Not with your mind—but in your heart

Ever notice how the Word of God properly addresses some things to “your mind” and some things to “your heart”?

“Lean on, trust in, and be confident in the Lord with all your heart -and mind- and do not rely on your own insight or understanding.”

In Proverbs 3:5, the wise sage mentions both our heart and our mind. From our hearts come “insight” from our minds “understanding”…

Something tells me there is a nuance, an important difference.

Can a quieted heart affect one’s mind? Can hiding God’s word in one’s heart keep one’s mind from agitation?

 

I am coming to believe that the mind is what we use to interpret circumstances, to interface with the material realm and render judgments as to whether we should react to external stimuli in a peaceful, calm manner, or whether agitation, fear, anxiety should be our response. The mind is designed to be our stimulus/Spirit of the Living One abides.

When the mind gets agitated, we do not see life as it truly is, as One. It is the constant agitation going on in our mind that deludes us into believing that you and I are separate. Our heart ‘knows’ differently.

The question we may well ask is, “If we are to have neither pleasure nor pain in life, are we not likely to become insensitive to the joy of life?”

This doubt arises from a wrong mental assumption, that there is only pleasure and pain and nothing else. Always cutting things up into two classes – everything must be either this or that – is one of the fatal weaknesses of the intellect-in other words, the mind.

Because of this dualistic trap of our intellectual mind’s way of thinking, we find it difficult to understand that it is the rare person who, able to receive good fortune without getting excited, and bad fortune without getting depressed, lives in abiding joy.

That joy, I am convinced, comes from the abiding presence of the Lord Christ, Son of the Living One, whose personal Spirit resides within my heart.

I can reawaken that JOY Presence—in either pleasure, or in physical or emotional/intellectual pain by automatically reciting my own mantram, which is the Jesus prayer—

“Lord Yeshua, Anointed One, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me!”

This, I am learning in a day to day practice…encourages my heart to remain in the Joy of the Lord.

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