He said to him, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind." Matthew 22:37 [HCSB]
What then? I will pray with the spirit, and I will also pray with my understanding. I will sing with the spirit, and I will also sing with my understanding. 1 Corinthians 14:15 [HCSB]
That the mind must love, that the intellectual nature also has its affections which it must give to God; this, perhaps, seems to us… strange; certainly it is less familiar.…
The glory of this part of His commandment… seems to me to be in this assurance which it gives us that God, the Father of men, is not satisfied if His children give Him simply gratitude for His mercies or the most loyal obedience to His will; but that He wants also, as the fulfillment of their love to Him, the enthusiastic use of their intellects, intent to know everything that it is possible for men to know about their Father and His ways. That is what… is meant by loving God with the mind.… “Understand me! understand me!” He seems to cry; “I am not wholly loved by you unless your understanding is reaching out after my truth.”…
They always have loved God best, they are loving God best today, who gaze upon Him with wide-open eyes; who, conscious of their ignorance and weakness, more conscious of it the more they try to know, yet do try with all the powers He has given them, to understand all that they possibly can of Him and His ways. - Phillips Brooks, Sermons Preached in English Churches
Spirit Filled Life Daily Devotional Bible, (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers) 1998, c1993.
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