Transforming the Male Mind

by Warwick Cooper

OK, I am a Star Trek fan. There was one episode from season three of the original series with Kirk & Spock, called "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," that I particularly remember. Bele and Lokai were both Charonians, but Bele has black skin on the right side of his body and white on the left, while Lokai is the reverse. Captain Kirk believes he can reason with these two warring ethnic groups when he blurts out, "Come on. You're both the same species. Why are you so mad at each other? You're both black and white! Just get a long!" But Bele retorts that Kirk is wrong. "We're not the same species. We are better than they are!" It's a silly episode but illustrates the point I want to make at the beginning of this article. Men and women often think differently but we really are very similar. We are not from Mars or Venus. We are from the earth and to the earth we one day will return. And, after that…heaven. How we get along down here will affect our place up there.

I want you to think about your mind for a moment -the mind on a man. It involves ideas, images, information and thinking itself. Lets look at each of these areas one at a time.

A current issue of New Scientist features the latest data on brain scanning technology. These days no self respecting university or teaching hospital is without a PET or FMRI scanner. Where once researchers were most interested in sweeping generalizations about how humans think, now their studies are becoming ever more personal, uncovering details about our individual motivations, desires and prejudices. We are fascinated with how we come to the conclusions we come to. Genetic twins raised in the same environment end up in extreme opposites of the philosophical pendulum. What's up with that?

As a Christian man, we are reminded of the advice of St. Paul who states, "Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: who being in the very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness (Philip 2:5) How is that idea affecting your life? It challenges the worldview of modern man today. To let that idea affect your outlook on life is a wrenching experience. In many parts of the world Christians are persecuted because they threaten the dominant idea-system of their culture. Jesus' ideas transcend specifics culture because they constitute a complete and consistent worldview.

Never underestimate the power of images in the role of male thinking. We are very visual in our thinking as men. This comes as no surprise. It was Aristotle who said that 'a soul never thinks without a picture." We are bombarded with images on a daily basis. Simon Weile notes however that "imaginary evil, such as that portrayed in books, television shows and movies, 'is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating."

Jesus used images to focus our attention. The story of the rich man's son eating with the pigs captured the soul of the average Jew of his day to understand the love of the father to his wayward son. The church has pointed to the cross as the symbol of the passion of a caring God in a fallen world.

The modern world values appearance over reality and many a man suffers from an image of himself, which is false. He feels he is not clever, not good looking, not talented, not valuable and not loveable. He is tempted either to despair - to live down to his image, or to succeed - to prove himself and others wrong. To see yourself as God sees you, to see God as He is -that's Job One for most men today. The better we see the truth about ourselves, about God, the easier it will be for us to align our thoughts with the image presented by Bernard of Clairvaux many centuries ago when he wrote:

Jesus, the very thought of Thee
With Sweetness fills my breast;
But sweeter far they face to see,
And in Thy presence rest.

What about the information that floods into our minds on a moment-by-moment basis? Take a piece of writing paper. Say that piece of white paper represents ALL the knowledge that has ever existed in all the world, time without end. Do you have that in your mind? Now, draw a circle around all of the knowledge that you feel you have in your mind right now. Got that? Question. How big is your circle? Mine is pretty tiny. In fact, I have discovered that in my search for knowledge, the more I get, the more I realize I don't have. So the more knowledge I have the greater my sense of ignorance.

Without correct information our ability to think has nothing to work on. Indeed without information, we may be afraid of thinking at all, or simply incapable of thinking straight On the evening before his death, Jesus said to this father in prayer, "I have revealed you to those whom you gave me." (John 17:6) We do not know all there is to know but the Bible gives us all we need to know about God right now. A Christian mind is one who constantly feeds on the revealed word of God.

My final point involves the act of thinking itself Thinking is the activity of searching out what is true, or cannot be true, in the light of given facts or assumptions. It interprets and assimilates the information we have and enables us to see things in relation to other things. Thinking shows up false or misleading ideas and images for what they are.

If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all - how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? (Romans 8: 31-32) Paul is thinking: if God gave us Jesus, it is hardly imaginable that he will refuse us anything we need.

This is very important today. We must think right. To serve God well we must think straight. Crooked thinking, intentional or not, always favors evil. And when crooked thinking gets elevated into orthodoxy, whether religious or secular, it always costs lives.

Thinking about God and his truth moves seamlessly into worship. Thinking is not a cold, dispassionate activity, but one that moves us to deep love of God and this in turn brings us back to think about

"Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise." (Revelation 5:12-13)

It was A.W.Tozer who once said:" It is my opinion that the Christian conception of God current in these middle years of the twentieth century is so decadent as to be utterly beneath the dignity of the Most High god and actually to constitute for professed believers something amounting to a moral calamity."

The effect of putting God first in our thoughts will be the transformation of our entire life. Everything else that enters our mind, and our reaction to the unexpected things that we encounter, will be properly ordered. Win the battle for the mind and you have won the war. Loose that battle and you will be fighting for the rest of your life to achieve peace.