Loving God With Your Mind

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2022;%20Mark%2012&version=NIV

In both the Mark and Matthew chapters today we hear Jesus give what he says it the greatest or most important commandment:

"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

The concept of loving someone with all of your heart and soul is one we can easily grasp - thanks, in part - to Hollywood. We are taught by worldly standars that love is about emotion. It is about romance and butterflies and excitement, about not bearing to be apart and missing one another desparately when you are. Love is about finding that one that completes you, Hollywood tells us. Love is about finding your soul mate. Now where Hollywood got it wrong is that this is the type of love one should expect to find with their mate. That is not to say that it isn't ever there, but it isn't always there. However, that type of love - especially the longing for the other, the ability of being completed by someone, the idea of finding a soul mate is exactly the type of love we expect and find with God.

However, loving with one's mind is a much less familiar concept. It is loving someone through intellect and because that isn't very romantic, it isn't something we talk about often. And quite frankly, because we rarely love other humans with an intellectual love, it isn't something we necessarily grasp completely until we understand it within the knowledge of God and his word. This type of love has little to do with feelings. This type of love has much to do with choice. The choice to learn about someone, to know them well, and to choose to love them because of what we know about them. It is this type of love, I believe, that is foundational to faith.

Let me see if I can explain why. I once heard Chuck Swindol say that we must love God with our minds because our emotions can and will lie. When we are in circumstances that are hard - faith threatening circumstances - we cannot rely on our feelings about God to drive our faith. Because when we are in the middle of heart-rending circumstances, we often can't begin to feel the love or compassion of God, and so it becomes very hard to believe that he is either. It is then that we must love God with our intellect. We must not go by what we are feeling at the time, but by what we know about God to be true. We must make a decision to live not by what we feel, but to live by what we feel. So we must first to seek to know God and to know him well. We must seek to know his word where he reveals his character to us. And we must seek to know and understand God as he reveals himself to us. If we do not do that, we are in grave danger.

Grave danger of what, you might ask? We are in grave danger of allowing our circumstances, our emotions, and even our fleshly desires to over-ride our knowledge of God. Listen to what Scripture warns us about if we do not focus on and retain our knowledge of God: "Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done." - Romans 1:28.

We must retain our knowledge of God - it is what drives our faith. Listen to how John talks about the knowledge of God as it relates to faith. He says, "We know and rely on the love God has for us" (1 John 4:16). Notice he does not say we feel and rely - but rather we KNOW. He also says that "we know also that the Son of God has come and given us understanding so that we may know him who is true" (1 John 5:20). So we see we are to have an intellectual knowledge of God - and through that knowledge and understanding, we are able to rely on his love.

So how, then, do we love God with our minds? First, Paul tells us in Romans 12:2 that we must not allow ourselves to conform to the patterns of the world, but to be transformed by the renewing ofour minds. Renewing of our minds means that we are allowing the truth and the word of God to guard our hearts and minds. Paul had a God-given wisdom about how what we allow to occupy our minds will sooner or later determine our speech, our actions, and even our faith. So we do as instructed in Philippians 4:8-9 and take control of what our minds think of instead of giving ourselves over to depravity. Instead we think on whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable - anything that is excellent and praiseworthy. We put into practice anything we have learned, received, and heard form God - not relying on what we feel about him.

Friends, I want so badly to love God with my mind. It is this type of love that drives a faith that rests, 'no matter what', that believes God is the God he says that he is, 'no matter what'. That believes he will do the things he says he will do, 'no matter what', that knows I am the person he says that I am, 'no matter what', and that is certain I can do all things through Christ and his strength, 'no matter what'. I pray that we each may know and rely on the love God has for us.

Here's a little homework assignment for you: Read through the 'Hall of Faith' chapter in Hebrews 11 and consider how the faith of each person required them to love God with their minds in the midst of very tough circumstances - I pray it will it will strengthen and inspire you to learn to love God with your mind.

Blessings sweet friends!

Today's post was submitted by Carol Bartels