Loving God with all your mind Have you ever thought about how you love God with all your mind? Loving God with our heart - our choices our primary motives and desires - is easy to conceive of if not easy to do. Loving God with our strength - our bodies and our resources - is also easy to picture if not easy to do. But what about loving God with our minds? For me it includes thinking about God and learning to think in God's ways.  Now I am not saying that we all have to become academic theologians with PhD's but I think that if we are to love God with our minds, we will want to increase our understanding of who God is and what God is like.   So this year you might like to read a book or some articles, or to listen to some lectures on aspects of theology - the trinity, doctrine of salvation, God and the problem of evil etc.  This is not to replace our direct study of the scriptures but to augment it by learning from those who know more than us. As we grow our understanding of God it can in turn help us learn to think in God's ways.  Thinking in God's ways has immediate application to our everyday lives - our decisions and our responses to blessings and disasters etc.  This is just as necessary for us as it was for Peter.  After Peter had declared that Jesus was the Christ and been praised by Jesus, he rebukes Jesus about his upcoming death and in response Jesus rebukes him saying 'you do not have in mind the things of God but the things of men.' (Matt 16:21-28). Just like Peter we can grow in thinking in God's ways as part of processing the God moments (kairos) in our lives.  As we reflect on specific events we can ask God to show us how to think in His ways for similar events in the future. If we do both of these things we can grow in our love for God with all our minds.

David Wanstall, 04/02/2011