Extracts from the John Piper sermon which can be found here:
So I take loving God in the Great Commandment to mean most essentially treasuring God—valuing him, cherishing him, admiring him, desiring him. Therefore, loving him with all our mind means that our mind—our thinking—is not what does the loving, but what fuels the loving. Loving God with the mind means our mind does all it can to awaken and express our treasuring God above all things.
If we equate loving God with thinking rightly about God, we jeopardize the very reality of love. If you say that fire and fuel are the same, you may not order the wood. Then the fire goes out. The fire is not the wood. But for the sake of the fire, you exert yourself to provide the wood. And for the sake of love, you exert your mind and provide knowledge.
We cannot love God without knowing God; and the way we know God is by the Spirit-enabled use of our minds. So to “love God with all your mind” means engaging all your powers of thought to know God as fully as possible in order to treasure him for all he is worth.
Favourite Quote: "when our thinking begins to focus on this event, something strange happens. The light of God’s glory that we meet at the cross is so strong and so bright as to make all self-exalting thinking look foolish."
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I hope and pray that the day will come when my heart and mind are so engaged with loving and glorifying God that I may write the way Piper does. I may not be entirely in agreement with his verbosity or his style but there is no question that the love of God spills out of every sentence.
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