Body, Soul, Spirit

You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, and your whole mind, and your whole strength...and your neighbor as yourself.

Yesterday I wrote about 'detoxing' the poisons from our souls and spirits, as well as from our bodies. In Scripture, when the word 'heart' is used, it refers to our spirit, our 'inner man.'  So when both Deuteronomy and Jesus advise us to love God with our whole heart, they are referring to our spirit, our source of life. 

The mind (in Greek--psyche) refers to our mind and emotions -- the psychological part of our being.  And "strength" refers to our physical component.  So Jesus is telling us to love God Spirit, Soul, Body---with our entire selves.  If we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, our 'self' must be cleansed first by the love of God, by God's own love flowing through it.  Until we love ourselves as God loves us, until we see ourselves as God sees us, the Spirit cannot flow through us to our neighbor; it will be blocked in whatever areas we hate ourselves.

Because we are not in touch with our 'inner man,' and because we do not read Scripture so as to know the mind of God, we do not really know how God regards us.  The "Tree of Knowledge" still tends to dominate our thinking, even in regard to who we are.  "Knowledge" refers to the psychological realm--that is, the knowledge we glean through the mind.  It does not see or know the same way the spirit sees and knows -- and it cannot penetrate the 'inner man.'  It tends to make what is on the surface of things "the truth," the essence, without penetrating any further.

Jesus kept saying, "Let him who has ears to hear, hear."  I will extrapolate his saying to this also:  "Let him who has eyes to see, see."  Obviously, he was not referring here to bodily ears and hearing, for all in the crowd could hear the words he spoke.  When he opened the eyes of the blind and the ears of the deaf, these were signs of what was happening to others who had working eyes and ears on the physical level -- their spiritual eyes and ears were being opened also to see and hear "The Son of God" speaking and acting in their midst.  This is why we must be born again, not of flesh, but of spirit.  Otherwise, we are limited to the Tree of Knowledge, which cannot grasp things of the spirit.

Do we really want to see ourselves as God sees us -- our 'inner man'--- or are we so afraid of that revelation that we really don't want to see?  Can we allow God to show us ourselves as He sees us?

Tomorrow, I will tell about a vision given to me many, many years ago, a vision I have not shared with many people.  It is too long to begin now, and I would prefer to end here with the question above.  It is a question of trust, for if we do not know God enough to trust Him, we have already answered the question.