Your Mind and the Smell of Sin...

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind." NIV Luke 10:27
The Message says it this way: 'Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and muscle and intelligence...'
I think its great that The Message writer refers to our mind as our muscle...use it...strengthen it...with God's Word...

I love to read books. Most of the books I read are, in book stores, considered 'Spiritual OR Religious', I find them in those sections anyway! My Bible happens to be one of the main books I read. So, books in those sections of the stores are usually related to Biblical topics...I must be careful, sometimes, they sneak 'secular things' in those sections, as well...uninformed book-store workers, I suppose!

Right now (which means it is apt to change in the next couple of days) I'm reading parts (probably will wind up reading all) of 'Loving God with All Your Mind' by Elizabeth George...because I'm giving a talk on that subject soon...although, I'm not really using anything from her book...it's just good to hear what she has to say....she did a great job with 'A Woman After God's Own Heart'...

On the 'book' area of my 'study' area, (which, because of the snow, has become my kitchen table) there is a small book that looks very ominous...it's called 'The Smell of Sin and the Fresh Air of Grace"..by a guy named Dan Everts. It is a great little book, about how seriously God takes our sin...and how His grace is available..the surprising thing in that book is how graphic he is when he talks about sin. (it's a rough 'R') Which, if we read the way Jesus talked about sin in the gospels, there was quite a bit of 'bloody' examples used there--gouging out of eyes, and cutting off of limbs... Enough about that, I don't do bodily fluids well, and I'm making myself sick! The point of the book is that God takes sin VERY seriously...and His Grace is available to all!

I wrote all that to say this: I love to read & study and think...I'm not really a naturally 'deep' thinker, so I may have to read difficult, or hard to grasp points over and over to get what the author is meaning...however;
God's Word, HIS Bible...is deep, but because His Spirit lives within me, I can 'get' what He has for me today in those pages! What a great God we serve: To have our portion ready each day when we pick up and study HIS word!!!
The bread of life...Again, I tell you: Go, get some bread!