“Teach Us How to Think!”

Martyn Iles
Executive CEO
Answers in Genesis

One evening, I asked them, “What do you need help with the most?”

After a long pause, one of them lit up as if she’d had the best idea of her life. That’s when she said it: “Please, teach us how to think!” This was met with a chorus of approval from the others.

That was not the answer I was expecting!

The key to thinking well is to begin from the right foundation. If you have the foundation, it’s easy to see how everything else builds on it. If you begin in the right place, you’ll be less likely to go astray later.

It reminds me of the scene from The Sound of Music when Maria teaches the children to sing starting with the tones do, re, mi. She compares it to learning to read by starting at the very beginning—A, B, C.

But what foundation lies at the beginning of everything? Even before A, B, and C? Well, what does God choose as his foundation when he speaks to us in his Word?

Before God said a single thing about anything at all, he began from this foundation: “In the beginning, God created. . . .”

There you have it. How to think? Start with God and what he has done. That description is strange in a culture where people tend to start explaining their thoughts with the phrase, “I feel like. . . .” We speak from our own authority—how we feel about things—rather than from God’s authority. But let’s look at an example.

In Matthew 19, Jesus was asked whether it was okay to get a divorce. These days, people resolve such questions with advice like, “Do what’s right for you.” But Jesus resolved the question by beginning at the foundation.

“Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?” (Matthew 19:4–5)

See, he started with God’s view on the matter, not ours. In particular, he started with what God did: he created marriage.

Jesus followed the same pattern as Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning, God created. . . .” Having turned to that foundation, he then applied it to the question: “What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Matthew 19:6).

Did you know you can think like this about absolutely everything? In Romans 13:1–7, the Apostle Paul even applied this pattern to the government.

Looking to God’s perspective and honoring what he has done as the Creator is the key to right thinking—the beginning of both knowledge and wisdom (Proverbs 1:7, 9:10).