Loving God with Our Minds

God made our minds to love Him. We do this by first coming to the cross of Christ for salvation, where, as the hymn says, "sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains." We love God with our minds by being renewed through His Word and thinking about excellent, lovely, wholesome things. Did you know that when you study birds (ornithology), bugs (entomology), words (etymology), the human body (anatomy), and just about any "-ology" you can think of, you are loving Him? "The works of the Lord are great, studied by all who have pleasure in them," wrote the psalmist. We love God with our mind when we admire smoothness, strangeness, structure, inticacy, fragrance, complexion, motion. "Glory be to God for dappled things," exclaimed the poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. - Suzanne U. Rhodes, The Roar on the Other Side