Dr. Tony G. Moon is the author of From Plowboy to Pentecostal Bishop: The Life of J. H. King.
“Jesus replied, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind’” (Matthew 22:37; see also Mark 12:30; Luke 10:27; my emphasis).
We Christians in the West don’t naturally think about loving God as a matter of the mind.
Rather, since we instinctively think of love as a matter of feelings, we believe that loving God means having positive feelings of affection and adoration for Him. Of course, biblically speaking, loving God includes the affections, but it entails far more.
When Jesus issued this imperative to love the Lord, he was drawing from famous passages in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy: “seek,” “love,” “serve” and “return to” God with one’s whole being, and “observe” and “obey” his law with one’s whole being. Jesus understood that this includes one’s mind, not just one’s emotions and will.
I was an average student in high school. I didn’t have much interest in the accumulation of knowledge and in academic study as such. However, when I became a Christian at eighteen years of age just out of high school, an amazing thing happened: I started a lifelong journey of actually desiring to learn! But it was later, as I began to be taught and mentored by believing college professors and other important Christian persons in my life, that I understood study as an act of worship to God and as part of my dedication to the Lord’s service and preparation for fulfilling his call on and gifting in my life.
Loving God with my mind , as demonstrated in a serious attitude about and approach to study, is an important aspect of what it means for me to be a consecrated God-server and Jesus-follower.
Translated to college life in the twenty-first century, this means that skipping class, neglecting course work and bordering on flunking out are weak examples of what it means to be a New Testament Christian. Jesus said that our whole being—body, soul and spirit;intellect, will and emotions—is to be laid at the altar and dedicated to the service of the God we love. Honoring the Lord in the way we live includes developing our brains for life, for career and for his service
