How to Love God with All of Your Mind

Matthew 22:37 (NKJ)
Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart,
 with all your soul, and with all your mind.’”

Of the three areas in our life the Lord instructed us to love Him, it would seem that the mind would be the hardest area to submit.  And, for good reason. Noah Webster’s 1828 Dictionary defines “mind” as, “the intellectual or intelligent power in man; the power that conceives, judges or reasons.” God is a faith God; we are not going to receive Him through the avenue of our minds. Yet, Jesus said to do it so there must be a way to achieve it. He never asks us to do anything without giving us a way to do it.

How can we love the Lord with all of our minds? The first thing can do is to take Romans 12:2a and walk it out. The Classic Amplified Version states, “^2a And do not be conformed to this world [any longer with its superficial values and customs], but be ^[a]transformed and progressively changed [as you mature spiritually] by the renewing of your mind [focusing on godly values and ethical attitudes]…” Conformity to this world will be the result of using our minds to judge or reason. This is obviously the easier to path to take, because all it requires is for us to look at the world around us and form an opinion. To renew our minds to the Word of God is far more challenging because it most often requires that we “go against the flow” of the world. When we make the decision to renew our minds according to God’s Word, we are expressing our love to Him – hence, we are loving Him with all our minds. It will be a life-long endeavor because our natural minds are not willing participants in the renewal.

A well-known minister of the gospel reflected on another way to love God with all our minds.

He suggests that when we purposely think of all the good things God has done for us in our lives, we are loving God with all our minds. We are taking that intellectual or intelligent power within us and choosing to yield it to the results we have seen because we have given Him a place in our lives. When we purposefully recall specific things in our lives that God has done for us – it becomes personal.  Whether we are verbalizing it or not, we are proclaiming, “This is about God and me, and this is our story.”

There are a number of things inherent in “our story.” The story is good because God is good. The story is about what He did for us, not what we did for Him. The story is just one chapter in a never-ending book, because there is no end to the things God wants to do in our lives. And, as with any good book the last chapter leaves us anticipating the next. With each new recollection of the things God has done, the root of our confidence and trust in Him grows deeper and deeper within us. As that happens it becomes easier for our minds to yield to our spirits (that part of us which is “just like Jesus”). The more we yield to our spirits, the more we will walk in the wonderful paths God has prepared for us. Ultimately that is what loving God is all about!

10/22