Think (6)

And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.  "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?"  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.  This is the first and greatest commandment.  And a second is like it:  You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets."  (Matthew 22:35-40)


God commands us to love him with our minds.  This is an integral part of what Jesus says is the greatest commandment, one of the two that essentially sum up the rest of what the Old Testament is saying.  What, Piper asks, does it mean to love God with all our minds?  Here is what Piper says...

"Our thinking should be wholly engaged to do all it can to awaken and express the heartfelt fullness of treasuring God above all things."  Thinking is the way we use our minds.  Only a comprehensive full engagement of the mind is worthy of our infinite God.  To love God, Piper will argue, will involve really treasuring him; there is a delighting, cherishing, valuing, and admiring.  See Philippians 3:8.  And finally, the act of thinking is not loving itself, but is a means to loving.  Satan can think true thoughts about God, and that certainly does not constitute love.

The next section focuses on the distinctions between heart, soul, and mind.  There is significant overlap between these.  They are not watertight compartments.  Piper writes, "We may summarize like this: heart highlights the center of our volitional and emotional life without excluding thought (Luke 1:51).  Soul highlights our human life as a whole ("man became a living creature," Gen 2:7), thought sometimes distinguished from the body (Matt. 10:28).  Mind highlights our thinking capacity.  And when the term strength is added, as in Mark 12:30, it highlights the capacity to make vigorous efforts both bodily and mentally."  The overlap in functions here and the repeated use of "all" make it clear that every faculty we possess is to be used to love God.

Why should we define loving God mainly as treasuring God?

Slight pointers...

1)  The heart, which is the center of our emotional and volitional life, is the first mentioned in the greatest commandment.  Perhaps the others flow rightly only from it.

2)  The english does not capture it, but the preposition Luke uses for heart is different from soul, strength, and mind.  The word used suggests that the first is the seat of the love, and the last three are instruments of it.

3)  Deuteronomy 30:6 promises a time when love for God would be possible in a new way because of a circumcision of the heart (and the heart of your offspring.)  The change needed is in the heart.

Solid reasons...

4)  Jesus distinguished between the first and second greatest commandments.  The order and distinction is not trivial, though certainly we should not artificially separate them.  Love for God will certainly flow into a love for people, but we should not say that loving people is itself loving God.  We should not simply equate outward actions with loving God, though loving God will lead to outward actions indeed.  Love is first a matter of the heart.

5)  Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, "This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me" (Mark 7:6-7)  "The external behaviors will be pleasing to God when they flow from a heart that freely treasures God above all things."

6)  No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.  You cannot serve God and money.  (Matt 6:24)  The opposite of love is hate and despising, which carries with it a strong negative emotional weight.  This implies that love carries with it strong positive emotional weight.  We cannot serve two masters, and the reason behind that is the nature of these internal emotional dispositions of love and hate.

We need to love God from our hearts, treasuring him completely, and may we ask God for this grace - that we might use all of our mind, strength, and soul to this end of loving deeply from the heart.