What does it mean to love God with all of our minds?

Well, hey everyone. What does it mean to love God with all of our mind? We looked at a passage of scripture from the Gospel of Mark in our message this last Sunday where we heard Michael Rivers, one of our Bridges members and someone who’s been here for a while, he talked about how God has used Mark chapter 12 and the greatest commandment, Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength, how God has used that particular verse in his own

life to help define what success looks like. And it’s a wonderful way of thinking about indeed success for our own lives. There are many goals we could go after, but what it comes down to is, do we love God with all that we are? That’s what God created us for, more than anything else is for relationship with him.

Love the Lord our God with all of our heart, all of our soul, all of our mind, all of our strength. Nothing’s more important than that. How do we love God with our mind? What does that mean to love God with our mind? It seems like we live in a time when it’s easy to separate faith and reason and to treat them as opposites, but the Bible doesn’t treat them as opposites.

Christianity is not a faith that says you have to separate faith and then your intellect or faith and reason. In fact, Christianity is a faith that engages our mind, it engages our intellect, it renews our mind, and calls us to redirect our old ways of thinking into the ways that God would have us think and to use our minds.

So what does it mean to love God with our mind? How do we do that? One helpful way of thinking about this is to recognize that in the scripture, often when you talk about your heart, your soul, your mind, those are all very often thought of at that time that these words were written and spoken in much the same way that heart and mind and soul were often interchangeable in the minds of the people back then in the first century and in the times of the Old Testament, that these were just ways of talking

about the inner being and that loving God with your mind in addition to loving God with your soul and with your heart is essentially we could say all saying the same thing. It’s to love God in an all-encompassing way with all that you are, everything that is within you. That said, there are also though places in scripture, certainly in the New Testament, where God talks about what we do with our thinking and what we do with our mind.

We’re to be renewed, our mind is to be renewed as we offer ourselves, Romans 12 says, as a living sacrifice. We have our minds renewed in God’s truth, that we’re to set our minds, Colossians 3 says, on things above, that we’re to have the mind of Christ, Philippians 2. So what does it mean to love God with all of our mind?

How could we do that if we are to think about the ways that we think and we use our intellect and we’re not going to divorce that again from reason with faith. We’re going to put those two things together. I could put these in three different categories that are helpful to me and maybe they’ll be helpful to you.

That when we think about using our mind, loving God with our mind, one one of the ways that we can use our minds in that way is to think about God. Thinking about God. That could be studying scripture. This is why we’re to meditate on God’s word. We’re to chew on it. We’re to we’re to be in God’s word so that God’s word can be in us and we can think about God.

We can think about his character. We can study theology. We can uh study apologetics. We can ask hard questions and God welcomes those things. We can think about God. That is one way for us to love God with our mind. Another way that we can love God with our mind is to think like God, to think like God. That is adopting a biblical, gospel-centered worldview, to think like God thinks about this person or about that event that is happening or this thing that is taking place in my life. So that we’re

no longer thinking in our former ways, just thinking like ourselves and like the rest of the world, we’re to think like God. So thinking about God, thinking like God, and then another way, a third way that we can love God with all of our mind is to think, we could say, for God. And what I mean by that is as his ambassadors here in the world, how do we use our reason and our minds and our intellect to create ways to represent God in the culture, to represent God in art or entertainment or in education

or whatever it is that you do vocationally or in your daily lives. How do we represent God everywhere that we go and to be creative with that? Those are wonderful ways that we could love God with our mind and become a a student of God’s word, a student of God’s character, and loving God with the intellect and the reason that he’s given us.

There’s a problem though, and that is that our minds, just like our hearts, are fallen. Before we come to Christ, we need to recognize that we need to put aside old ways of thinking. So we need to have not only a change of heart, we need to have a change of thinking. Our thoughts and our ways separate us from God.

And so when a person decides to follow Jesus and they become a new creature, God not only is at work in their heart, but he’s at work in the ways that they think and we’re to put aside former thinking. So, this is where the gospel comes in, the gospel being the good news about who Jesus is and what Jesus came to do, how he died for us in our place on the cross and how we can be made right with God again by placing our faith in Jesus alone as the one who took our place and bore our sins.

That that message, the gospel, is so necessary because as we think on the implications of the gospel and what Jesus has done, our mind is renewed and we begin to then see that all wisdom and all understanding and all intellect and all beauty, all things that are good in this world that God has made for our enjoyment, that all of those ultimately lead us back to the one who made our minds in the first place.

Friends, I want to encourage you to love God with everything that is within you. I know I want to do that. How do we love God with all of our heart, with all of our emotion, with all that is within us, in addition to loving God with our soul, all of our strength, all of our energy, all of our resources, and all of our mind.

Let’s do that this week together, friends. Thanks for joining us.