Heart And Mind

I was talking to someone the other day about different churches and it occurred to me again that we need a combination of heart and mind, spirit and head, word and Holy Spirit when it comes to approaching God.

If everything in our spirituality, from Sunday worship to personal devotions, is spontaneous and feelings based, then we can get very vague in our understanding of who God is. We can have a great time "in the Spirit" but unless we know who God is and what He is like then we can actually end up far from God pursuing a demonic agenda.

This happened during the Reformation period when some groups called anabaptists were so much into "being led by the Holy Spirit" that they started preaching weird doctrines and practices such as polygamy.

On the other hand if we reduce everything to The Book, Christian life can become a new form of legalism, an academic process of merely learning Bible verses and theology. The sense of joyful relationship with our Saviour can easily be lost.

Some churches are so bound up in getting their theology right that they squash every movement of the Holy Spirit.
Someone once said "If you just have the Holy Spirit you will blow up. If you just have the Word, you will dry up. If you have both the Spirit and the Word you will grow up."

We need to engage God with every part of our being. This should not be either one or the other. Neither is it a matter of balance between extremes.

Pursue God with every part of you.