As I thought over the past few days about the significance of Christ’s death and resurrection, I was tempted to stop several times because it’s just too much. It’s too much to think about how marvelous God must be to have a perfect, sovereign plan. It’s too much to figure out how many ways God set up history to reveal Christ’s glorious moment on the cross. It’s too much to understand the agony and suffering and war that must have waged in the very flesh of Christ during the final hours. It’s too much to grasp the encompassing all of Christ’s payment. It’s too much to believe that I can stand approved and righteous in front of a holy God because of Christ’s completed work and victory over the grave.

It’s too much.

I think so often we give up when it comes to understanding the Lord. We say things like, “Well, we’ll never understand anyway” or “Who are we to understand?” Sometimes it might be genuine awe of God’s greatness and sometimes it might just be laziness. What I’m realizing this week, through amazing conversations with friends and words in books and time spent with my Savior, is God’s intentionality in giving us a mind to understand. We cannot love a God we do not know. So, God gives us the ability, through our mind to become alive in our love for Him.

Regarding the command to love the Lord with all our mind, Piper says in his book Think, “loving him with all our mind means that our thinking is wholly engaged to do all it can to awaken and express this heartfelt fullness of treasuring God above all things.”

When we get lazy or distracted or discouraged, our thinking fails to engage fully, express deeply, and (most importantly) treasure God supremely. The strange thing is, the so-called shortcut is only hurting ourselves. When we choose to NOT treasure God supremely, we cannot experience the joy of all joys that flows out from this treasure!

I’m reading and processing and reading and processing. Is anyone else reading (or has read) the book Think by Piper? What are your thoughts? Here are some other things that I’ve been browsing that you might find interesting:

The Overflow of Easter: A whole theology of resurrection in one chapter

I’m kind of obsessed with this website: ChristianityExplored and not just because the people talk in English accents. I love that they answer hard questions and share personal stories about the power of God in their lives. If you need a little inspiration, check it out!

This quote is still so relevant today even though it was written in 1908 by G.K. Chesterton. This is pretty powerful stuff.

“What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert–himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt – the Divine Reason. . . . The new skeptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. . . . There is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it’s practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. . . . The old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which makes him stop working altogether. . . . We are on the road to producing a race of man too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.”

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy [Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1957], pp. 31-32

let LOVE fly like cRaZy
with all your HEART, SOUL, MIND, and STRENGTH
toward the Savior