August 9th, 2026
by Deon Hairston
by Deon Hairston
Loving God With Everything You Have -- Including Your Mind
There is a question that most of us never get asked in church. It is easy enough to ask whether you love God. Almost every hand goes up. Almost every heart says yes without hesitation. But the harder question, the one that cuts closer to the bone, is this: with what? What exactly are you loving God with?
Somewhere along the way, a subtle but damaging idea crept into the way many of us think about faith. It is the idea that love is purely a feeling, something that washes over you like weather, something you fall into and fall out of without much say in the matter. And if love is only a feeling, then loving God becomes something you wait around to feel on Sunday mornings, during a powerful worship set, or in the middle of a prayer that finally breaks through. You feel it, you ride it, and then by Wednesday it has gone thin again. You wonder what happened. You wonder why the fire does not last.
But that picture of love is not the one Scripture gives us.
The Shema and the Shape of Total Devotion
In Deuteronomy chapter 6, verses 4 and 5, Moses delivers what became the oldest and most sacred confession of the people of Israel. It begins not with a command to feel something, but with a command to hear someone. Hear, O Israel. Before love is ever mentioned, there is a call to stop and listen. The logic here is not accidental. You cannot love a God you have never stopped to hear. Love, in this framework, is a response. It is what rises up in you after you have been still long enough to hear who God is, what he has done, and how faithful he has remained.
And then comes the command itself: love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. These are not three separate boxes to check off on a spiritual to-do list. Together, in the Hebrew way of thinking, they describe the total person. The heart governs your inner life, your desires, your emotions, your perceptions, and yes, your thoughts. The soul reaches outward to encompass your whole being, your body, your words, your actions, and even your reactions. And might stretches further still, to everything you have available for honoring God, your resources, your relationships, your talents, your possessions, all of it.
The oneness of God, in other words, is meant to be met with the oneness of your devotion.
The Word Jesus Turned the Light On
When Jesus is asked in Matthew chapter 22, verse 37, to name the greatest commandment of all, he reaches back to that ancient confession from Deuteronomy. But listen carefully to how he says it. He says to love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.
That third word, mind, is the one worth pausing over.
Did Jesus change the Shema? Did he correct Moses or improve on what was already written? The answer is no. What he did was turn the diamond so the light hit a face of it that many people had been missing. The Hebrew word for heart, levav, was never in the ancient mindset simply the seat of emotion. It was the control room of the whole inner person, the place where thinking and deciding and desiring all lived together. The mind was already folded inside the heart. Jesus made explicit what was already implicit. He turned on a light that was always in the room.
This is extraordinarily good news for anyone who has ever been made to feel that faith and thinking cannot live in the same house. The mind is not the enemy of devotion. According to Jesus himself, the mind is a room in the house of love. You do not get to love God with all your heart and leave your thinking out in the parking lot.
Both Fires, Not Just One
The ancient teachers of Israel noticed something remarkable in the original Hebrew text of the Shema. The word for heart is written in a doubled form, levav, and they understood that doubling to carry a specific meaning. It was a call to love God with both of your inclinations, the good drive within you and the drive that pulls the other way, the fire that, left unchecked, can burn everything down.
This is a word for anyone who has spent years in church trying to kill off the fierce, intense, or passionate parts of themselves because they assumed that was what God required. The instruction is not to extinguish the fire. The instruction is to hand it over. God is not asking you to become someone smaller or softer. He is asking you to turn every part of what you are toward him. The very drive that could be a weapon, when consecrated and given to God, becomes a guard. The fire that could destroy becomes the thing that protects.
A Love That Requires the Whole Self
What emerges from all of this is a picture of love that is far larger and far more demanding than mere sentiment. Loving God is not something you perform on Sunday and then set aside until the next service. It is unreserved devotion, the whole personality handed over to an intimate and ongoing relationship with the Father. It means you cannot love him with your feelings on Sunday and think like the world for the rest of the week. If the mind is running on the world's patterns six days out of seven, then the love being offered is not all. And God asked for all.
The renewed mind is not one more burden to carry. It is the very thing God works in us so that the love can finally flow from every part of us at once, not just the part that shows up when the music is right.
So bring your questions. Bring your reasoning. Bring your fire, both the good kind and the kind you are still learning to manage. Hear who he is. And then love him back with everything you have, your heart, your soul, your mind, holding nothing back.
That is the whole commandment. And everything else hangs on it.
There is a question that most of us never get asked in church. It is easy enough to ask whether you love God. Almost every hand goes up. Almost every heart says yes without hesitation. But the harder question, the one that cuts closer to the bone, is this: with what? What exactly are you loving God with?
Somewhere along the way, a subtle but damaging idea crept into the way many of us think about faith. It is the idea that love is purely a feeling, something that washes over you like weather, something you fall into and fall out of without much say in the matter. And if love is only a feeling, then loving God becomes something you wait around to feel on Sunday mornings, during a powerful worship set, or in the middle of a prayer that finally breaks through. You feel it, you ride it, and then by Wednesday it has gone thin again. You wonder what happened. You wonder why the fire does not last.
But that picture of love is not the one Scripture gives us.
The Shema and the Shape of Total Devotion
In Deuteronomy chapter 6, verses 4 and 5, Moses delivers what became the oldest and most sacred confession of the people of Israel. It begins not with a command to feel something, but with a command to hear someone. Hear, O Israel. Before love is ever mentioned, there is a call to stop and listen. The logic here is not accidental. You cannot love a God you have never stopped to hear. Love, in this framework, is a response. It is what rises up in you after you have been still long enough to hear who God is, what he has done, and how faithful he has remained.
And then comes the command itself: love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. These are not three separate boxes to check off on a spiritual to-do list. Together, in the Hebrew way of thinking, they describe the total person. The heart governs your inner life, your desires, your emotions, your perceptions, and yes, your thoughts. The soul reaches outward to encompass your whole being, your body, your words, your actions, and even your reactions. And might stretches further still, to everything you have available for honoring God, your resources, your relationships, your talents, your possessions, all of it.
The oneness of God, in other words, is meant to be met with the oneness of your devotion.
The Word Jesus Turned the Light On
When Jesus is asked in Matthew chapter 22, verse 37, to name the greatest commandment of all, he reaches back to that ancient confession from Deuteronomy. But listen carefully to how he says it. He says to love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.
That third word, mind, is the one worth pausing over.
Did Jesus change the Shema? Did he correct Moses or improve on what was already written? The answer is no. What he did was turn the diamond so the light hit a face of it that many people had been missing. The Hebrew word for heart, levav, was never in the ancient mindset simply the seat of emotion. It was the control room of the whole inner person, the place where thinking and deciding and desiring all lived together. The mind was already folded inside the heart. Jesus made explicit what was already implicit. He turned on a light that was always in the room.
This is extraordinarily good news for anyone who has ever been made to feel that faith and thinking cannot live in the same house. The mind is not the enemy of devotion. According to Jesus himself, the mind is a room in the house of love. You do not get to love God with all your heart and leave your thinking out in the parking lot.
Both Fires, Not Just One
The ancient teachers of Israel noticed something remarkable in the original Hebrew text of the Shema. The word for heart is written in a doubled form, levav, and they understood that doubling to carry a specific meaning. It was a call to love God with both of your inclinations, the good drive within you and the drive that pulls the other way, the fire that, left unchecked, can burn everything down.
This is a word for anyone who has spent years in church trying to kill off the fierce, intense, or passionate parts of themselves because they assumed that was what God required. The instruction is not to extinguish the fire. The instruction is to hand it over. God is not asking you to become someone smaller or softer. He is asking you to turn every part of what you are toward him. The very drive that could be a weapon, when consecrated and given to God, becomes a guard. The fire that could destroy becomes the thing that protects.
A Love That Requires the Whole Self
What emerges from all of this is a picture of love that is far larger and far more demanding than mere sentiment. Loving God is not something you perform on Sunday and then set aside until the next service. It is unreserved devotion, the whole personality handed over to an intimate and ongoing relationship with the Father. It means you cannot love him with your feelings on Sunday and think like the world for the rest of the week. If the mind is running on the world's patterns six days out of seven, then the love being offered is not all. And God asked for all.
The renewed mind is not one more burden to carry. It is the very thing God works in us so that the love can finally flow from every part of us at once, not just the part that shows up when the music is right.
So bring your questions. Bring your reasoning. Bring your fire, both the good kind and the kind you are still learning to manage. Hear who he is. And then love him back with everything you have, your heart, your soul, your mind, holding nothing back.
That is the whole commandment. And everything else hangs on it.
Deon Hairston
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