorganizes our knowledge base—what people call a paradigm shift. It is like moving from a geo-centric view of the universe to a heliocentric view of our solar system. Having faith is a paradigm shift of the most fundamental and comprehensive nature, moving from an atheistic or self-centered view of life to a theistic, theocentric view of life; from an accidental emergence of the universe out of nothing to God’s purposeful creation of the universe; from a relative, just-right-for-me meaning of life we make up as we go to a divinely ordained and therefore absolute meaning of life; from a situational, utilitarian morality to an objective, absolute standard of God’s law.
We can imagine how such a change in mindedness affects how we view and interpret everything, how and for what we live. Faith doesn’t necessarily replace what we know; it reorganizes and reinterprets and recasts what we know in light of God and His lordship over our lives.
Second, faith is a specific orientation of our mind/heart: it is heavenly-mindedness. We don’t just have a mind full of knowledge and ideas; our mind is bent towards something or away from something. People are more or less all self-centered. But some are more service-oriented. There are also those who are idealistic and those who are more practically/pragmatically-minded. The Christian faith is heavenly-minded.
This is not to deny that the Christian faith is also Christ-centered. But we know that people have created many Christs according to their image. Which one is right? The only right one is the biblical one. We can also say that all the false images of Christ are basically this-worldly or worldly-minded. That was the problem even when Jesus came into the world. Many followed Jesus, including His disciples, thought that He was an earthly Messiah in the likeness of David and Solomon. He had to constantly correct their wrong understanding. He did not come to revive David’s kingdom; He came to usher in the kingdom of heaven! They did not get it right until His death and resurrection, until the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost. To be heavenly-minded is to have our mind oriented toward and around heaven. As Vos puts it somewhere else, the center of gravity for Christianity (therefore our faith) is on the other side of the grave, not on this world.
It is a good thing that our faith is heavenly-minded. What faith can we put in this world of change and decay? Is this temporal, temporary world worthy of the immortal soul, which God bestowed on us? This doesn’t mean that we don’t care about the world and think only of heaven. It means that we do what we do in this world for a different purpose with a different motive, which come from seeing the full reality, which not only consists of the physical universe and the present moment but also of the spiritual realm and the end, which God ordained before the foundation of the world. Heavenly-mindedness will keep us humble in moments of success and triumph and it will keep us from despair in moments of failure and loss.
May the Lord grow us in our heavenly-mindedness! Have a blessed day!