September 8 Daily Devotional

Bible Reading:

MarK 12:30:

³⁰And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.

Devotional:

It is singular that Jesus included in the first and great commandment (Matthew 22:37), the injunction that we should love God also with our mind.

When Jesus holds before us the high ideal, that we shall love God with our heart and with our soul, we accept it at once, for at the first hearing we understand that our heart and soul are disposed to love. But how can you love with your mind? Your mind has been given you that you may think, ponder, and understand; but how, involuntarily you ask, can the mind be an organ of love, an instrument by which love can execute its glorious operations?

That so many fail to see this is because it is read thoughtlessly, and no serious work is made of investigating this first and great commandment in each of its parts. With hurried reading, it is taken as though it said that we must put our mind in the service of God, and leave it to the heart and the soul to do the loving.

Yet this is not so. It does not say that we must serve God with the mind; that we must center our thought upon God; that we must come to an intelligent confession of God with our understanding, or however one may think he ought to direct the working of his mind toward God. No, it declares clearly and plainly that we must also love God with our mind. Our whole religion is focussed by Jesus on this one mighty conception of love, and this love must permeate our entire human personality. From the soul, not only in our heart, but also in our mind, it must have dominion, and must bring it to pass, that all our vital powers are led by one supreme motive, to wit: the love for God.

The mind here by no means signifies our logical processes of thought, our clear judgment, our learned understanding; no, our mind here means the whole glorious gift of our consciousness, including our creative ability, our imagination, our reflection and meditation.

Powers work in nature far more strongly than in men. But nature, though it lives, is altogether unconscious. And though in the more highly organized animals you observe a small beginning of consciousness, yet even with the most highly developed animal it is extremely weak. And the glory of the conscious life, which in God alone is perfect, is among all earthly creatures found only in man, because man, in this particular as well, has been created after God's Image.

This consciousness may not come to the highest degree of development with many people. With the insane it may become confused, and the pitifully unfortunate idiot shows, by contrast, what an unspeakably rich gift even the very ordinary man has received from God, in his consciousness, in his self-consciousness and in his conscious life, so that you have no right to consider the consciousness inferior to your heart, and that all religion, which would focus the service of God solely upon the heart and upon good works, and excludes from it the glorious human consciousness, maims itself, robs God of His gift, and must degenerate into false religion.

Thus, you feel at once, that it is indeed Christian duty, that our human science also should direct itself to God, not only that a part of science, to wit: theology, should choose as its object the knowledge of God and leave no path untrod along which this can be enriched; but that science as a whole, in every domain, should ever cause the glory of God to become manifest.

However thoroughgoing and learned science may be, the moment it leaves God aside, awakens doubt about His existence, or undertakes to deny Him, it is no longer science, but sin; for it sins against the great commandment, that mankind with its whole mind, shall first love God. And since it is contradictory to every idea of love, to be indifferent to its object, or to ignore it, it follows that the scientist, who in his scientific pursuit does not feel himself drawn toward God, and who, before all things else, with his scientific knowledge does not seek to enhance the glory of God, violates the first and great commandment.

And this is the curse, which rests so heavily upon the science of our times, that in its veins it does not feel the throb of love for God, and that it behaves itself as though the great commandment, that we must love God with all the mind, had never been given.

The same applies to our doctrinal standards.

Students of science are but few in number, but every one is called to confess the faith.

What this means is not difficult to understand.

Every man has a standard, a system of main ideas, from which he starts out, a world of thoughts, however small, by which he lives, for which he contends, from which he acts.

To say, therefore, that every one is called to confess the faith, means that no one's standard of life must leave out God; that in this standard of life God must be the center; that this standard of life must cleave unto God, must go out from God and go out after God; and that in this life-view, all the rest must adapt itself to the love, the ardent love for God, Who demands it.

Not every man can make this clear for himself. In every other respect, the great mass of mankind borrows its main ideas and fundamental convictions from the knowledge that has been acquired by former generations.

And so here, too, the Church of Christ with her Creeds of age-long standing comes to the help of the plain man. In the Church every one receives with respect to the knowledge of God the result of the experience of faith of by-gone centuries, and no condition of a people can be healthy, if its thousands and tens of thousands do not have these confessional standards of the Church as starting point of their life-view.

Hence, it is the ruin of the love for God with all the mind when these confessional standards are removed from the life-view, and people are falsely instructed that everything hinges on the mysticism of the love of the heart and on the deeds of the will.

He who drives in this direction, impoverishes the love for God, by excluding from it all the mind, and treads not in the footsteps of Jesus, but goes directly against His great command.

But with this also the love for God with all the mind has not reached its limit.

Apart from Science and Church Creeds, there is still the common daily consciousness—in our daily calling, in our associations, in our conversations, in the plans we make, in the line of behavior which we lay out for ourselves, in the intentions which we foster, in our reading, in our thoughts about persons and affairs, in our convictions, in our imagination, in our appreciation of art and literature, in our passing of judgments, in our review of the past and in our thoughts about the future.

All these together form the many-sided activity of our consciousness; it is the daily sphere of the work of all our mind, the school and workshop of our thinking, investigation and reflection; and all this can go on apart from God, or be animated and dominated at every point by the thought of God and love for His Name.

Therefore, with every one of us, Jesus lays claims upon all this for His God and our God. He wills that in and with all this, the love for God shall not merely lead, direct and rule us, but that, from an inner impulse, all this shall form and clothe itself in the way that we know is well-pleasing unto God. Above all we should do this in this way, not merely from the sense of duty, because we must, even when we will it otherwise. And also that we are not merely to do this in order not to invoke the wrath of God upon us, nor for the sake of meriting heaven thereby. But purely from the love of God, because for God's sake, we can not persuade ourselves to use this costly gift of our consciousness to plan or work out anything that would grieve God.

And though in regard to all this we stand in our actual life still far distant from this high ideal, a child of God, who loves his God, by the reading and re-reading of this first and great commandment, will, by this claim that he shall love God with all the mind, be brought to a halt. He will thereafter in a different way practise control upon the life of his consciousness. And if he succeeds in this way to cause the love for God to enter more fully into everything he studies, plans and meditates upon, yea, in every word he speaks, then the deeper experience of the love of his God will be his daily gain, and the fellowship with the Eternal Being will ever become more blessedly known within his inmost self.

This devotional classic offers 110 meditations on a single thought from Psalm 73: "As for me, it is good to be near to God." The author states, "The fellowship of being near unto God must become reality ... it must permeate and give color to our feeling, our perceptions, our sensations, our thinking, our imagining, our willing, our acting, our speaking. It must not stand as a foreign factor in our life, but it must be the passion that breathes throughout our whole existence."

The meditations reflect the blending of spiritual vigor with doctrinal loyalty so consistently expressed in the life of Abraham Kuyper. These are devotions with true substance, avoiding the extremes about which Kuyper adds a word of caution: "Stress in creedal confession, without drinking from the Living Fountain, runs dry in barren orthodoxy, just as truly as spiritual emotion, without clearness in confessional standards, makes one sink in the bog of sickly mysticism."

Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) was a Dutch political leader and Calvinist theologian. Elected to parliament in 1874, he became Prime Minister in 1901 and served in that capacity until 1905. As a theologian, he revived a systematic, orthodox Calvinism. He founded the Free Reformed Church and the Free University of Amsterdam. His other works include Principles of Sacred Theology, Lectures on Calvinism, and The Work of the Holy Spirit

Further information about Abraham Kuyper's life can be seen in the translator's "Biographical Note"; further information about To Be Near Unto God can be Abraham Kuyper's "Preface" to that book.