Loving God with Your Mind
Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment is. He replied,
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”
(Matthew 22:37)
In the church today I think we’re pretty good at emphasizing loving God with all your heart and soul. We emphasize connecting with God emotionally and spiritually. This is a big component of worship today and that is good. I think it’s very important that our experience of God be more than just head knowledge. Our Heavenly Father wants us know him and experience his love personally, not just to know about him. In my pastoral ministry I placed a strong emphasis on this.
So, while not taking anything away from that, I think we need to remember that Jesus also said that we are to love God with all our minds. While there are dangers to just having head knowledge that doesn’t touch the heart, it’s also not good to have all the emphasis on the heart in the Christian life with little involvement of the mind.
God has given us our minds and he wants us to use them. He wants us to worship him with our minds, thinking deeply about him. There is no deeper subject for us to think about and exercise our minds with than our great God! We can worship God by thinking seriously about the truth that he has revealed to us and the implications of that. The book of Hebrews says that we are to grow in our knowledge and understanding, moving on from the elementary teachings about Christ (Heb 5:11-6:3). This is loving God with all our minds.
It is my hope that this blog not only helps you to share with others but also helps and encourages you to love God with all your mind. We can do this in part as we analyze the evidence of God in the world and contemplate how that fits with the truth he has revealed to us in his Word. You don’t have to be an intellectual giant, you just use the mind God has given you and in the process you’ll grow intellectually and God will be worshiped and glorified.
So come back next week and together we’ll love God with all of our minds.
As we’ve looked at over the past several weeks, the evidence is strong that Jesus really was crucified, died and rose again from the dead. As I explained last week, he did this to give his life for us as a sacrifice to pay the penalty for our sins. There’s nothing more superheroic than giving yourself to save others and then having the power to come back from the dead. Superman did it in the comics but Jesus did it in real life and you can examine the evidence of that historical event. (