Feelings reign supreme in our culture.

So many people have bought into the lie that how you feel determines what’s real.

What we need is more thinking. We need to love God with our minds.

One of my mentors J.P. Moreland, put it this way:

“The spiritual journey is certainly more than loving God with our minds, but just as surely, that journey is at least a life of such intellectual devotion.”

One of the reasons is that we don’t engage the mind and think more is that we are too busy. I mean who has the time to read a book? Or think about something for longer than three minutes?

Moving From “How I Feel” to “How I Think”

If we want to grow personally and help teenagers follow Jesus for a lifetime, then we must help them learn how to think well. This is part of our worship of God. Not all of it, but a major part of it.

Pay attention to how many conversations begin with “I feel that” rather than “I think that.”

Feelings are important and good barometers of what is going on inside, but thinking helps us successfully navigate life.

Jesus explained the greatest commandment:

“And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”–Luke 10:27

Putting This Into Action

1. Pick a book of the Bible (like Philippians or Colossians) and read it every day for the next week (it will take about 15 minutes)
2. Find a physical book (not a digital copy) and set aside 10 minutes a day to read it.
3. Around the dinner table, ask your kids what they think about what they learned in school or church that day. Ask them to give you reasons they agree or disagree with whatever they share.

These are small things that can make a big difference!

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Was the Jesus story borrowed and recycled from pagan mystery religions?

Is Christianity really just a copy-cat religion?

Let’s take a quick look at this common objection. The short answer is no. Here’s why.

The Quest to Find the Real Historical Jesus

During the first quest, the history of religions school was very popular among scholars. The idea was simply that Christianity was a copycat religion that had borrowed from other popular myths and created the Jesus myth.

This claim was soundly refuted and scholars (whether liberal, moderate, or conservative) have abandoned it. However, it is a favorite of Internet skeptics and it makes the rounds on YouTube. So I do want to offer three reasons the copycat myth is false.

First, Christianity emerged out of first-century Judaism that was monotheistic and exclusive.

The Jewish people had learned their lesson about worshiping other Gods (cf. being judged by Assyria and Babylon).

They were committed to one and only one God. The Shema in Deuteronomy 6:4 makes this clear, declaring, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”

The New Testament teachings were clear as well, “For they themselves report concerning us the kind of reception we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God” (1 Thessalonians 1:9).

Second, the alleged parallels disappear once the specifics of each myth are examined.

A dying and rising Jesus is not a meaningful parallel with crops coming to life in the spring dying off again in the winter.

As Mary Jo Sharp notes, “The suggested “parallels”—such as themes of virgin birth, sacrificial death, and resurrection— are not paralleled in the content of the texts. There is no sound evidence of overlap within the details of these two types of texts. The biblical account of Jesus cannot be grouped into the genre of mythological literature based on either story details or structure.”

Lastly, if any borrowing was going on, it was the pagan mystery religions copying from Christianity.

Gregory Boyd and Paul Eddy observe, “With the exception of Osiris, all the written accounts of these myths date after the birth of Christianity.”

If anything, mystery religions were copying from and being influenced by Christianity in the first two centuries because they had to compete to gain new converts and survive.

And when you look at all of the positive historical evidence for Jesus, it’s easy to see why professional New Testament historians and scholars have abandoned this theory.

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Quick Read > What did the historian Josephus really say about Jesus?