Romans 12:1-2 lays out the importance of the this process: I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, so that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.As God’s truth permeates our minds, it imparts objective facts and it impacts our subjective thought process. In other words, God’s truth forms the basis for what we think and fashions how we think. Scripture provides us with the truth we need to inform our thinking and to shape our wisdom. For this reason, and many more, an unreasoned Christian life is a deficient Christian life—the mind must be engaged.
That being said, we must never allow our reasoning to rise to the level of authority. What does this mean? J.I. Packer incisively explains: But all its many varieties spring from a single principle, namely, that the final authority for my faith and life is the verdict of my reason, conscience, or religious sentiment as I examine Scripture “with an open mind,” and measure it by what I have learned from other sources, historical, philosophical, religious and scientific. What under these circumstances reason and conscience say, what I find that “I feel,” that God says (Packer, Fundamentalism and the Word of God, 50).
