Love Your God With All Your Mind

For the majority of people who call themselves the body of Christ, it would be an understatement to say that we do not love Christ with all our minds. The whole of our mind-loving, usually consists of a severely fragmented head knowledge about the basics of salvation, along with several dogmatic stances regarding some very difficult passage of scripture that we use to categorize each other into whichever Christian sect is the most conducive to our lifestyle.

You don t have to search very far to find evidence that as a whole the Christian community is not a hub of intellectualism. For many non-Christians, Christian beliefs, virtues, and doctrine are considered at best a sentimental antiquity from days gone by, at worst a stumbling block to progress. But where should the blame lie?

Christians have busily occupied themselves with potluck dinners, re-writing church constitutions, marketing Jesus, and rallying against the unsaved, and have left non-believers to answer difficult questions, and make the hard decisions for us. We have moved ourselves out of the scientific community, out of the entertainment industry, out of political arenas, and out of the thinking machine in general, in exchange for a plush Christian sub-culture that exists free of all the risks that come into play when people of God challenge a dying world and commit their hearts, souls, and minds to changing lives for the glory of God. Evolutionists have re-taught us our origin, social workers replace the need for God s love at work in our lives, and pop-culture reinterprets meaning and dictates how we are to live.

So what has happened? Has God been found to be lacking? Does he not possess the answer to our ultimate questions, or could it be that the answers lie outside the parameters of what is allowable through the interpretation of scripture? No, it has been intellectually dormant Christians that have reduced almighty God to little more than an afterthought for the majority of civilization.

For all practical purposes, Christians today are afraid to integrate their mind and logic into their passion for Christ. There are, I believe, several reasons for this. First, Christians are hesitant to confront carnal knowledge for the fear that they will be themselves tainted for having tested it against the truths found in scripture. It is much easier to live in blind faith, but as mature Christians I believe it is imperative that we know what we believe and why. Also, within our Christian ghetto, there exists the fear that if we use our mental capacities to explore the realms of science, psychology, astronomy, history, archaeology, etc., that we will somehow disprove Gods existence, and find out that maybe we were wrong after all, that perhaps God s word won t hold up to ration and logic. A faith that is afraid of being tested is no faith at all, but blind stupidity. Also, we are a very lazy community of believers. It is much easier to fall into the routines of a habitual Christianity, it s clich s and conformities, than it is to seek the Lord with all our mind and reasoning abilities.

Christianity and Christian ideals are ridiculed by the media, and have become the laughing stocks of the intellectuals. But, I would venture to say that we are at fault; we made the decision to separate our intellect from our love of God. We have failed in this arena not because Christianity falls short intellectually, but because we have been too complacent to seek and prove Biblical thinking in our own lives. We Christians, who are supposed to be winning multitudes for Christ by offering truth and light, are stereotyped by ignorance and fear in our own culture.

So where can we find redemption, how can we bring about change? I would propose that in addition to a personal commitment to love God with our minds, it is necessary for pastors and church leaders to redirect the focus of their flocks. Our pastors should be trained and educated to not only love scripture, but to know and understand it, as well as fostering a passion for truth. We have a tendency in our churches to be satisfied with prettily packaged 3-point sermons consisting primarily of fluff, with a nugget of truth thrown in once a month if we are lucky. We need to be daily impassioned for Christ bringing about an all-encompassing love that fully requires loving Christ with not only our hearts, but our minds as well.

I would tell the Christian church to lose their trite billboards competing to have the wittiest quote of the week, and get rid of our clich ridden jargon that can only further complicate very complex theologies that need to be understood. Instead, we must commit our minds to pursuing holiness and a deeper love for Christ. In Matthew 22:37-38, Christ, in answering the Pharisees question regarding the first and great commandment, told them: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. I would not think this a commandment to be ignored, let us pray that the people of God will hear and obey, starting with us.