“And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart…and with all your mind…” (Mark 12:30) Keeping the heart and the mind connected is one of the most important and daunting tasks for believers. Young believers have a tendency to need the next ‘fix’ of emotional and heartfelt experience. Yet, after the experience, usually within a few hours or days, their little airplane of emotionalism crashes and they must look for another ‘fix.’ Satan drags them around to live from experience to experience.
Without understanding the truths of spiritual life in the mind, the enemy plays young believers like Nero’s fiddle—watching their life burn while they seek an escape. Like an addict on crack, the experiences, though fulfilling them for the moment, will only lead to destruction and spiritual tragedy because they are abandoning sound doctrine and the understanding needed to ground their faith on the Rock of Jesus Christ. Emotions will fluctuate and drag us around by the nose if they become our ‘all in all.’
On the other hand, older believers have a tendency to get caught up the cerebral truths of the Gospel and neglect the heart. Information about God replaces intimacy with God. Knowledge in the mind becomes a proud display of spirituality while the heart becomes cold, aloof, detached, and religiously ugly. This causes a loss of the wonder of the resurrection and the glory of the living presence of the Holy Spirit.
We are to love the Lord with BOTH heart and mind! It is not an either/or proposition. We must refuse to allow anyone (preachers or doctrines) to ‘slice us in half’ and make us choose either heart or head. If we don’t, we’ll either be wild-eyed emotional or the frozen chosen intellectual.
If we live consumed in our feelings (the heart), our life will be as erratic as a rollercoaster at Disney World. It may seem fun for a while but eventually you’ll begin throwing up. If we attempt to only live by the factual knowledge of ‘sound doctrine’ (mind), we’ll become the epitome of religious pride and turn into a modern day pharisee. This will cause us to walk right past hurting people because we are too busy judging and condemning them instead of loving them and showing them Christ.
The greatest distance to travel in order to become a wise and mature Christian is to constantly travel on the bridge that connects the heart and the mind. When connected, we become neither a straw blowing in the wind or a cold statute of religious egotism. The Lord makes us a complete and total person in Christ.
The Gospel of Christ brings us to fulness of life in our heart and our head. He has given us a way to become velvet steel—firm enough in sound doctrine to hold up under pressure, but soft enough with grace to comfort those in need. Let’s be careful to love the Lord with all of our… Heart and Mind!
