Luke 10:25-28
Love God With Your Mind
25 On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
26 “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”
27 He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
28 “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
Jesus saw the gospel as helping us remove the needs and pleasures of the flesh...Some of these are like the need to be applauded...The need to be respected...The need to be seen as wise around others...The need to have things in your life go well and maybe let others know about it...
Jesus, on the other hand, teaches a Great Humility and tells us that in this world life will give us troubles, even if we get the desires and needs we want...So the gospel needs to sink down into our hearts and we need to live by His teachings and love one another and others will then see that we are Christians and followers of His Principles...We can have the best of intentions but fail to live up to them...Temptations can overtake us without us seeing them at first, if we are not on guard...The Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak...
All believers know the struggle...Paul even said this about our struggles with sin...He had discovered this principle of life—that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong...I love God’s law with all my heart...But there is another power within me that is at war with my mind...This power makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me...Oh, what a miserable person I am!...Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death?...Thank God!...The answer is in Jesus Christ our LORD...So you see how it is: In my mind I really want to obey God’s law, but because of my sinful nature I am a slave to sin...
Jesus tried to teach us that our different temptations, our struggles with sin, and these needs and desires of ours are not in sync with the blessings of God, and so in His First Sermon, the Sermon on the Mount He tells us about those who are blessed...But growing up on earth and being flesh and carnal in our nature, we live in this carnal world of our personal needs and desires and temptations...We must listen to the gospel and the Spirit and let these desires go...It doesn't seem that Jesus had many personal wants and needs and desires...When He was tempted n the wilderness by the evil one, He stood by and quoted God's Word...By listening to Jesus and reading about Him we see that we are not humble like He is, we see that His need for desires and pleasures are not like ours...Jesus' personal needs were not important when it came to God and a neighbor in need...He depended on God, and worked everyday teaching about God and to help others...And thus He tells us that to love God and love neighbor are the Greatest Commandments...