“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.” Mark 12:30
May 9, 2025
Can smarter people love God more? Does knowing the Bible better than others mean I love God more? Such thinking is not Bible thinking. Two out of the four personal capacities focus on the mind (“heart,” “mind”). The truth is that God is to be loved with the full exertion of our thought life. Loving God is not a narrow cerebral effort. The mind is me thinking, perceiving, understanding. At my conversion to Jesus Christ my mind is no longer set against God (Eph. 4:18; Col. 1:21). The passion for loving God is learning how to think biblically. We need to know what God likes and what He hates. What has He revealed, promised, and commanded. What He has forbidden. Is my thought life growing in my ability to understand spiritual realities and acting upon them. In his wonderful little book, The Thought of God, Maurice Roberts tells us what good thinking is: “The art of good thinking is to carry thought to its logical conclusion…The mere thought of God should end all anxiety. Then why in my case does it not? Because I fail to carry thought to its proper conclusion.” Am I learning this on a daily basis? There is no substitute for saturating my mind with God’s thoughts, reading the Bible, studying it, and memorizing it. Must add, living by God’s precepts.
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“O Creator of my mind, I desperately need to know how ‘to take every thought captive to obey Christ,’” (2 Cor. 10:5).