Matthew 22:37-39
Love Your Neighbor as You Love Yourself
37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’
Faith and reason meet together in our minds, our hearts, and our souls...If we only had reason, with no hope or love, there would be little faith...We use our minds to reason that there is a God...Our souls give us the spiritual and give us hope...In our hearts is where love helps us seek and find our Father...And faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see...And hope is the anchor to our soul...
Mathematician Blaise Pascal said, “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of... We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart."...And he also said this about reason and reasoning, “We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.”...And he added this about reason, “The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it.”...
St. Thomas Aquinas believed that reason and faith were two different ways of knowing..."Reason" covers what we can know by experience and logic alone...From reason, we can know that there is a God and that there is only One God; these truths about God are accessible to anyone by experience and logic alone, apart from any special revelation from God...
Jesus said: "Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind."...So Jesus is telling us to love God with our minds, He is telling us that we can use our minds to reason and believe in both God and Himself...Because God is Truth and is Word is Truth, we can reasonable believe in Him and His Son...And He tells us to love God with all our hearts...We are to use love and our hearts as a way to find and believe in Him...Love knows no boundary, love is always trusting, and love endures...Love is the greatest of all virtues and LOVE never fails and will stand when all else has failed...And so we know that God is LOVE, and so we use love to seek and believe in Him...And we use our soul, because the soul makes us a spiritual man, and we know that God is Spirit...There is hope in the soul, as hope anchors our soul and give us a confidence in what we hope for assurances for what we cannot see and reason...