Not long ago I read a book on creative solution finding. Almost one third of the book covered paradigm shifts – major and sometimes revolutionary changes in the way we think. How we think determines our attitudes and actions.
While reading the book, I remembered a joke I had heard some time ago. A man tells a workmate that he is concerned about his wife’s hearing. “She doesn’t seem to hear what I’m saying; I have to repeat myself at least three times.”
After his workmate drops him off at his house, he walks in the front door and shouts, “Honey, I’m home!” No answer. He walks towards the kitchen. “Honey, I’m home!” Still no response. He enters the kitchen and sees his wife taking something out of the oven. Her back is to him, so he says for the third time, “Honey, I’m home!”
“Alright, alright,” she says, “I answered you the first time! Are you deaf or something?”
Not everyone got the point of the joke, because it takes a shift in thinking – from the supposedly hard of hearing wife to the actually hard of hearing husband. I thought of paradigm shifts later that week when a Christian writer claimed that humans did not descend from Neanderthals, but Neanderthals from Adam. (That Neanderthals were really mutants!) Can you imagine the paradigm shift required for an evolutionist to grasp this devolutionist concept?
Jesus said, “So take heed how you hear, for whover has, to him more will be given, and whoever does not have, even what he seems to have will be taken from him.” (Luke 8:18) “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by a word from God.” We need a major shift in our thinking, a paradigm shift, from what evolutionists are saying to the world to what the Spirit of God is saying to the churches.
“My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the LORD.” (Isaiah 55:8) This was spoken to “the wicked” and “the unrighteous” (see the preceding verse), not to those who’ve been made “the righteousness of God in Christ.” To see ourselves as God sees us, we need to think the way He thinks. Now there’s a paradigm shift-and-a-half!