The Ultimate Love Affair (4) - with all your mind!

Our love for Christ begins with a pure devotion with all our heart, and expresses itself by being full of passion, with all our soul.
But there is more to the ultimate love affair. Jesus says that you are to love the Lord your God with all your mind. Our love for God is to be one that is systematically thought out too.

Loving Jesus is more than excitement and more than euphoric warmth and experience. It is not emotion that is illogical, and that excludes good understanding and dedicated learning.

There is a brand of Christian teaching that creates the impression that clear thinking, study and considering the Bible can get in the way of our relationship with God. While it is true that when you rely on intellectual aptitude to figure out God, you will always fail. God cannot be fathomed by human minds. And if you wait until you have figured God out, all the reasoning and debate can stand in the way of a blessed and spontaneous love affair with the Lord. Yes, our minds can be a barrier preventing us from devoted, passionate love.
But that does not mean that our minds are not also a big help in growing our relationship with God.

It is clear from the Scriptures that God knows that our minds, our thinking, our insight and our contemplation are always involved in our love for him. In Romans 12, we are told that our minds need to be renewed and then we will live for God with pure commitment. And Jesus says we are to love God with all our mind.

A mind committed to Christ, transformed by the renewing power of the Spirit, is a remarkable asset to the Kingdom of God. Christianity makes sense and anyone who thoughtfully considers the plan of God will soon be able to communicate just how reasonable it really is to serve the Lord passionately. Faith is after all a certain knowledge of God, his heart, his plan and his character. Faith is a big, heartfelt “Yes” to everything God has told us about himself through Jesus Christ! And our love for the Lord grows as our informed faith grows as a result of better understanding what God is saying to us about himself and his plan for our lives.

A mind that loves God will become a mind into which God will pour his wisdom and his insight. After all, our love relationship is with the almighty God who made the whole universe. Our God has all wisdom and all knowledge.
And as we commit all our ways to him in love, even our thinking, reasoning and learning, he gives us of his wisdom and his knowledge. All our intellectual ability ought to be dedicated to God. When it is, he will show us how to think and how to reason with less flaws and with more understanding.

There is perfect order in God’s creation. We will find the same in his character as we learn to know him better through our love relationship with him. One of the main reasons that we love him so devotedly and passionately, is because his Gospel makes so much sense to poor sinners that are lost! It is what he showed us and taught us about himself that made us love him with all our hearts and soul.
Therefore we simply have to love him also with all our mind.