Loving God With All of Your Mind
"And one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, and perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him, which is the first commandment of all? And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear O Israel: The Lord thy God is one Lord. And thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these" (Mark 12:29-31 KJV).
Jesus answered the scribe, "Hear" (pay close attention), in this context it was spoken to Israel. Yet, Jesus Christ in the New Testament admonishes often for hearers to hear, "he who has an ear, let him hear." Lord, whatever the condition that prohibits us from hearing I pray that it is taken out of the way and nailed to the cross and that we can and will be healed to hear every word you speak. We have to take God's commandments seriously personally.
This is an aha moment, when the rod of correction which admonishes, he who has an ear, let him hear; brings comfort as well as the staff the shepherd uses which leads us. It is a comfort to know God loves us and it is also a comfort to love God. How would we grasp this reality without the Comforter, the Holy Spirit. He relieves us of discomfort within our hearts and souls. Loving God is rest for the weary heart and soul who may not have found the love they sought after in life. One day God calls you and the peace that is present soothes the heart towards loving Him, in response to Him loving you. This peace is the same peace that Jesus spoke to the wind and waves to silence the storm, as He walked on the water. He walked into our hearts one day and spoke peace to our troubled lives. The storms of life were beating against our spirits and souls threatening every morsel of serenity we had. The love we now have came bursting with the dawn of hope towards faith in God.
We love God because He first loved us. Our love for Him is our response to and in our relationship with Him. To render love to a sinless God whose love is pure and holy is the highest form of appreciation for love. To enter daily in our devotionals into His courts ascribing that we love Him with all of our hearts, souls, minds, and strength has to be one of the most gratifying emotions we can ever experience. Loving God brings healing and ointment is poured out upon us and in us because we have made our decision to love Him and honor Him with our holistic love in (our hearts, souls, minds, and strength).
Loving God shifts and repositions us into a realm where praise and worship is the only response our hearts know. We shift out of the natural and are transported into the spirit realm where we can be free to love Him, knowing that we do not have to worry any more that we will not be loved in return because His love is what drew us and still draws us closer to Him. In this secret place we can freely love Him with all of our hearts, souls, minds and strength. God's love is sinless and endless. I know you have heard the song, Endless Love" and you probably just as I, would have to confess belief in this grandiose ideal. But, we were hoodwinked into the belief of a love which operated under the auspices of sin. Yep! we were dead in trespasses and sin and believed in a concept of a love that only existed through carnality activated by passion.
The flesh has more to gain through passion, but what does the spirit and soul have to gain through passion? First our spirits had to be redeemed and our souls must be transformed and be actively in the renewal mode or we would and will not be enabled nor empowered to grasp that God's love for us is sinless. Our spirits and souls were shifted out of sin. To believe in an endless love without that love being sinless, is to believe in a love you have not qualified whether it is really love or lust. I know that, I know that the love of God is pure and holy and there is not an element of sex or sin in it.
Eros which is passion dressed up as love had convinced us to believe in endless Eros. Nevertheless, Jesus Christ came clothed in sinless perfection and broke all the powers of darkness and gave us the power needed for us to rise up to the call of Agape, the sinless love of God. How do we as beleivers in Christ love a sinless God? We believe in His grace which saves our faith to believe in sinlessness above sinfulness. Our broken hearts He mends in the silence and magnificence of His sinless love and we become one with Him in love. Thank You Father God for Your sinless love that is healing us to acknowledge and respect Your holiness. We are being taught how to love God with the sinlessness imputed to us through the blood and righteousness of Jesus Christ. .Visualize if you will, a bowl over your head daily washing your soul from impurities for the purpose of loving a sinless God with all that is within you. Forget not all of His benefits; His sinless love, grace, salvation, mercy, kindness, and goodness: His Holy Word, His Holy Spirit and His Holy Son.
Hear O child of God, that the Lord our God is one. Come into the oneness with your investment of love purchased by blood for you at Calvary. The chains we once wore because of sin that kept us from His love are broken asunder. You have to be able to see all the pieces of the chains fall off you and free your heart and soul from any past pain you may have experienced while you were looking for love in all the wrong places. Finally righteousness calls all the shots and you can bow your heart and soul to a loving and merciful God, because it is right to love God and receive His love as you personally interchange with Him.
First, we must be acquainted with the character and nature of the love God has for us, and understand that loving Him is the freedom of the response we have that produces in us the capacity to first know that He is One God, and that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one. This is the beginning and how we learn how to love God with every aspect of our being (Our heart, soul, mind, and strength).
We are being taught through the gift of grace and through our faith how to love God. We don't really know how to purely love but through the Word and Spirit of God. This is definitely a shift in the atmosphere, Hear O Christian, The Lord our God is one Lord and do not break the unity of this peace given to you through oneness. Oneness is what we will need to love God with all of our hearts. A house divided against itself can not stand. We are setting our houses in order. Your house is figuratively your life in totality, your holistic self. spirit, soul and body. It is possible to love God with all your heart, but your soul and mind needs the renewing until it sees the worth and value of having a mind full of Him. Next time you enter in with all of your heart into your study and prayer time, let God the Father know that you desire to love Him with all of your soul. Do your thoughts exemplify loving God? Do you think about Him all of the time? It is not too late to start. If haven't spoken these words before. How about right now, just release it and tell Him, Father, I love you with all of my heart, soul, mind and strength. I know that you experienced a great moment. Tomorrow is not promised, yesterday is gone, but we can experience the here and now.
Can you remember your first experience of loving someone and how you thought of them all the time? Why not God who loves you so deeply. The mind needs direction on how to think in and towards God. Are we risen with Christ? The instruction and counsel from the Apostle Paul is:
"If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth" (Colossians 3:1-2 KJV). Let the mind of Christ be in you, Jesus loved the Father with every thing that was within Him. We have our example in our blessed Lord.
Loving God becomes the premise of our faith as time goes on and the heart embraces every opportunity to express love for Him. It is a relationship of commitment to God alone that spills over into all of our other relationships. The foundation and basis for loving others begins with God's love for us. God has been loving us so long, even when we were dead in trespasses and sins, He loved us unto life. We really came alive when we had an encounter with God's love. I don't see my life having genuine expression apart from God, it was a façade.
In retrospect, I can see how I was dead in trespasses and sins, and how life didn't start until the Word of God brought Jesus Christ into the light of my heart and I began to see that God loved me even when I didn't know what love was. I only had a concept of what love should or could be. God loving me opened up portals and avenues in me that I didn't know existed. I never really thought about having a spirit or soul in the state of an unrepentant sinner. The closest I ever came to knowledge of soul was defined within the term soul music which could only define soul in the way it needed to be discovered in depravity.
Soul music, and the soul train were merely terms with no real purpose, but to dance. However, it was music which made you think about your situation, and conjured up all types of emotions and even provoked tears to certain scenes in the songs within the scope of what was going on. However, it never really gave soul a purpose for being as depicted in Genesis 2:7b, and man became a living soul after God breathed life into him. God gives soul purpose. Soul must assist in the navigation we need through life, but it must be redeemed and then transformed.
Love is a transaction, it needs all the parties in the relationship to be in agreement, just like a balanced account needs debits and credits to balance every transaction made. I was just thinking about this very issue. How the love that God has for us is so unique, we love Him because He first loved us and we have more than a reason to love Him back and to continuously love Him in return. Some people find it easy to emotionally withdraw what they have not deposited, and leave you broken hearted, but, not so with God we have a balanced life when we choose to invest our love in God. He will never break your heart into tiny little pieces and not put it back together again whole, so that you can love others as He loves you.
The love for God with the spirit and heart begins the day you realize that God loves you and gave His Son for your salvation. God sent His word to me in the form of a tract which was a love letter to my spirit. John 3:16 was His Word He sent to rescue me from a loveless existence. I was always hoping to be loved and that this love would be grandiose. I was even given the opportunities to love, and it still wasn't enough, nor did it scratch the surface, because you can never really understand and know people like you can God. God's love is tender and kind, strong yet gentle and entreats the heart and tugs it to come and be healed from all that has afflicted your soul. His love tells us we need Him every hour of every day and not to forget to touch the heavens daily in prayer and adoration.
We can understand and know God because He has given us the Bible to learn of Him. It is amazing that all the people in this enormous world had not convinced me of the love that accepts you even through failure and continues to love you anyway. God's love convinces me and my response is I love you too, and thank You for the healing power of Your love. This is when you stop looking for love in all the wrong places, and look in God. God's love is pure and it's clean, it is purifying my heart and soul. My spirit loves God and I know and understand the difference between loving Him with all of my heart and all of my mind. Hebrews 4:12 explains that very well.
The Word of God is quick and powerful, and sharper than any two edged sword, even to the dividing asunder of spirit and soul. This verse provides a premise for loving God with all the spirit and with all of the soul, because the Word of God divides and differentiates between the two. The born again spirit joins in oneness with God at salvation, but the soul has to learn and is learning how to love God. I was listening to a teaching and the teacher made a comment that all who were present listening to the Word, were loving God with theirs minds. Those words struck me like a bolt of lightning and produced this hub. I had never thought of it in that way.
In Deuteronomy 6:5, it reads a little differently, but holds the same premise.
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
The book of Deuteronomy credits Moses with the authorship of its contents. "These are the words which Moses spake unto all Israel" (1:1). "And it came to pass, when Moses had made an end of writing the words of this law in a book, until they were finished."
In Luke 10:27, it reads,
Hear O Israel: The Lord thy God is one Lord. And thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. This verse is how the lawyer recited it to Jesus.
It is intriguing that this commandment entails love for God with all of the heart, soul, mind and strength. As I alluded to earlier the soul houses the mind and yet this verse places emphasis on the mind in addition to the soul, making it of equal importance. The mind is being renewed after the knowledge of Christ to deflect conformity to the world and is being transformed through renewal. As our mind receives more biblical information about God, that information gives our mind what is needed to change; and incorporate wisdom, and understanding into our lives. This teaching and all the information we learn about God assists us in loving Him with all of our minds.
Four aspects are mentioned in Luke 10, heart, soul, mind, and strength, and in Deuteronomy 6, three aspects were referenced, heart, soul and might. The fourth aspect in Luke is the mind, placing further emphasis on the mind as a separate entity. We've been taught that the soul houses the mind and that it is an intricate part of our soul. Nevertheless, loving God with the soul and mind is the focal point. When we study and read the Word of God with the right motives we are practicing love for God with our minds.
Jesus didn't make an issue of the wording being different in the two verses and neither shall I. This Deuteronomy 6, verse mentions, the heart, soul and might. The verse in Luke 10 refers to the heart, soul, mind and strength. As long as we get the main idea that's all that counts. Love God with everything within you. King David knew that blessing the Lord with his soul was like the flowing of a spring of living waters. As the hart pants after the water brooks, so my soul thirsts after thee O God, my soul thirsts for You, for the living God, Lord I delight in Your presence, this defining moment for him is found in (Psalm 42:1-2).
In this picture the caption boldly declares I Love God, yet do you see all the people? Every time we declare our love for God, we are never alone. The crowd is innumerable making the same declaration, but for us it begins with I love God. The words I love You God ushers us into oneness with Him and all who love Him.
My moments of discovery have come and are continuously coming through loving God and documenting what I am perceiving and feeling through writing, be it a poem, a song, or article or the compilation of all these thoughts through the lens of a book. I wrote a book in 2012, entitled "Crescendo of Praises" which entailed thoughts of old and new. I named it Crescendo of Praises because it represented the culmination of both old and new.
My Pastor in New York, A.R. Bernard was the first person to utter this word crescendo and it was powerful then and now, as is the reality of hearing the word over 25 years ago. On the other side of the publication of the book I have made a discovery about my relationship to God and of myself. Writing helps me to organize thoughts as I am granted understanding, and I am learning more about the kind of thinker I am. The thoughts of God govern my soul and this is the way to love God with the mind. Thoughts which represent Him and form experiences in which expression can spring forth through poetry, prose, composition of new songs and so much more. It is a wonder filled time loving God.
Crescendo of Praises entail my experiential and personal chronicle of my journey towards loving God with all of my heart, soul and strength. It is a compilation of what has been inspired in my heart, the affection and adoration I witness in my relationship with God which is instrumental towards the transforming of my soul. It is also my testimony of loving God through creative writing. The blood of the lamb and my testimony are realities to me.
This book was more that a compilation of poetry and writings, it was how I was loving God with my mind to the point of expression. Every poem is about His goodness, greatness, and the essence of His character and nature in and through my life personally, but my hope was and is to share out of my relationship and to encourage others in their relationship with Him; to love the Lord thy God with all of your heart, soul, mind and strength. It is my soul loving God and pinpointing and highlighting what my spirit inspired by the Holy Spirit and the Word of God gives me, it is about the mind absorbing thoughts which pertain to God.
My spirit caught these glimpses and needed a vehicle of expression, it is truly like having fire shut in your bones. The mind is the intellect and our soul houses the intellect. To think is to have thoughts, it is what we think about that has to be examined closely. Thoughts about God everyday is loving God with your soul and mind. Loving God with the soul means the conscience is invited to this feast as well and so are all the other aspects of the soul, the reasoning is welcome to come and reasoning together with God. The emotions are allowed to express the joy only God can give, because it is our strength. We can use our will to will what God wills for us, we can interlink with Him. I can trust my imagination, not to place anything above the knowledge of God my mind is gaining wisdom everyday. My memory can now serve God not to recall resentment, grief, bitterness, and every type of contamination, but to choose memories that forgiveness has resurrected with new life.
Poems, prose, prayers, praise, books, magazine articles, spoken and preached Word, teachings, admonitions, exhortations, encouragement and inspirations all surface and grant us the ability to express our selves because we deem Him worthy and submit ourselves to thought only He provides through His Word as we make the decision only we can make, to love God with all of our souls and minds. You are not just merely reading and studying the Word, you are loving God with your mind. with your free will you are letting God know, Lord I love Your counsel and the principles which are shaping and helping me find the formation of Christ for my soul.
The acquiring of revelation of God triggers within me the desire to worship and praise Him through every thing my pen can write and ascribe. Every emotion rises up and allows me to feel what I deem exclusive emotions for God. I had to do a review and summation of the book that I wrote and every poem is my declaration to and of God, most of the poems are my own conversations with Him which are poetic prayers and His responses.
In summation, I arrived at this reality, that these thoughts are my way of loving God with all of my mind. Thinking about and then writing about God is one of the most glorious things I have ever done in this life. I consider it a privilege and honor to use my mind and my pen, my voice and all of me to exalt the Most High God. Purpose is being fulfilled, as I continuously discover who I am and whose I am. I am a child of God and He is my Father. Loving God with my mind produces books, songs, and poetry which I have to have an avenue of expression and release. I just can't keep it to my self it is like dynamite, explosive.
Loving God produces a multi-millionaire thinker and I am rich in thoughts. Thoughts of God pour into mind through the Word of God. Beloved, wealth begins in the heart and travels to the soul who loves God and affects the material realm as a result. I had to re-evaluate wealth and qualify it for my soul's prosperity. The soul that loves God is a prosperous thinker. In turn, I have been given understanding and the inspiration to write and proclaim His majesty. Hallelujah!
(1John 3:2) Beloved, I wish above all things, that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prosperth.
Loving God with our mind is truly a real treasure. This love is liken to a royal spiritual diadem that has been given to the soul to quicken it unto resurrection power that springs forth to embrace the oneness and unity that makes us whole. With all of these aspects we are commanded to love God, yet the commandment becomes the desire of our hearts which bows to God. Loving God brings the spiritual prosperity we find and experience in the abundant life Jesus came to give.
There is a type of authority in which the one who gives a commandment coupled with the respect for that authority can produce mere compliance as can easily be seen in the Pharisees, Sadducees and scribes, they were in compliance to the law, but ignored the weightier things of the law, such as mercy. Jesus Christ came in a relationship with God in the volume of the book and it will always be apparent that He loved God the Father with all of His heart, mind, soul and strength. It was evident that He was committed to His relationship with God and not merely complying. I encourage you beloved to love God with every fiber of your being and bless the Lord with all of your soul and everything that is within you. God is love and love never fails!
