Loving the Lord With Our Minds

Mark12:28-30 "And one of the scribes came and heard them arguing, and recognizing that He had answered them well, asked Him, "What commandment is the foremost of all?" Jesus answered, "And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind and with all your strength."

We have all read this Scripture many times and we have probably heard quite a few sermons on the topic. However, I don't think I have ever heard a sermon about loving the Lord with our minds. The sermons usually address the heart aspect. So, what does it mean to love the Lord with our minds and how do we do it?

We have a stewardship responsibility over our minds just as we do over our bodies, our possessions, and our social life. Our minds are an incredible gift, one that is under appreciated by many. I believe our minds have more potential than we may realize.

There is an Old Testament Scripture that has fascinated me for years. No one seems to pick up on it. It is found in Genesis 11, the story of the Tower of Babel. In this narrative, the early Babylonians had an idea, a function of their minds. They decided to stay in one place and build a tower into heaven. This, of course, was in direct disobedience to God's command to spread out and fill the earth.

As they worked on their project, the Lord comes down to check out what's happening. Listen to what the Lord says in Genesis "Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they began to do and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them". Did you get that? NOTHING will be impossible for them! God had to intervene and stop them from accomplishing their ungodly goal. The mind of man is an incredibly powerful tool, for good or evil. There apparently are few limits on what we can do.

Someone once said, that whatever the mind of man can conceive, it can achieve. I pretty much believe this with certain exceptions. God can and does stop us whenever we get too far out of line as He did with the Babylonians.

Think of the science fiction that you saw on television or read about twenty or thirty years ago. Much of it is reality today.

Loving the Lord with our minds can take various forms. For example, we love the Lord with our minds when we follow Paul's admonition to Timothy[1] when he told him to study Scripture to show himself approved. We do this not for the sake of mental gymnastics or personal achievement but so that we might discern what the will of the Lord is so we can then do it[2]. This is the highest outcome of studying God's Word.

We love the Lord with our minds when we learn to not just quote Scripture, but to reason from Scripture[3]. This is a lost art among most American Christians.

Harry Blamires wrote a book, The Christian Mind. The first sentence of his book reads, "There is no longer a Christian mind." I totally agree. What's left of the Christian mind has been secularized, paganized, compartmentalized, and neutralized. Thus large portions of us fall into this sad and potentially fatal situation. Hosea 4:5 warns us about Christian ignorance. It also gives us the remedy in Proverbs 11:9 where it says that the righteous will be delivered through knowledge. How do we get the knowledge? We study to show ourselves to be approved.

We love the Lord with our minds when we learn to meditate on God's Word. This, by the way, is also the secret of success. Look at Joshua 1:8, "This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it; for then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have success." We can quit going to Tony Robbin's seminars and just mediate on God's Word. Think of all the time and money we will save.

We can train our minds. They can be exercised and developed to be all that God intended them to be. There is virtually no limit to what you and I can accomplish if we fully utilize the mind God gave us.

Albert Einstein at age 16 had what he said was the greatest thought of his life. He imagined what it would be like to run alongside a light beam. This thought was the catalyst that eventually became Einstein's theory of relativity. That thought has transformed modern physics to this day.

Please continue to love the Lord with all of your heart, all of your soul, all of your mind, and all of your strength. If we will all do these things, we will see tremendous change in our lives and in our families and even our culture. Remember, a mind is a terrible thing to waste.

[1] II Timothy 2:15

[2] Romans 12:2

[3] Reasoning from Scripture entails complex real life situations and addressing these from various Scriptural principles. For example, how do treat a criminal who steals? The Bible gives specific critera for restitution in Exodus 21-23 and elsewhere. It also gives specifics about many other crimes.