Love God with All Your Mind - Pt 3
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all
your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” Mark
12:30)
As we read through the Bible God never says to leave our
brain outside; or to check our minds at the door. The human mind is one of the most incredible
aspects of creation. It is more powerful
than the largest supercomputer and can solve great problems and make great
discoveries.
Even apart from God, the human mind is an amazing gift
from God; and it can be everything from fairly feeble to an incredible genius. We get this amazing gift from God with its
varied abilities; and then God says it must be made new. That is because there is a problem in the
world called sin. The whole creation has
experienced a brokenness and that brokenness has even filtered into the human
mind; and that is why, for instance, you do not have to teach a 1 or 2 year old
child to say “no” they just do it naturally.
We, as twenty-first century evangelicals, live in a
unique time that influences our understanding of Christianity and the Bible. Since we are so influenced by the times in
which we live, the only way we can evaluate our understanding of Scripture is
to look at Scripture and look back at our past. When we do this we become aware of the things
that we are doing well and of places where we may be falling short of the
commands of Scripture.
Jesus states that we are to love God with all our mind,
just as we do our heart, soul and strength. Jesus is saying there is something about our
mind that is essential for us to follow Him in discipleship. So much so that He clearly added the word mind
to the words in Deuteronomy 6.
Think about that for a second—that is why God gave us a
mind. Some of us know that our minds are just running rampant with all sorts of
really dumb stuff. Maybe it is because
we give ourselves to other things: for some it is fear, for some it is fantasy,
for some it is sex, and our minds are just full of these other things—because they
have power. God wants your mind to
glorify Him in the way in which you think; the clarity with which you think;
and the purity in which you think.
To love God with all my mind, means I love Him with my
reason and intellect. Jonathan Edwards
said that the “intellectual life and the passionate life are friends and
not enemies.” Our passion for
Christ and our intellect go together, the deepest thinkers should be the
deepest lovers.
Having faith does not mean giving up knowledge and
understanding. Loving God with your mind
includes Bible study, prayer, meditation, and conversations that help our faith
grow in ways that make us less easily distracted by a world that is constantly
trying to tempt, defeat, and discourage us.
In Colossians 4:2 the Apostle Paul reminds us to, “Devote yourselves to
prayer, being watchful and thankful.”
To love God with our minds is to hold Him in high esteem,
to think about Him with reverence and with adoration. The more we love God with our minds, the more
we’ll be driven to do that other thing that is alien to us in our fallen
condition, namely, to worship Him.
True knowledge of God always bears fruit in greater love
for God and a greater desire to praise Him. The more we know Him, the more glorious He
will appear to us. And the more glorious
He appears to us, the more inclined we will be to praise Him, to honor Him, to
worship Him, and to obey Him.
Can God change
your life?
God has made it
possible for you to know Him, and experience an amazing
change in your own life.
Discover how you
can find peace with God.
