“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”  [Mark 12:30]

Happy Love Month, Y’all! Isn’t love a grand thing? All month on See Hear Love we are chatting about love – and, I’ve got to tell you – the more I talk about it and read about, the more I realize how much I’ve dropped the ball on the whole love thing.

And what in the world does loving God with all your mind and strength mean anyway? Right?!  

Now, listen here – I am not a bible teacher or a scholar, but I’m a simple girl that loves Jesus and is trying to learn more everyday on how to do that well. It’s taken me well over a week to write this blog because I don’t want to get it wrong – you know? Because, I don’t fully understand it all. I don’t fully understand all the right ways to love God with all my mind and strength. But, if you’ll bear with me for a few moments, I do have a couple thoughts as I sit here in my kitchen in Nashville.

Remember that phrase, garbage in, garbage out? Yeah. I’ll think I’ll start right there. I think loving God with our MIND means filling it with the good stuff! With HIM. With wisdom. With truth. In fact, God tells us what to fill our minds with:

“Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things and the God of peace will be with you.” [Philippians 4:8]

I truly believe that what goes into the mind comes out in a life. Jesus in, Jesus out. Truth in, truth out. Love in, love out.

So, what we fill our mind with matters. It’s one of the ways we love God. And loving Jesus means doing what He says. But how do we do that unless we know what He says? And knowing Him means relationship. Getting ourselves into the good book – the Bible – is our love guide, our life guide, God’s heart right there on every page. I simply believe that one of the best ways we love God with our mind and strength is in knowing Him. Life is always clear when we press closer to Him. Life is always clear when we see it through the sheer love of God. Life is always clear when we spend time with Him. Life is always clear when we listen to Him. Life is always clear when we lean in.

The value of loving is in the value of being like Christ. We become like the people we hang around. So, I just can’t help but think that the more we ‘hang around’ Jesus the more we are like Him and the more we love like Him…and love Him – in everything.

And I think that’s where loving God with the ‘strength’ part comes in. It is loving God in our disciplines, in our everyday choices – it is loving God with everything we have available for honouring Him – our affections, our desires, our families, our homes, our cell phones and music and computers and money and time.

Loving God with all our mind and strength starts with God-oriented thoughts and actions that permeates our behavior and our words, and influences everything that flows from there.

It all matters. Garbage in, garbage out. What goes into the mind comes out in a life. So, let’s start there – loving God with our mind and our strength by leaning in and living out Him.