“And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” – Matthew 22:37
Matthew 22:37 is NOT an illustration of the Christian’s need to love God selectively or compartmentally but for us to love with our whole being: our hearts, our souls, our mind, our strength. Everything we are, everything we do, should be an act of worship to the One who made us, but how often are we actually doing that? It is admittedly much easier to say than it is to do.
Of the items listed: heart, soul, mind, the one that I find that many church attendees seem to neglect is the loving God with our mind. Certainly, many of us will attend church on a Sunday service, listen as the preacher dissects the Word of God for the congregation, and let it revitalize their parched soul of the goodness of God. However, that’s not what the Bible calls us to, is it? God calls us to a lifetime and daily walk with Him where we are satisfied from our daily bread. We activate our minds when it comes time for Sunday school or Bible study but outside of those select times we do not engage with God in an intellectual manner.
Even as we engage with the Bible in a more mindful way, I have found that many people engage the Biblical text as though it were a “different” thing than other intellectual pursuits. For example, how a scientist engages with peer-reviewed studies is different from how that same scientist would then engage with a fiction novel. Or more poignantly, how historians treat the Bible than they do other ancient texts like the Code of Hammurabi. They treat one with a fleeting disregard as a religious text while treating the other as a display of true human history and anthropology. Do we implicitly treat the Bible as if it is a less intellectual pursuit than subjects such as STEM?
To love our God is to think on Him, including on the things that we don’t understand, to engage with the Biblical text in light of archaeological evidences and historical accounts. We have to ask and grapple with the difficult questions and trust Him even if we do not receive the answer to those questions. To love our God with our mind is to intellectually and reasonably pursue after Him. R.C. Sproul once said that every Christian is a theologian, that is because we must all be ones who are curious about God and study as much as we can about Him. So, the pursuit of God is not to shut off our mind to let God in, but to willingly and intelligently come to the throne of God seeking wisdom and insight from and about God.
Stephen Lee
September 7, 2025