Loving God With Your Mind

(Matthew 22:37) "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."  (ESV)

We are to love God with all of our being including our mind.  Unfortunately modern evangelicals have downplayed the role of the mind in loving God.  Modern evangelicalism has an anti-intellectual streak preferring to focus more on feelings and experience.  Loving God with our minds involves having a great concern for doctrine and theology.  Unbelievably many evangelicals have a negative view of doctrine and theology.  

The liberals of old said that Christianity was life and not doctrine.  Unfortunately this seems to be the motto of many modern day evangelicals.  Christianity is life based on doctrine.  Liberalism denied the authority of Scripture, hopefully evangelicalism will not go down the same path.  

If we truly love God we will desire to know more about him.  You have heard it said that I don't need theology to know God loves me.  Well I hate to break this to you but saying God loves me is theology.  Theology is basically the study of God and every Christian should be interested in him.  Of course thinking about God and the things of God requires some effort.  This may be part of the reason why evangelicals are weak in their thought life.  

God has revealed himself to us in the Bible. To be a thinking Christian one must read and study the Bible.  It needs to be read as a whole and not just in bits and pieces.  We have to learn to see the big picture and develop a Christian worldview.  We will then have sound doctrine upon which to base our lives.  

We must learn to love God with our minds.  Being anti-intellectual is simply disobeying God.  The church will not be strong until we recover our minds.  We must have good theology and sound doctrine in order to honor and love God.