Love God With All Your Mind
The Lord Jesus Christ said that “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” He said that this is “the great and first commandment” (Matt. 22:37-38). We are to be passionately committed to, and we are to pursue the Triune God with every fiber of the totality of our being. And one aspect of our being that Jesus refers to here is our mind--our intellect, our reasoning faculty. I have been thinking recently about thinking, specifically the role of thinking in our relationship to God. It seems to me that there is a serious neglect in our day of this aspect of the “great commandment” within the Christian community. Yet at the very least we must see that we cannot pick and choose what parts of God’s commands we are going to obey. We must love God with the use of our minds just as much as any other aspect of our God-given beings as His image bearers.
Connecting with Tim’s very important comments yesterday in his blog on “Becoming a Resident Theologian”, I offer some complementary thoughts taken from Essential Truths of the Christian Faith, by R.C. Sproul, that I hope will serve to reinforce in our lives what Tim is challenging us with, and exhorting us to be. In this excellent introduction to the doctrines of the Bible, Dr. Sproul begins by giving us 10 causes which work against the Christian goal of spiritual maturity. And one of these causes that he mentions is the anti-rational spirit of the age. Here’s what he says:
We must listen well to Dr. Sproul’s final point--“To despise the study of theology is to despise learning the Word of God.” While God has not gifted or called all to be intellectuals (though He has called some), He is calling all of us to use our intellects, our minds that He has gifted us with, to the fullest capacity that we each have, to love Him, and to study Him--to the proximate end that we may more clearly display Him through our lives, to the ultimate end that we may glorify Him and enjoy Him to the full, forever.
What are some specific practical implications of this for our lives that come to mind (pardon the pun)?
Connecting with Tim’s very important comments yesterday in his blog on “Becoming a Resident Theologian”, I offer some complementary thoughts taken from Essential Truths of the Christian Faith, by R.C. Sproul, that I hope will serve to reinforce in our lives what Tim is challenging us with, and exhorting us to be. In this excellent introduction to the doctrines of the Bible, Dr. Sproul begins by giving us 10 causes which work against the Christian goal of spiritual maturity. And one of these causes that he mentions is the anti-rational spirit of the age. Here’s what he says:
I believe that we are living in the most anti-intellectual era of Christian history ever known. I do not mean anti-academic, anti-technological or anti-scientific. By anti-intellectual, I mean against the mind.
We live in a period that is allergic to rationality. The influence of existential philosophy has been massive. We have become a sensuous nation. Even our language reveals it. My seminary students repeatedly write like this on their exam pages: "I feel it is wrong that..." or "I feel it is true that..." I invariably cross out their word feel and substitute the word think. There is a difference between feeling and thinking.
There is a primacy of the mind in the Christian faith. There is also a primacy of the heart in the Christian faith. Surely that paradoxical declaration sounds like a contradiction. How can there be two primacies? Something must be ultimately prime. Of course we cannot have two different primacies at the same time and in the same relationship. When I speak of two different primacies, I mean with respect to two different matters.
With respect to primacy of importance, the heart is first. If I have correct doctrine in my head but no love for Christ in my heart, I have missed the kingdom of God. It is infinitely more important that my heart be right before God than that my theology be impeccably correct.
However, for my heart to be right, there is a primacy of the intellect in terms of order. Nothing can be in my heart that is not first in my head. How can I love a God or a Jesus about whom I understand nothing? Indeed, the more I come to understand the character of God, the greater is my capacity to love Him.
God reveals Himself to us in a book. That book is written in words. It communicates concepts that must be understood by the mind. Certainly mysteries remain. But the purpose of God’s revelation is that we understand it with our minds that it might penetrate our hearts. To despise the study of theology is to despise learning the Word of God” (pg. xvi).
We must listen well to Dr. Sproul’s final point--“To despise the study of theology is to despise learning the Word of God.” While God has not gifted or called all to be intellectuals (though He has called some), He is calling all of us to use our intellects, our minds that He has gifted us with, to the fullest capacity that we each have, to love Him, and to study Him--to the proximate end that we may more clearly display Him through our lives, to the ultimate end that we may glorify Him and enjoy Him to the full, forever.
What are some specific practical implications of this for our lives that come to mind (pardon the pun)?
Labels: Guest Post, Loving God, the Mind, Theology
posted by Bruce at
8:00 AM
4 Comments:
Bruce, this anti-itellctulism filters into every area.
In sharing the gospel it's often about how God can give a better, happier life, not the forgiveness of sin for having been disobedient to his holy law.
I don't recall many sermons in my life-time where doctrinal truths regarding the Law of God, and punishment for sin have been clearly preached. Without that background, you cannot do evangelism. Jesus didn't die to make us feel better, be more comfortable, more prosperous! He died to take care of the very serious matter of sin and judgment and to bring us into a state of peace with God.
I have wondered recently if I could make sense of the gospel to any given teen-ager. To speak of a holy law, of our sin, of guilt and the need to have a Substitute to bear our sin before God...
Is the anti-intellectualism so severe that the message is no longer capable of being communicated in understandable terms? The terms don't exist! They haven't been taught.
Of course, given enough time, and the pressing need of a soul (guilt), I do believe the gospel can be communicated and understood and applied in a saving way. But it surely is a strange day in regards to the issue you have raised.
Wow, need to proof-read my comments better. I had to change the batteries in my wireless keyboard as letters were being skipped when I began typing.
There, now I have cleared myself and secured my pride!
Peter, it is so true that the anti-intellectual spirit of the age has filtered into every area of life-----even the church. This should not surprise us though, for the sins of the world do indeed become the sins of the church.
As we engage with unbelieving people we will often and increasingly need to consciously meet them at a more basic level. Before we can tell them about the truth, we may need to first establish in their minds that objective truth even exists and that it matters.
Your thoughtful comments reminds me of something J. Gresham Machen once said:
"And yet it would be a great mistake to suppose that all men are equally well prepared to receive the gospel. It is true that the decisive thing is the regenerative power of God. That can overcome all lack of preparation, and the absence of that makes even the best preparation useless. But as a matter of fact God usually exerts that power in connection with certain prior conditions of the human mind, and it should be ours to create, so far as we can, with the help of God, those favorable conditions for the reception of the gospel. False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion" (Christianity and Culture).
This leads us to an. Important corollary, namely... .preaching. Many would say that we need to dumb down our message to accomodate a dumb audiance. Please indulge me as I wax biographical for a moment. I am a product of a public school education. Most of my command of both the English language and rational thought processes I learned at Trinity Baptist Church under Al Martin. I became "undumbed" under challenging theological rhetoric and words that were well beyond the 6th grade level. This occured in the the regular adult Sunday school class and morning and evening worship sermons, to which any child in grade school or older was encouraged to participate. Later, in my graduate Theological training, I learned the almost forgotton truth of what the Greek NT calls the kerygma and the karux. Translated "the thing heralded and the herald. God says only when the truth is heralded, is preaching actually occuring. Simple, expository, verse by verse, discriminating, applicatory preaching of the word of God. John Calvin was a great example of this. Read any of his sermons and the above mentioned adjectives will be seen in action. This also required that 6 or 7 year olds sat attentively as the sermons were delivered. We spent much of Sunday afternoon "discussing and explaining" the sermons to our children. Brothers and sisters, I know I am old (55) but this was only 30 years ago. Have we come so far that we can't get a 6 year old to sit attentively through a sermon. I bet you could get one to sit through an hour of cartoons and pay attention. Let us not be part of the problem but part of the solution.
I submit to you that much of todays anti intellectualism is the product of a crass lack of both self control and self discipline.Humbly,
JR
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