And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ – Mark 12:30 (ESV)

The love Jesus demands that we exercise toward God, as He cites Deuteronomy 6, springs from the whole person–heart (which, as you know, signals not mere emotion but the entire personality) and soul and mind and strength. That mind is explicitly mentioned is of no small importance. We often think of loving God with our “heart” in the modern sense, that is, with our emotions; we merely serve God with our minds. This text suggests our understanding is distorted. We are to love God with our minds, as well as with our heart and soul and strength. These are not mutually exclusive categories, and I need not probe them here. My point is that at least some of the tension you feel may be because you think of devotion toward God in categories that are too narrow. Unless you feel on a “high,” you wonder if your love has slipped. – Carson & Woodbridge, Letters Along the Way, 168.