Your Grace Archbishop Stanley Ntagali, Chancellor of Uganda Christian University; Rev. Dr. John Senyonyi, Vice Chancellor; assembled bishops and members of the clergy; faculty, students and, most of all, assembled graduands of Uganda Christian University:
I will speak today from 2 Timothy 1:6-7:
Therefore I remind you to stir up the gift of God which is in you through the laying on of my hands. For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.
But before I do, I would like to bring greetings from the students and faculty at Patrick Henry College in Virginia, USA. They are all excited about our visit here at Uganda Christian University. I know that many are eager to visit you in person and perhaps to study and serve with you in the future here in Uganda.
I bring greetings also from our parish, Church of the Holy Spirit Anglican, and our Rector Clancy Nixon, who has been here to Uganda numerous times; and greetings from our parish’s little mission congregation, Waterford Anglican Mission, where I serve as Lay Pastor. Our parish was under the spiritual authority of the Church of Uganda for about eight years during a time of difficult transition, and we are so very grateful for this.
Finally I bring greetings from the Anglican Diocese of the Mid-Atlantic, where I serve on the Standing Committee, and from our Bishop John Guernsey, who was himself ordained in the Church of Uganda before serving as a bishop in the US. Actually he was here a few days ago, so some of you may have already received his greeting in person.
* * *
It is actually very surprising that I should be here to speak to you from the Bible. At least, it is surprising from the point of view of my family and my early life.
I was born and raised in California, where people consider themselves very advanced. My mother and father did not walk with God. My mother was openly atheistic or agnostic, and very hostile to Christ for almost all of her adult life. My father said very little about God, but he made it clear that he agreed with my mother that intelligent people should not believe in God. My parents were scornful of religious faith, especially faith in Jesus Christ.
On my mother’s side, it went back for at least two generations. My grandmother was assertively atheist for all of her adult life, and I was told that her mother before her was the same way, although I never knew her.
This approach to life did not produce a happy life for my parents. They were both addicted to alcohol for many years. Although they were married to each other until I was eight years of age, they divorced and married other people, and then divorced again, twice again in my mother’s case. This made life very hard, and very confusing, for me as a little boy. Sometimes I had to live with my mother and her second or third husbands, and sometimes I had to live with my father and his second wife, or sometimes with his women who were not his wives.
But God saw me and had mercy on me. When I was fifteen I began to hear about Jesus Christ. I learned that he was the Son of God, and that he loved me enough to die for my sins. I learned that there was considerable evidence that he rose from the dead. I said yes to Jesus at age 15, and was born again. Since then my life has been very different from that of my parents.
For one thing, I found a wonderful, intelligent wife who loves Jesus, too. We have been married for 24 years, and have two grown daughters who love the Lord. My wife Lindy is here with me today. (Please stand, my dear, so our friends here can greet you!)
My parents and grandparents were very intelligent, talented people. My mother was an artist who painted extraordinarily beautiful paintings of landscapes and people. In fact, in 1978 she spent many weeks in Africa—in Kenya and Tanzania primarily—and painted a series of stunning oil paintings of East African animals and rural village life. Many of these African paintings are hanging in our home and also on our campus at Patrick Henry College. My father was architect who designed elegant residential and commercial buildings. (He would have loved your beautiful new library.) My grandmother and both my parents had studied at a very prestigious university, the University of California at Berkeley, then as now one of the world’s most highly ranked research universities.
But despite their intelligence, my mother and father were often confused in their thinking. For example, they thought that believing in God would make them unhappy and alcohol would make them happy. But of course the opposite was true.
They were confused in their thinking in other ways, too. Let me give just one example. My grandmother read widely both during her time at the University of California and afterwards. I enjoyed talking with her. But when she wanted to emphasize her rejection of God, she would often say, “I studied Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, and I learned that different people groups have different moral and religious beliefs. So who are we to say that we are right and they are wrong?” When I was older, and after I had become a Christian, I would try to reason with her. “Grandmother,” I would say (I wasn’t allowed to call her Grandma; I had to say Grandmother); “Grandmother, the fact that different people groups have different ideas doesn’t prove there is no universal truth in morality or religion. It only proves that they disagree. One group could, in fact, be right and another wrong. Or vice versa. Or both groups could be mistaken and some third view could be correct. But, logically speaking, the presence of disagreement does not prove the absence of truth.” I think I tried to be respectful in saying this. But she would almost invariably respond by reiterating what she had said before; “I took Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley….(etc).”
For her, a university education had the effect of insulating her against logic, at least where the most important questions were concerned. An experience that should have amplified her rationality instead impaired it.
* * *
This example of confused thinking brings me back to our occasion today and to those who today are receiving their degrees. Now you are university graduates, and I hope your thinking has become clearer and truer than it ever was before. I am afraid that my grandmother’s university education made her more sophisticated but her less logical. I hope that, as a result of your education here at Uganda Christian University, you will care very little for sophistication but will be very good at careful, wise thinking—better than you ever were before.
You will need wisdom, and clear-headed thinking, because life will be challenging and you will need all your wits about you.
Thus I come to the text I have chosen for today. A few moments ago I reminded you of the words of St. Paul to Timothy when he was perhaps the age of many of you:
Therefore I remind you to stir up the gift of God which is in you through the laying on of my hands. For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind. (2 Timothy 1:6-7)
You are to have no fear. You are to suffer no intimidation. Instead you are given a spirit of power, love, and a sound mind.
In the context of the verse, you notice that he is reminding Timothy of the gift given to him, and it was given to him by the laying on of Paul’s hands. Now, looking back at the book of Acts, you can’t help but recall that, generally speaking, when hands were laid on, miraculous and stunning things happened, things out of the ordinary. The laying on of hands usually had a supernatural dimension to it. So it is not surprising that when Paul explains the spirit that God has given us in verse 7, the first thing he mentions is power, “a spirit of power.”
The word there in the Greek text of the New Testament is dynamos, the same word that Jesus uses in Acts 1:8, when He is about to be taken up into heaven. There He tells them, “Wait in Jerusalem until you be endued with power—dynamos—from on high.” And when Pentecost came, it was dramatic, and thousands of people were saved that day through the testimony of the newly-empowered disciples. So it is that Paul speaks of “a spirit of power”: when he laid hands on Timothy, the young man received this dynamos of God.
Next Paul speaks of “a spirit of love.” The Greek word is agape. There are several words for love in the Greek of the New Testament, and this is the deepest and highest one. It refers above all to the love of God, the selfless, giving love of God Himself. It is a love more stable and more powerful than any merely human love, although, amazingly, man may participate in this love and give it to others. You, like Timothy, are given God’s miraculous power and this divine, selfless love.
Then Paul speaks of “a spirit of a sound mind.” Now it is the third element of this trio of gifts that I wish to focus on today: a sound mind. You might think that the term used there might refer to miraculous power or prophetic insight. Certainly God does give those gifts, and they are described elsewhere in the New Testament and in the epistles of St. Paul. But in this passage, the word for a “sound mind” is actually more ordinary, more normal, more understandable and natural.
The Greek language professor at our college helped me to study the biblical language here. The Greek word here is sophronismos. It can be rendered in English as a sound mind, right-mindedness, sobriety of mind, the ability to have your mind properly functioning, sober rationality. To shed light on it, I did a little word study. The word is used in a few different places in the New Testament, but its closest cognates are in two passages that you will recognize.
In Mark 5 and Luke 8 the biblical text describes how Jesus went across the Sea of Galilee and encountered the man possessed by demons. The man was afflicted by so many demons that they were called Legion. The man tore himself and nothing could restrain him. He was fierce and completely, frighteningly irrational. The Lord Jesus, in His great power and love, case out the Legion and sent them into the herd of swine, who ran in a furious rush over the cliff into the sea.
So it says in Mark 5:15 that the people from the nearby town went out to see what had happened, and “they came to Jesus and saw the one who had been demon-possessed, and had the Legion, sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind.” He was sitting there, delivered from demonic possession. He was not turned into some kind of raving street preacher—although sometimes God does raise up enthusiastic street preachers. But in this case, the point is that his healing was evidenced in that he was clothed—a very good thing—he was sitting at rest, and, most of all, he was in his “right mind,” sophronismos.
Now the reaction of the local people to this was interesting. You would have thought they would say, “What a relief, now we can talk with this man and with Jesus.” But it was such a stunning change, that instead they were afraid. They were so afraid that they pled with Jesus to depart from them, because to see this man clothed and sitting there in his right mind was such a shock. But there he was, and he had that quality of sophronismos which is the gift of God, the spirit of a sound mind.
The Prodigal Son, whose story is told in Luke chapter 15, had a similar experience of regaining a sound mind. The word sophronismos is not used, but you can see the concept is the same. He had lost his clarity of thought. He had been almost out of his mind as a result of “spending all his substance on riotous living”—a long period of dissolute self-indulgence. But when he reached bottom, “he came to himself” (Luke 15:17) and in a moment of repentance began to think clearly. He remembered that even the servants in his father’s house had enough to eat. So he determined to return to his father’s house, and humbly say “I have sinned against heaven and against you and am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.” It seems that God granted him a moment of clear thinking when he could figure out to do the right thing. His repentance made this moment possible. His repentance before his father restored first his soundness of mind and then ultimately his life.
Then again the precise word sophronismos—just like in 2 Timothy—occurs in Titus 2:6 where St. Paul asks Titus to “exhort the young men to be sober minded,” that is, to have sophronismos. I think I understand this, because I see that young men seem especially to need this reminder because how easily they can follow in the footsteps of the Prodigal Son!
The word sophronismos is also pivotal to the narrative in Acts chapter 26. You may recall that when Paul was imprisoned and before he was eventually sent to Rome for a trial, there was a series of judicial hearings. The first hearing was before Festus as recorded in chapter 26. Festus was not particularly impressed, so Festus then brought him before King Agrippa. There before Agrippa and the whole assembled court, Paul gave his testimony. He told how Jesus had appeared to him on the road to Damascus, and he also spoke about Christ’s resurrection and how this resurrection was a fulfillment of Old Testament scripture.
In Acts 26:24 the text tells us that “as he thus made his defense, Festus cried out with a loud voice, saying ‘Paul, you are beside yourself, much learning is driving you mad!”
Now as an aside, I think many generations of students have wanted to take Acts 26:24b as their motto: “much learning makes you mad.” I have heard people say, with a twinkle in their eye, “well, I shouldn’t have to study so hard, because the Bible says it will make me mad.” But I am sure you would never take the Bible out of context in this way!
But to be serious again: Festus scornfully says, “Much learning has made you mad.” But Paul replies, “I am not mad, most noble Festus, but speak the words of truth and reason.” The word “reason” here is a cognate of sophronismos: truth and sobriety of mind. Paul contrasts insanity with sophronismos to make the point that he is not insane. “For the king, before whom I speak, freely knows these things—none of these things escape his attention, for these things were not done in a corner.”
St. Paul is appealing here to the knowledge available to all in Palestine. The things Paul described were not secret, esoteric events: Jesus had had a public ministry, had died a publicly validated death, then rose from the dead. Many witnesses were available. This thing was not done in a corner, as Paul reasonably points out. (As he says to Titus when he points out “We have not followed cunningly devised fables in presenting to you the word of God.” Titus x:x) And so at the close of this episode in Acts 26, King Agrippa says, “You almost persuade me to become a Christian.”
So, the Gadarene demoniac was given, and the Prodigal Son was given, and Paul before Agrippa was given a spirit of sophronismos, a spirit of sound-mindedness—not insanity, but sound-mindedness.
What is beautiful about this sophronismos is that it is a form of reasoning or rationality that others can connect with. The Bible in these passages is not speaking about some kind of specialized knowledge or rationality that only Christians can understand or appreciate. We’re talking about the kind of rational sobriety or right-mindedness that enables you to speak before kings and the whole assembled audience in such a way that the king is “almost persuaded to become a Christian.” This persuasion occurred not simply because he somehow got zapped and was lying on the ground, but because of the compelling case that Paul made. These things were not done in a corner, and King Agrippa knew it. His rationality was engaged by Paul’s right-mindedness.
I want you to be like St. Paul. I want you to be able to testify before kings. I want you to have a sound mind and a rationality that works and that is accessible to other people. Following Paul’s example, you need not treat King Agrippa as some kind of enemy, because our enemies are never flesh and blood, as we are reminded in Ephesians chapter 6.
King Agrippa was potentially a brother in Christ, as are all men. After all, as St. John tells us, “He [Christ] is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2). And thus St. Paul reminds us that God “will have all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (Titus x:x).
As all men are potentially brothers in Christ, so all men are capable of sound rationality, because rationality is a feature of the image of God inscribed in all men by Creation.
When you speak the truth, you are going to be so compelling, so logical, so sober, so unusually normal, that you will persuade. God does the deep and unseen persuading, to be sure, but like St. Paul you are going to persuade with Him through your right-mindedness. And your teachers have polished and nurture that quality in you during your time here at Uganda Christian University.
Recall that St. Paul speaks jointly of “a spirit of power, of love, and a sound mind.” Ultimately, you cannot hold onto that sound-mindedness without the other two elements. Mankind was not made to be self-sufficient. Adam was designed to function at his best only when he was filled with—suffused with, permeated with—the Holy Spirit, the presence of the creative Father God. When Adam turned away, his capacities began to shrivel up. We really only get these capacities from God, and we really only get to keep them when we embrace them as coming from God. In the regenerate Christian life that God gives us when we are born again, God starts putting us back together again in every way, including in this rational way. I want you to have power and love and a sound mind. You will find that you cannot retain them except as a package.
I think this is why St. Paul says “a spirit of.” I learned from our Greek professor that the word Spirit or pneuma in the New Testament is not capitalized in the original; it depends on the context as to whether the word deserves capitalization indicating the Holy Spirit of God. In this context, it seems clear to me that the spirit of sound-mindedness is the Holy Spirit of God. Sound-mindedness is linked with dynamos and agape because it is a gift of the Holy Spirit.
This gift is desperately needed in our era. My own country is—perhaps more than Uganda—edging away from sound rationality.
This is happening, at least in part, because those whose job it was to foster sound-mindedness—that is the colleges and universities and the schools below them—have been progressively abandoning their job or becoming disillusioned with it. For eight years I was on the faculty of University of Pennsylvania in our historic city of Philadelphia. It is the third or fourth oldest university in the United States and is a member of prestigious group of institutions called the “Ivy League.” There I was stunned by the degree to which my faculty colleagues did not really believe in rationality, except perhaps in the hard sciences and mathematics. Accordingly, many of them did not believe there was such a thing as objective truth or even fair-minded reasoning. Many argued that education or scholarship are, at base, merely the spinning of unjustifiable interpretations. The use of the mind to decorate the emotions—this was how many of the faculty conceived of the intellectual life.
According to this increasingly dominant view, education is not possible, only propaganda. And therefore, all education is really propaganda dressed up fancy. (If you wish to hear more about these problems in American higher education, you are most welcome to attend my lecture in Kampala on Tuesday afternoon.)
It is very troubling when the custodians of reason no longer believe in reason. Soundness of mind gets eroded.
As Christians, we must not operate the way the confused practitioners of worldly education operate. Instead of being conformed to this world, we can be “transformed by the renewing of our mind,” as St. Paul urges in Romans 12:3.
And so, when your lecturers set about educating you here at Uganda Christian University, we can see the fruit of sound-mindedness. When you come to conclusions about difficult public issues, it will not be because you simply repeat the things you were told to believe. It will be because you thought about it, you’ve checked the word of God first where it bears on the subject, because you’ve reasoned it through, you’ve looked at the evidence. You are becoming intellectually complex Christian thinkers. We—and here I now count myself among your teachers since I am speaking to you today—we are not interested in turning you into intellectually narrow, fragile, brittle thinkers. For example, we don’t want you walking out of UCU saying, “I believe in the Bible because I went to a university that believes the Bible.” We want you to believe in the Bible because you recognize that the Bible deserves to be embraced as the word of God, and you see the evidence. The evidence for the Bible includes supernatural events, but it is evidence that the natural man can recognize. The natural man is busy suppressing the truth that is, in fact, available to him, as Paul says in Romans 1:18. But we are training you to excavate the truth using sound-mindedness, so you can speak before kings and be persuasive.
But you’re not going to have sound-mindedness in its fullness unless you hold on to God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—who is the giver of power, love, and a sound mind. That’s what I want for you, and what your UCU lecturers want for you, and what God wants for you.
But this leads to a question. Can a person have sophronismos—sound-mindedness—without a consciousness of the Holy Spirit? Or without being a born-again believer in Jesus Christ?
Yes, it happens all the time, because the image of God is present in all men whether they acknowledge it or not.
But a sound mind is brittle and fragile on its own. It is vulnerable to damage. Without the indwelling Holy Spirit, the mind is far too easily subverted. Every man is tempted to rationalize in his own self-interest. For example, how easy is it for a man to quickly change his views on business ethics when there is a chance to make a big profit if only he will cut corners or cheat? But if this man is a Christian, the Holy Spirit already within him will warn him and inwardly convict him, and thus secure both his mind and his soul.
Do you want to secure a sound mind, and hold on to it for the long term? Then accept Jesus as your true savior. As Jesus said in John 3:3, “You must be born again.” It is very simple to do this. You must simply believe that Jesus is the Son of God and that he died to atone for your sins, and that he rose again from the dead. Then just tell Him you are sorry for your sins and invite him to take up residence within you as the ruling King. Then you are born again! And after this, “be filled with the Holy Spirit,” as St. Paul urges in Ephesians 5:11.
* * *
I told you at the beginning today I told you about my mother, how for most of her adult life she was scornful of people who believed in Jesus Christ, and very averse to Christ Himself. Partly due to the influence of her mother (my grandmother), her thinking was confused, increasingly so as she became more addicted to alcohol over the years.
About five years ago, I had visited her in California, which is almost 3,000 miles away from where we live in Virginia. She was ill during that visit, so I offered to pray for her. In response to my offer, she almost literally spat at me, and did curse me, using language that I will not repeat here. In other words, she did not merely say, “No thank you”; it was a ferocious aversion. But of course on my own I did pray for her, and also prayed for her with my wife Lindy. We later prayed for my mother together with a dear friend who is an Anglican rector in my mother’s town in California. He led us prayer for the Lord Jesus to open up her rational mind again, like the man of Gadara, so that she could think clearly about God.
By this time she had become very ill indeed, and had been admitted to the hospital, and then sent to a nursing home because she could no longer walk or take care of herself. Of course I visited her as often as I could. Finally I wrote her a letter reminding her that she had the natural ability to think through things on her own, that she didn’t have to follow her mother’s or grandmother’s atheism, but that she could decide for herself and needn’t be captive.
And somehow, as a result of our prayers, and in response to that letter, God gave her the ability to hear. It resembled the deliverance of the man at Gadara. Thankfully it was not that dramatic, but she seemed to experience some deliverance, and she began to hear. A dear friend named Elizabeth, who lived in my mother’s town, began regularly to visit her in my absence, and read the Bible to her, and sang Christian worship songs for her. With Elizabeth’s help, my mother finally accepted Jesus and was born again about three years ago at the age of 85.
I am happy to tell you that this friend Elizabeth is actually in Uganda this week. She was here on the UCU campus a few days ago, and is in Kampala today getting ready for an evangelistic mission to Karamoja starting in a few days. Elizabeth’s husband Mark and son Charles are here today, and can tell you the truth of this story I am telling you about my mother.
Through the following few months, my mother became a little stronger physically. She had rarely been speaking but she became more conversational, and she gave clear testimony to her faith in Jesus. She became calmer, less agitated. The care staff at the nursing home said, “She’s so much better and easier to deal with. She doesn’t use all that bad language with us the way she used to.” And she spoke about the love of God. She said it was a love she had never known before. She was happier than I had seen her for decades.
So she came back and she called me on the phone and said, “You might want to say something to your mother.”
The day came for her to die. I was far away in Virginia. Elizabeth called me from my mother’s bedside in the nursing home. Elizabeth put the phone up to her ear, but my mother was unresponsive. I told her I loved her, and my wonderful wife Lindy took the phone and said she loved her, too. Lindy told her how she was wearing my mother’s fleece vest so she could keep her close to her heart. There was no response. The phone was hung up, and as soon as the phone hung up, Elizabeth said that a tear ran down my mother’s otherwise impassive face. So Elizabeth held her hand; it was about 10 p.m. our time on a Tuesday night. Elizabeth was singing Christian worship songs to her, along with another friend, and holding her hand when my mother’s heart stopped beating.
My mother is dead, but she is alive now—and we had already begun to see the beginnings of that new life. After decades of pain with a mother who went through a whole series of marriages and relationships and whose relationship with me was difficult, I never thought, even though I prayed for her for 38 years, I never really felt that I would get this blessing.
For all the pain that she had experienced at the end of her life, in her weakness, and through the faithfulness of Elizabeth, who spoke the word to her, my mother actually, consciously embraced the Lord Jesus. She was changed, spoke about Jesus and His love, had a three-month period of physical and mental rejuvenation.
It should not be surprising that when the Holy Spirit comes into you, your whole being is affected. Ultimately, the power of the Holy Spirit is so strong that your dead body is going to be resurrected on the last day. And my mother’s, too. She got a little foretaste of that fall after she was born again.
So if you have people who are not in the kingdom, do not give up. Pray, love, and watch for opportunities to help others, because we do not necessarily lead our own parents or grandparents to the Lord. In my mother’s case, it was not I, it was someone else: and I rejoice.
I am especially speaking to you who are graduating today. You are called to restore not only the soul but also the mind of your generation and those to follow. Do not give up, because God is a God who persists and persuades. And as for us who already know him, remember that He has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.
