Jesus quoted Deut 6:5 and told his audience that the greatest commandment is, “You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, with your whole soul, and with your whole mind” (Matt 22:37).

Heart

If you’re reading this, you probably feel love for God. Jesus wants us to love God with our whole hearts. That requires that Jesus is the most important thing for us. We need to feel greater love and desire for him than for wealth, power, position, romance, status, and more.

Soul

However, feeling love for God is not enough. Jesus adds the call from the Mosaic Law to love God with our entire souls. The word for “soul” can also mean life. We might think of it as loving God with our whole being. That would include our wills. The will is about convictions we have about what we value or is important. Loving God with our soul, our life, our convictions, means we put him first over everything else.

Mind

We usually think of love as something emotional, whether it is for a spouse, a close friend, or even something mundane like peanut butter chocolate ice cream. We feel love. What would it mean to love God with your mind?

I love my wife. The longer we’ve been married, the more I feel love for her. Part of that feeling, however, is based upon knowing her well. I know this person and I love her. I am grateful for what she does for me.

We should take the same approach toward God. To love him with our minds, we need to seek to know him better.  This has two parts:

1. Knowing more about God, Who he declares himself to be and what he has done and is doing.
2. Knowing him personally. In Phil 3:10, when Paul says of Jesus, “I want to know him,” I don’t think that this is intellectual. It is having an ever-closer relationship with Jesus.

Using Your Mind in Worship and Prayer

Paul said in 1 Cor 14:15 that, “I will pray with the Spirit, and I will also pray with the mind. I will sing with the Spirit and I will also sing with the mind.”

God does not want “mechanical” prayers or praise. We need to think about what we are saying or singing. In my first months as a Christian, I was part of a church with lots of written liturgy, such as prayers. That’s fine. Someone else’s carefully written prayer may be better than my spontaneous one. It bothered me, however, that we said these prayers too quickly for me to process and mean what I was saying. I l left that church for one where I had more time to think about what I was praying or singing.

Paul also wrote that as believers, we should, “present your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God, which is your thoughtful worship” (Rom 12:1). Some translations render the word for “thoughtful,” logikon in Greek, as spiritual. Paul exhorts the believers that their service/worship of God should be thoughtful service in a dedicated spiritual sense. The word for service refers to religious service or ministry. Worship is to be thoughtful, using your mind.

Paul follows this with the instruction, “Do not be conformed to this world (its mindset, cultural values, etc.), but be transformed by the renewal of your mind so that you will determine what the good and pleasing and perfect will of God is” (Rom 12:2). Our minds need to be renewed by the Holy Spirit to think the way God wants us to think. With a renewed mind, we can love God better.

Wanting to Know God Better

God loves you just as you are, more than you could possibly comprehend. He will always be faithful to you and never betray you. Therefore, wanting to be closer to the Lord is a no-brainer. Of course, we’d want to be closer to him. We are invited to “draw near” (Heb 10:22). If you really love someone, you want to be close to them. God wants that from us.

It would be unwise, though I guess it happens, to meet someone in Las Vegas and knowing nothing about them except maybe his or her name, and get married right away. How can you meaningfully love someone you know nothing about?

That’s why loving God with your heart and with your mind go together.

Don’t Check Your Brain in at the Door

Churches, however, can throw up roadblocks to knowing God better. Professor J. P. Moreland, author of Love Your God with All Your Mind, states that, “In many churches, a questing mind [one that seeks more understanding] can be a plague to its owner. The thinking woman or man seldom gets much support today—and more often than not meets with resistance and suspicion.” Why is this?

My early years as a Christian were spent in a church where studying the Bible was crucial, but using academic tools to study it, like books on the historical background, or academic commentaries that took deep dives into the meaning of the text, were considered bad. After all, these were all written by “liberals,” who rejected true faith in Jesus.

This is a sad perspective, not least because it is false. Many works that take readers on a deeper dive into the Bible and theology were written by scholars who love and are passionate about Jesus and teaching others about him. How could knowing God’s word better, and therefore knowing more about God and what he says about us, be bad?

I acknowledge that there are writers out there, like John Dominic Crossan, Hans Kung, and Bart Ehrman, who will damage your faith.

A Few Reading Suggestions

However, many Christian academics have written books about God and Scripture that have been very helpful to millions over the years, like

• C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
• N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope
• Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth

There are many more. I have ten tall bookcases filled with books by scholars who will nourish one’s faith in Jesus, and this is only a tiny fraction of such books that could help you know and love God better.

We want to know Scripture and Jesus better. I am passionate about this, and it’s why I write blog posts. I want to make what I’ve learned more available to people who aren’t involved in academic study of the Bible. It’s not simply so you will know more. I write so that you might know God better and love and live more fully for him.

Jesus calls us to have childlike faith. He did not call us to childish thinking. As Moreland said, “A flabby mind is no badge of spiritual honor.” Jesus knew his Bible well, and he knew God well. We should all want to be like Jesus. The reason that God works all things together for good, good which we might not see in this life, is “to be conformed to the image of his son” (Rom 8:29-30).

All those books I own, though interesting, do me no real good if they don’t lead me to Jesus. All the stuff our culture values, like money, sex, and power, is ultimately worth nothing, since these won’t bring us closer to loving God with our minds.

To love God with our minds, we need to use them to learn more about God and his ways. This is not something to fear. Owning a Bible, even speed reading it through in one year, does not give us greater knowledge of and fellowship with God. It’s what it teaches us about God and about knowing and loving him that matters. Paul told Timothy,

“Make every effort to present yourself approved by God (through testing), a worker with no need to be ashamed, handling or teaching the word of truth correctly” (2 Tim 2:16). The word for handling or teaching the word of truth originally had the sense of cutting a clear path through the woods in order for a traveler to arrive at the right destination. The Bible itself is telling us to study Scripture.

Some Practical Steps

This will require doing more than reading a daily devotional entry. My advice would be to try something like The Story of God’s Word commentary series, e.g., the commentary on Philippians by Lynn Cohick, or the NIV Application Commentary on Matthew, by Michael Wilkins.

These books are designed for those with no academic background in biblical studies. There’s no need to worry about understanding them. Readers with a high school education can manage such books. God gave us minds, and he looks for us to use them.

To learn more about God, I would recommend the book, Knowing God by J. I. Packer.

No, you cannot learn what you need to love God with your mind on Tiktok, X, or most other social media platforms. You actually need to read books and articles, and/or listen to lectures on Youtube or Vimeo, such as those by Craig Keener.

Some Suggestions

To grow closer to God, as we are called to do, here are some suggestions for loving God with your mind:

• What do you need to know about someone to love them deeply? How might this speak to loving God with your mind?
• Meditate on Eph 2:1-10. By meditate, I mean you should look at each word or phrase and think about what it tells you about God and his work in your life. Christians have done this since the beginning. It is not eastern meditation. How does this expand your thinking about God or yourself?
• Meditate on Psalm 8 and think about what it tells you about God. How does this expand your view of God?
• Read Mark 5:21-43. Meditate on what you learn about Jesus here. What do you see that you might not have noticed about him before? You can increase the benefit of this exercise by seeing yourself in the shoes of Jairus, the woman with the blood flow, Jesus’ disciples, or the crowd. How might using your imagination here give you new insights into who Jesus is?

Suggestions for Prayer to Love God More with Your Mind

• “Lord, please help me to love you with my whole heart above absolutely everything else.”
• “Lord, may I want to love you with my whole being. May my will be your will. May your will be done in me as it is in heaven.”
• “Lord, help me set my mind on you. May I learn more about you in order to love you better. May I grow closer to you. Please help me deal with things that might keep me from growing closer to  you.”
• “Jesus, please help me to study your word more deeply and carefully. Guide me to good tools to help me see more truly who you are.”

If you found this post helpful or encouraging, please share it with someone else. Also, please take the survey I posted. That will help me serve you better. Thanks.