There is a version of Christianity that is entirely feelings-based. It runs on the warmth of Sunday mornings, the emotion of a well-sung worship song, the comfort of familiar sermons and John 3:16.
And don’t get me wrong, it is sincere and often genuinely devoted.
But it is, in a very important sense, incomplete.
Because God has an ask of you. He wants not just your heart, your devotion, your attendance or your giving or your service. He asks for your mind, and He has never been quiet about it.
This is Part Two of a series on faith and intellectual life that has been sitting in my drafts. Part One asked whether you can be an intellectual and a Christian, and the answer was yes, as history, science, and philosophy all bear out.
But that was the defensive question, addressed to the sceptic, the critic, and the person who assumes faith is what serious thinkers eventually abandon.
This part is addressed to you, the believer. The one who loves God and means it, who prays and worships and would never dream of walking away, and yet who has quietly, comfortably, perhaps without even realising it, left the mind almost entirely out of the relationship.
That is the problem this post is here to name. And more than name, to challenge.
Let’s begin with the commandment you probably skipped
When a lawyer came to Jesus intending to test Him, he asked which commandment was the greatest. It was a reasonable trap because there were 613 commandments in the Jewish legal tradition, and whatever Jesus chose, someone could object. But Jesus did not hesitate:
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” (Matthew 22:37)
Heart, Soul and Mind.
We have built an entire culture of Christian devotion around the heart and the soul. We sing about it, preach about it, and measure spiritual experience almost entirely in its terms. How did the sermon make you feel? Did worship move you? Was your heart in it? These are not bad questions, but they are incomplete ones, because the commandment does not stop at the heart or soul.
The mind is right there, in the words of Jesus Himself, carrying the same weight as the heart and the soul. All your mind – all of it, offered to God as an act of love.
And this requires our obedience. It is not a personality preference for intellectually inclined Christians or philosophers, it is the Greatest Commandment.
Paul presses the same point from a different angle: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12:2)
The word Paul uses for transformed is the Greek metamorphoo, the same word used in Matthew 17 for the transfiguration of Jesus on the mountain, when His appearance changed so completely that His face shone like the sun and His clothes became white as light. Paul is not describing something minor but a renovation so thorough it affects the very form of a thing, and the thing being renovated is your mind.
I have often found that this scripture does not receive the attention it deserves. It is quoted, certainly, but rarely examined with the seriousness it demands, and the result is that a great many Christians are genuinely found wanting in this area. The renewed mind is treated as an optional extra, a nice idea for the more academic among us, rather than the non-negotiable that Paul clearly intends it to be. And unfortunately, the gap this creates is not a small one.
Because the mind, according to Paul, is the instrument through which the believer discerns the will of God. Not feels it or guesses at it but discerns it, tests it, recognises it with clarity and conviction. That kind of discernment does not come from a mind that has been left unrenewed and unengaged. It comes from a mind that has been deliberately, consistently shaped by the truth of God over time.
A Christian who never renews their mind is not safe because they are simply being formed by something or everything other than God, by the friends they keep, the type of work they do, their social media feed and whatever values their culture propagates. Formation is always happening and the only question is whether the Potter is the one moulding you.
What God Actually Requires
Before we go further, let us be precise about what is being asked, because the misunderstanding is common and it keeps many Christians from ever attempting to take this seriously.
Loving God with your mind does not require a seminary degree or a particular level of education or a natural gift for abstract thinking. It does not mean that intellectual complexity is the measure of spiritual depth, or that the simple, trusting faith of a child is somehow deficient. Jesus celebrated that kind of faith and said plainly that the kingdom belongs to those who receive it like children (Mark 10:15).
What God requires is that you engage with Him, His Spirit and His Word. He requires that you bring your whole self to the relationship, including the part of you that thinks, questions, reasons, doubts and seeks to understand. He requires that you know Him and that you know the reason for the hope that you carry, not just that you carry it.
Peter makes this requirement explicit and personal: “Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and respect.” (1 Peter 3:15)
Read that again. Always be prepared. Not sometimes, not when it is convenient, not only if you happen to be theologically gifted.
But always. Peter was writing to ordinary believers scattered across Asia Minor, living under pressure, surrounded by people who did not share their faith. And his expectation of them was not that they would have every answer memorised. His expectation was that they would have thought about it, that they would know what they believe and why they believe it, and that they would be ready to say so when the moment came.
This is God’s ask and it is not unreasonable. It is serious, and it requires something of you – that you love and serve God with your mind, too.
Jeremiah records God’s own desire with remarkable directness: “Let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me.” (Jeremiah 9:24). The type of knowing God desires is not mystical or abstract but rather the fruit of sustained attention, honest inquiry, and the deliberate effort to engage with who He is and what He has revealed.
Hosea delivers what may be the most sobering diagnosis in the entire Old Testament: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” (Hosea 4:6). What Israel lacked was knowledge of God, genuine, substantive, thought-through knowledge, and the consequences were devastating.
The Work of the Holy Spirit and the Work of the Believer
Here is where it is important to hold two things together, because some Christians, hearing a call to intellectual engagement, will conclude that this is all about human effort and miss the point entirely.
The renewed mind is not a project you complete on your own. It is the work of the Holy Spirit in you, and it has been from the beginning.
Jesus promised His disciples that when the Spirit of truth came, He would guide them into all truth (John 16:13). Paul told the Corinthians that the natural person cannot receive the things of the Spirit of God because they are spiritually discerned, but that the person with the Spirit can discern all things (1 Corinthians 2:14-15). The capacity to understand the things of God, to have your mind opened to Scripture, to see what is true and recognise what is false, is a gift. It is the Spirit’s work in you.
But the Spirit works through means. He opens the mind of the believer who opens the Word. He illuminates the truth to the person who is actually engaging with it. He sharpens the discernment of the Christian who is deliberately, habitually bringing their thinking into contact with Scripture. The Holy Spirit is not a replacement for your engagement. He is the power behind it, and He works most freely in the life of a believer who has decided to cooperate.
Think of it this way. A farmer does not make the rain fall or the seed germinate. Those are not in his power. But he prepares the ground, plants the seed, removes the weeds, and tends the crop. The life in the seed is not his doing. The fruit is the result of both the life he did not produce and the labour he chose not to neglect.
So it is with the renewed mind. The transformation is God’s work. The renewal of the mind is what the Holy Spirit does in us. But we are called to be active participants in that process, not passive observers waiting for a feeling. We open the Word, pray for understanding, read carefully, think honestly, sit with hard questions and we expose our assumptions to Scripture rather than using Scripture to confirm our assumptions. And the Spirit works through all of it to produce something in us that we could not have produced on our own.
Proverbs captures this partnership precisely: “An intelligent heart acquires knowledge, and the ear of the wise seeks knowledge.” (Proverbs 18:15) The wise person seeks. They are not merely receptive. They are active, deliberate, and oriented toward understanding. And it is in that seeking that wisdom is found.
The Danger of Intellectual Laziness
There is a particular kind of Christian who has been a believer for twenty years and still cannot answer a serious question about their faith without deflecting. Ask them why they believe the resurrection actually happened and they will say something like, “I just know it in my heart.” Ask them how they would respond to someone who doubts the reliability of Scripture and they will change the subject, or feel quietly threatened, or offer something so thin it would not persuade anyone.
This is gross negligence dressed in the clothes of piety.
Paul wrote to the Ephesians about the danger of remaining spiritual children, “tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.” (Ephesians 4:14) The picture he paints is not of someone who has been attacked by an obvious enemy. It is of someone who has been slowly, subtly moved off course by ideas they were never equipped to evaluate.
Intellectual laziness presents itself as comfort, as simplicity, as the humble refusal to overcomplicate things. And then one day a hard question arrives, or a persuasive voice, or a season of suffering that does not make sense, and there is nothing sturdy enough to hold the weight.
A faith that has never been examined is a faith that cannot be defended and often cannot survive and it is not because God is not real or faithful, but because the believer never built anything solid enough to stand on.
The writer of Hebrews was not gentle about this: “By this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.” (Hebrews 5:12-14)
Discernment is not mere feelings or instincts but a capacity that is trained, developed, and sharpened through repeated, deliberate engagement with truth. You cannot train something you never exercise and you cannot exercise something you have decided is not your responsibility.
What the Work Actually Looks Like
This is where good intentions usually stall. The conviction is real but the path forward is unclear, and without clarity, nothing changes. So let us be specific
1. Read your Bible like it is asking something of you. Not just devotional snippets or videos on Instagram as you doomscroll that confirm what you already feel. Whole books, read from beginning to end, with the kind of attention you would bring to any document that actually matters to you. Ask real questions as you read: what was the writer trying to communicate? What was happening in the world of the original audience? What does this passage mean in its context, and what does that meaning require of me now?
The psalmist said, “Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day.” (Psalm 119:97) The Hebrew word for meditation carries the idea of turning something over and over, examining it from every angle, pressing it until it yields what it holds. That is the posture – not passive reading but active, hungry, expectant engagement with a text that has something to say.
2. Read theology. You do not have to start with the difficult texts. Start with C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, which has brought more thinking people into or back to faith than almost any book of the last century. Or Tim Keller’s The Reason for God. Or the Westminster Shorter Catechism, which has been forming the minds of ordinary believers for four centuries. The point is not which book but that you pick something beyond your Bible and read it carefully, because theology gives you both the language and structure for what you believe, and without that structure, your faith has no scaffolding to stand on when the pressure comes.
3. Sit with hard questions. Job sat with the hardest question a human being can face, the apparent silence and injustice of God in the middle of real and unbearable suffering, and he did not pretend it was simple. He wrestled, he argued, and he demanded an answer from God directly and God did not rebuke him for it. God rebuked the friends who offered tidy, theologically convenient answers that were ultimately dishonest. “You have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.” (Job 42:7) If you have questions you are afraid to ask, bring them to God. Intellectual honesty before Him is not unbelief. Sometimes it is the most authentic form of faith available to you in that moment.
4. Learn what you believe and why you believe it. Not because you need to win arguments, but because Peter’s instruction was clear: be ready to give a reason, and that readiness is built through deliberate effort over time. Start with the questions we raised in Part One, including the historical evidence for the resurrection, the case for a first cause, and objective morality, and add the arguments for the reliability of Scripture. Then follow whichever one stirs you most into deeper reading. Not so that you can be combative, but so that when someone you love is genuinely struggling, you have something real to offer them beyond an invitation to simply feel what you feel.
If you have questions along the way, feel free to send me a message. I will graciously help you research and guide you to resources that can help.
5. Engage the world around you with discernment rather than blind absorption. Daniel was taken to Babylon at a young age, immersed in its language, its literature, and its intellectual tradition. He engaged with it fully and thoughtfully, and he did so without being absorbed by it. “Daniel resolved that he would not defile himself.” (Daniel 1:8) That resolve was not on a whim but it was the fruit of a mind that knew what it believed and why it mattered.
The world you live in is full of ideas, many of them compelling, many of them wrong, and some of them subtly corrosive to faith. You cannot evaluate what you have never examined, and you cannot examine what you have decided not to think about.
The Mind Surrendered Is Not a Diminished Mind
There is a fear, rarely spoken but widely felt, that submitting your mind to God means becoming intellectually smaller. That faith is a ceiling, that the most rigorous thing a mind can do is discard God, and that accepting Him requires turning something important off and following blindly.
Part One walked through the evidence against that fear, from Augustine and Aquinas to Pascal and the scientists who saw studying creation as a way of knowing the Creator. Here I want to add only what that survey could not show, which is that these were not people who believed despite their intellect but through it. Augustine’s Confessions is one of the most relentless works of self-examination ever written, and it is addressed to God on every page. Pascal carried his mathematical precision with him to the altar, and the Pensées is what came of it. In both cases, the surrender of the mind produced not diminishment but clarity.
Isaiah records God’s own invitation: “Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD.” (Isaiah 1:18) The God of the universe is not asking you to leave your mind at the door but to bring it to Him, to reason with Him, and to engage with who He is and what He has said with the full force of the mind He designed and gave you.
And the Holy Spirit, who dwells in every believer, is not indifferent to this. He is the Spirit of truth (John 14:17), and He was given, in part, so that your mind would not be left to navigate truth alone. You are not doing this work alone. The same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, and He is more invested in the renewal of your mind than you are.
Part One closed with C.S. Lewis’s line about seeing everything else by the light of Christianity, the way we see everything by the sun. That is what loving God with your mind eventually produces, not a narrowing of vision but a clarification of it, a way of seeing everything else more truly because the light is finally coming from the right source.
A Provocation You Cannot Ignore
You do not have to become a theologian. You do not have to master every argument or resolve every tension before you take a single step, because the call is not to perfection but to begin, and to mean it.
But you cannot keep drifting. The ideas competing for your mind, and for the minds of the people around you, are growing bolder and more blasphemous by the day. They are deliberate and confident, and they are counting on the fact that most Christians have never thought carefully enough about what they believe to push back with anything more than discomfort.
So ask yourself honestly: can you truly say you believe if you do not know what you believe? If a single conversation could one day dismantle the fragile walls of your conviction, it might reveal that your faith has been thinner than you thought. That is why the call to love God with your mind is not secondary but a safeguard for your personal walk and relationship with Him.
God has an ask of you, and it is the same ask He has always had. Love Him with all your mind. Know the reason for the hope that is in you. Let the Holy Spirit do the work of renewal that only He can do, and cooperate with that work with everything you have.
The Great Commandment has not changed. And the mind it asks you to bring, your whole mind, with all its questions and complications and God-given capacity for serious thought, is not a problem to be managed. It is an offering He has been waiting for.
Selah, and I pray I see you on the other side of full renewal.
And for those who are still finding their footing, consider what others who have thought carefully have found.
“I am persuaded that men think there is no God because they wish there were none. They find it hard to believe in God, and to go on in sin, so they try to get an easy conscience by denying his existence.” – Charles Spurgeon
“Christians believe in the virgin birth of Jesus. Materialists believe in the virgin birth of the cosmos. Choose your miracle.” – Glen Scrivener
“I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured that if it weren’t true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world-and they couldn’t keep a lie for three weeks. You’re telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40 years? Absolutely impossible.” – Charles Colson
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