Thoughts on Loving God with All Your Mind

And he said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the great and first commandment.  The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself."  ~Matthew 22:37-38


Of all the ways that we are commanded to love God, loving God with "all your mind" is probably the most neglected in the American church today.  A healthy distrust of academic "wisdom" has morphed into an abandonment of the life of the mind altogether.   We have emptied our relationship with God degenerating from "knowing God" to an "experience" devoid of content.

But this post isn't intended to be a polemic against problems in the American church.  Rather, I want to make a couple observations about loving God with all your mind, as a tool for you to evaluate your own obedience to the "great and first commandment."

1) Loving God with all your mind is not dependent on a sophisticated intellect; it is dependent on a sanctified intellect.  Don't make the mistake of assuming that loving God with all your mind is only for super-smart people like theologians and philosophers.  This command was first given in Deuteronomy to a group of largely illiterate nomads.  God's intent is not that we can analyze the minutiae of theological arguments, but that we take every thought captive to Christ, that we strive to bring more and more of our thought life into obedience to God's Word, that we seek to develop biblical discernment, and that our pursuit of knowing God involves greater and greater knowledge of Him.

2) Loving God with all your mind is a command.  To label yourself as unintellectual and therefore uninterested in the life of the mind does not absolve you from this command; it just makes you disobedient.  The redemption provided for us in Christ is a total redemption; God intends to transform our entire being with the truth of the gospel.  It is not enough for your relationship with God to start and end with your heart; God wants your heart, mind, body, will, emotions, and actions.

3) Loving God with all your mind is the ground of all transformative holiness.  Romans 12:2- Do not be conformed to the world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.  Ephesians 4:22-23- Put off your old self... and be renewed in the spirit of your minds.  Colossians 3:10- Put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.  In all these passages and more, the prescription for transformation is clear.  Knowing things equals believing things equals doing things.  Anything less is unbiblical and ultimately unfruitful.

4) Loving God with all your mind is central to eternal life.  John 17:3- Now this is eternal life: to know You, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.  At the end of the day, this is why we pursue the life of the mind.  This is why we want to bring every thought into obedience to Christ.  This is why we want to love God with all our minds.  Because we want to know Jesus.  We want to have the full, abundant, eternal life of knowing God and being swallowed up into the experience of His glory that only comes through beholding Him with unveiled minds and hearts fixed on Him.