Family, Issue 21, Relationships, Restoration

Loving God With Your Mind

Join our telegram channel

Loving God With Your Mind

Growing up as a second-generation Christian (meaning that my parents were Christians before I was born), I grew up learning about God through reading the Bible, praying, and going to church. Thus, if you asked me a few years ago if I knew who God is, I would immediately answer, “YES!” I was familiar with the epic Bible stories (think Noah’s ark and the story of Jonah), and I knew that God’s beloved Son, Jesus Christ, died on the cross for our sins.

Then I met a friend in 2013 who made me rethink my sure response.

Tim (not his real name) was openly agnostic and cynical about God. As I got to know him more, I felt determined and even compelled to influence his thinking and beliefs about God. Since we were both in the same class, I had many opportunities to talk about God with him. However, my initial enthusiasm slowly waned as every attempt I made to refute his views were promptly shut down with a question I couldn’t answer or a statement I couldn’t refute. Soon, the only word I managed to say in our conversations was “But …” followed by a long, deafening pause, and finally, a sigh. While I remained resolute about my faith, I also felt like it had been shaken right to its core. It didn’t take long before I realised this: I was struggling to talk about God because I barely knew Him. I knew of His many acts through the Bible, yes, but it was probably to the same extent that I knew about Lee Kuan Yew from my social studies textbooks.

Besides having to nurse an ego bruised by my agnostic friend, more importantly, I had to face a sobering question: How can I claim to love a God I don’t know? My mind had become lazy and my thinking was stagnant when it came to God. I did not engage my mind to think about Him, and that led to my failure in testifying about Him. I had so little to say about a God I thought I knew to be so big!

WHO IS GOD?

When Jesus was asked about the greatest commandment, He replied with this command: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.” (Matt 22:37–38).

There was a desire within me to know God more, but I busied myself with church activities rather than get to know the One I was serving. As I began to wrestle with my lack of knowledge about God, I started to ask deeper questions about the God I grew up believing in. I was shocked to find that my understanding of Him was actually pretty shallow. These questions stirred a hunger to read the Bible and find out who God says He is, and not who I say God is. I expected to become more “enlightened” through asking questions and gaining answers, but the funny thing is, the more I knew, the more I realised I didn’t know!

God as I know Him today is very different from God as I knew Him four years ago when I first met Tim. In learning about who God is, my trust in Him and my love for Him grew and thus matured.

HOW CAN I CLAIM TO LOVE A GOD I DON'T KNOW?

HOW CAN I KNOW GOD?

In my journey of knowing God, I have learned that God is not a God who hides. In fact, God is all about revealing Himself to us! So how can we know Him?

Read the Bible

This is a basic discipline in our Christian faith. Unfortunately, we (myself included), have tossed Holy Scripture aside. But reading the Bible is so important because it builds our knowledge of Him, and when we know His word, we can love Him more fully. After all, history is His-story! And guess what? The main character in this story is … God!

Persevere through all seasons

Let God reveal Himself to you through the various times and seasons that you go through in life. Ecclesiastes 3 says this: “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.” In each season of your life, God reveals a part of Himself we might have found hard to understand or relate to in our previous seasons. When we struggle with questions or concepts about God that we cannot seem to understand, we can trust that God is taking us on a journey of revelation. Moreover, I have found that wrestling through difficult questions produces a faith that runs deeper than before.

Remain Humble

We often hear this verse from Proverbs 3:5 — “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.” As I have mentioned, the more I learned about God, the more questions I seemed to have. While there are still days that these questions really bug me, I’ve learnt to recognise that it’s alright for me to not know everything. God, who is good and loving, knows all things, and therefore, I can trust Him. An attitude of humility gives you the right position to look up to the greatness of God. Truly, blessed are the meek! In contrast, an attitude of pride can be a barrier towards knowing God because we take the position of “God” in our lives.

THE MORE I KNEW, THE MORE I REALISED I DIDN'T KNOW

GOD REVEALED

While God pursues us and desires to make Himself known to us, we are still bound by our human mind. Once, someone in church said this to the congregation: “Whoever claims to know God fully is shrinking God to only what he can explain.” There are many things about God that we may not understand in this lifetime. God is someone who is far greater than us, far wiser than us, and far more beautiful than we can ever imagine.

As we open the Bible and allow the Word to teach us about who God is, may our growing understanding serve to continually humble us before a God that is so great and so beautiful. There are not enough words in the English dictionary to describe the vastness of who God is, and even language itself cannot fully express just how great He is! As we engage our minds to know Him more, the guaranteed sense of awe and wonder that will come will surely lead us to a place of adoration and admiration, which will ultimately mature our love for God. Surely, as we pursue God in our minds, the greatest command to love God and our neighbour will not seem daunting and impossible, but a command we take immense pleasure in obeying.

Share this article

Explore more articles

Shopping cart
Start typing to see posts you are looking for.