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.

The Epistle to Diognetus

Today I had the incredible experience and blessing of reading the short "Epistle to Diognetus," the earliest example of Christian apologetics.  The only thing we know about the author is that he claims to be "a disciple of the Apostles."  It was written to Diognetus, a Gentile interested in the claims of these strange Christians he had heard about.  It was probably written in the early 2nd century-- somewhere between 100 and 160 AD.  That makes it one of the earliest extra-biblical Christian writings we have.

What I love about this epistle is its presentation of the gospel.  I was so encouraged to see that the gospel of substitutionary atonement and justification by faith we preach today is the same one being heralded 1,900 years ago.  I've copied chapter 9 of the epistle below.  By the time I was done with it, I was practically weeping.  It's definitely worth taking a few minutes to read:



Having planned everything already in His mind with His Son, He permitted us during the former time to be borne along by disorderly impulses as we desired, led astray by pleasures and lusts, not at all because He took delight in our sins, but because He bore with us.

And He bore with us not because He approved of the past season of iniquity, but because He was creating the present season of righteousness, so that, being convicted in the past time by our own deeds as unworthy of life, we might now be made deserving by the goodness of God, and having made clear our inability to enter into the kingdom of God of ourselves, might be enabled by the ability of God.

And when our iniquity had been fully accomplished, and it had been made perfectly manifest that punishment and death were expected as its recompense, and the season came which God had ordained, when from that time on He should manifest His goodness and power (O the exceeding great kindness and love of God!), He did not hate us, neither rejected us, nor bore us malice, but was long-suffering and patient, and in pity for us took upon Himself our sins, and Himself parted with His own Son as a ransom for us, the holy for the lawless, the guileless for the evil, the just for the unjust, the incorruptible for the corruptible, the immortal for the mortal.

For what else but His righteousness would have covered our sins? In whom was it possible for us lawless and ungodly men to have been justified, save only in the Son of God? O the sweet exchange, O the inscrutable creation, O the unexpected benefits; that the iniquity of many should be concealed in One Righteous Man, and the righteousness of One should justify many that are iniquitous!

Having then in the former time demonstrated the inability of our nature to obtain life, and having now revealed a Savior able to save even creatures which have no ability, He willed that for both reasons we should believe in His goodness and should regard Him as nourisher, father, teacher, counselor, physician, mind, light, honor, glory, strength and life.

Propitiation, and Big Words that Matter

I'm generally not a fan of big theology words.  As someone with a heart for pastoral ministry, I yearn to make theology accessible and applicable and wonderful and glorious to the average person in the pew, and that often means ditching some overly high-falutin' doctrine words in favor of, frankly, fewer syllables.

But I hold a few exceptions to that general rule.  There are a couple words whose weight of glory so outweighs the weight of their syllables that they are worth teaching and explaining and treasuring.  The two words that most quickly come to mind in that category are "justification" and "propitiation."  Both are Bible words, not theologian words.  They are hard to pronounce, but are absolutely central to the all-satisfying glory of the Gospel.

Propitiation means "a sacrifice to satisfy wrath."  Two of the main texts for this word are Romans 3:25 and 1 John 2:2--

"...Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by His blood, to be received by faith."

"He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world."

There is an eternity of weighty, glorious meaning in this word, for all our redemption and salvation is wrapped up in its mystery.  My exhortation to you is: become a student of this word!  Spend your time and your mental energies in unpacking and exploring and applying all that this word holds for your soul. It will be time and energy well spent as you come to know more of the heart of our great Savior, Jesus Christ.