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.

Let It Be Said of Us

Let it be said of us that the Lord was our passion,
That with gladness we bore every cross we were given,
That we fought the good fight, that we finished the course,
Knowing within us the power of the risen Lord.

Let the cross be our glory and the Lord be our song,
By mercy made holy, by the Spirit made strong
Let the cross be our glory and the Lord be our song,
'Til the likeness of Jesus be through us made known.
Let the cross be our glory and the Lord be our song.

Let it be said of us: We were marked by forgiveness,
We were known by our love and delighted in meekness,
We were ruled by His peace, heeding unity's call,
Joined as one body that Christ would be seen by all.

~by Steve Frey
download the song here

Islam, Fear, and the Gospel's Demands

This article at Desiring God by Ted Esler, the Executive Vice President of Pioneers, is an absolute must-read.  Pioneers is a missions organization dedicated to taking the gospel to the unreached peoples of the world.  Ted's insights into the gospel implications of militant Islam are profound.  Here's an excerpt:


"For many evangelicals, the threat of Islam—both real and perceived—has sometimes distracted from obedience to the demands of the gospel. While radical Islam certainly has a political agenda that should not be minimized, we should, in obedience, follow Jesus' command to love them.

How best should we love Muslims? We can pray, we can show them tangible acts of love, and we can send emissaries to them. While it is very disconcerting to see Islam grow within the borders of the USA, our hearts should break more over the fact that 1.2 to 1.5 billion people don’t know Jesus and will never experience the joy it is to know him. Most will never meet a disciple of Christ unless some of us go."



Read the whole article here.  And then pray over the implications of this verse:

"The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.  Therefore, pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.  Go your way; behold, I am sending you." ~Luke 10:2-3

Costly Grace

The following from the early-20th century German theologian and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is worth reading, weeping over, and celebrating:

"Grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. Costly because it costs a man his life, it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. Costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, costly because it cost God the life of His Son: "You have been bought with a price" and what has cost God so much can't be cheap for us. It is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. It is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ, but it is grace because "My yoke is easy and my burden light."