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Mark 12:30-31, Romans 12:1-2

So remember yesterday that the greatest commandment given by Jesus, tells us to love God with all of your heart, all of your soul and all of your mind and all of your strength.

And we talked about how our mind is thoughts, knowledge, and intellect, and how we will love God with all of our mind when we allow our thoughts to be transformed and renewed by the work of God’s Holy Spirit.

Today I want to talk about that a bit more. Remember it was Jesus who added in the word for mind, that is not in the shema found in Deuteronomy.

Mark 12:30-31 (NIV) Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.

When Jesus says we must love God with all our mind, remember we concluded that this means that the mind becomes a place of worship. Paul said it like this.

Romans 2:1-2 (NIV) Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

Paul wants to emphasize resisting a fallen and wicked world. This emphasis reflects his early description of a depraved and sinful world in Romans 1.

Paul declares that humanity rejected knowledge of God and was given over to a “debased mind” Romans 1:28. There is a relationship between the debased mind and the wickedness we see plague the world. So it’s important for Christians to have a transformed mind.

“By refusing to conform to the ways of the old Adamic age and instead “walking in the newness of life,” Christians’ minds may be continually transformed according to the pattern of the risen Christ (7:4, 6; 8:1-17) Believers must steadfastly resist the pressures of this present age to conform them to the pattern of this world, which is already “passing away” (1 Cor 7:31). As the firstborn of many brothers and sisters, God’s Son is the predestined model to which all believers may be conformed (Rom 8:29), the destination of the new age, the shape of things to come.”

(William M Greathouse with George Lyons, “Romans 9-16,” A Commentary in the Wesleyan Tradition, [Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City 2008], 126).

As we live in a sinful world, we are to reaffirm the truth of God’s grace to continually bring to our minds the truth of God.

In 2 Corinthians, Paul says, “We … take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5).

God cares about truth, knowledge, and wisdom. And He wants us to understand Him and the world around us. Sin has impacted our minds and our thinking must be transformed by the power of God through the Holy Spirit.

So how do we love God with our minds? By allowing them to be transformed. We use our minds every day to figure out problems or gain knowledge. We read or google new ideas or ways of doing things.

What if we tempered that knowledge and thinking with God’s desires? So when we are at work, we can look at the numbers or the figures and simply see a problem that has to be solved or, we have an opportunity to see how that problem affects the lives of others to find a solution that would help other people. Or we read new information from an opinion article about a politician or a group of people and instead of allowing that information to determine our conclusion on the matter, we strive to find other sources that shed a different light on a situation and are able to gain a better perspective that is honoring to God.