What Does It Mean to Love God With Our Minds?

Part 1 of 6.

It is not
too hard
to under-
stand most
of this passage.
To love God
with our
whole heart
(kardia) means
to have no
idols, no
wavering, no affairs with other gods; in other words, total captivation to Him. To love God with our soul (psuche) means with our entire being, our whole person. And to love God with our strength (ischus) means to serve without growing weary or giving up, holding nothing back. But, what does it mean to love God with dianoia (our mind, our intellect)? What is "intellectual love" for God?

In his book Reaching for the Invisible God, Phillip Yancey tells the story of Frank Laubach, the man who founded the modern literacy movement. His lifetime goal was to think continuously about Jesus. Yancey describes how he practiced this discipline with increasing success, keeping a log of how often he thought about God. He gradually got to the point where on his best days, he thought about God every few seconds. But is this what the passage means? Do we "love God" by thinking about Him?

Unfortunately, many Christians think that our intelligence is somehow not honoring to God. Intellectual activity is seen as being "worldly," and an intellectually strong person cannot possibly be spiritually strong. As a result of this serious error, some Christians do not even try to develop their minds, defaulting instead to simplistic thinking and emotionalism. This is a dangerous posture to take, and it creates a poor testimony: non-believers assume that to be a Christian one has to give up thinking, and when they hear us using God's name, they assume we are either praying or preaching. There is double sin at work here: to be against intellectual activity is an insult to God, since our gifts and abilities all come from him; and it is poor stewardship to not develop and use every gift we have by His grace. In his book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis, commenting on Jesus' teaching that we will never enter the kingdom of God unless we become like little children, said: "Christ never meant that we were to remain children in intelligence: on the contrary...He wants a child's heart, but a grown-up's head."

To love God with our mind, then, means to love God by thinking. The human mind is a good gift from the Creator. To think is a godly thing to do.
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