Loving God with all your mind - Freedom from Fear

For the second in our series of blog posts leading up to the SCM annual conference 'With All Your Mind', Student Outreach Worker and President of Bristol Christian Connexion Jessica Cheetham reflects on the role of trust in our relationship with God:

Loving God with all your mind is to act subversively.

It requires a bold claim of trust, embracing a relationship where we don’t need to be afraid, timid or anything other than ourselves.

When we enter into any relationship which is based on fear, we don’t need our minds - in fact we are required to ignore them, so that we can allow ourselves to be shamed, bullied and punished. When, on the other hand, we enter into a relationship with someone who allows and encourages us to use our minds, we are given permission to question their works and thoughts, to be angry with them, to cry with them and to openly express our hopes, dreams, opinions and doubts. It’s a relationship that honours us as thinking creatures and encompasses the mysteries and the complexities of our intellect, it’s a relationship that lets us ask “why?”. Our God is a God who relishes questioning obedience, who delights in “why questions”. We are not called to unthinking abasement, to a life ruled by guilt and the suppression of our faculties. Oppression of thought is an action designed to squash the very essence of life, it is the act of an abuser who wants their will to be followed without thought, because thought might reveal it for what it really is; selfish, harmful, unkind, spiritually fatal. God enters into a relationship of trust with us, allowing us to pursue dialogue because His Will is always generous, compassionate, gentle and life-giving. His actions will always bear the closest of inspections. We are called to obey, but called to obey a command that we fully understand, that we respect, made by Him whose motivations and spirit we have seen to be pure and good. By calling us to love with all our minds, God signposts what relationship with Him will look like; full of freedom and liberation.

Throughout Scripture, we see the virtue of wisdom praised; “to me belong good advice and prudence, I am perception: power is mine… I walk in the way of uprightness in the path of justice” (Proverbs 8:14, 20). In a similar vein, John Wesley, the founding father of Methodism, reminds us that “Neither the learned nor the unlearned are saved from the trouble of thinking. All are to think. This is the way to understand the things of God…” just as Anselm reminds us of “faith seeking understanding”. Knowledge of God necessitates our pursuance of that knowledge for ourselves and He tells us “And now, my children, listen to me. Happy are those who keep my ways. Listen to instruction and become wise, do not reject it” (Proverbs 8:32-33). At the beginning of Luke’s Gospel, the Gospel writer tells us that God sent John the Baptist to lead the “disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” Indeed, many denominations publicly recognise the role of reason in growing in faith and we must seek to embrace this wholeheartedly; it is a vital part of our created nature in Christ.

When God asks us to love Him with all our minds, He is giving us permission to strip away damaging models of deity; those that pollute our image of Him with the idea that we must, weak and tearful, acquiesce without plea to His every request in fear of retribution. He reminds us that “God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians 5:9). As Shelia Linn writes, He protects our “spiritual freedom” to choose. He, in His unending mercy and grace, opens wide His love to include a conversation, an eager questioning and a celebration of the virtue of wisdom. For me, I came to really know this truth when I realised that God was not constantly seeking to punish me for my sin, actual and imagined. God wasn’t out to get me, neither He nor I required my fear to facilitate obedience. God wanted me to understand Him, to change and do good out of love, not fear. To embrace God’s gift of love in the mind, the Church must refuse to sell His people short with the distorted image of a God who doesn’t value our intellectual capability and our ability to evaluate His Word. We must, collectively, commit to the challenges and joys of such a relationship and answer this call to love Him more ardently and with still greater fervour.

You can book your place for 'With All Your Mind' here.