Rabbi Schneider - Reflected in How We Treat Others
One of the most well-known passages of scripture in the Brit Hadasha, in the New Testament, Yeshua is speaking here Luke 10:27 and he answered, "You shall 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 your neighbor as yourself".
Did you ever actually think about the different components of that: loving God with all our heart, strengths and mind, and our neighbor as ourself? Let's think about it for a second.
First of all loving God with all our heart. We want to be watching our heart. It's the thing in our heart expressing the love of God, it's the thing in our heart expressing the love of God. Jesus said, "How can you love God when you hate your brother"? So we want to make sure that our heart is radiating the love of God, and this love of God should come out in the way that we treat other people. We treat other people right, because we love God, we do it for the Lord.
And then he says, "And with all your soul". This is all your inward being. David said, "Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, my soul, my inner being, let it all be alive unto Hashem, unto the love of God".
With all your strength and with all your mind. Let me ask you a question: Jesus commands us to love the Lord with all our mind. You know what this means? It means that we should be regulating our thoughts, so that we're aware of our thoughts, and the thoughts that are running through our mind, and break them when they're not in alignment with the love of God. We're all prone to our minds are wandering, the enemy's coming at us, we're being distracted, we're being stressed, but we need to recognize that loving God involves taking responsibility for the thoughts in our mind.
And so we need to continue throughout the day be bringing our mind, our thoughts back into alignment with thoughts that radiate the fact that we love God. And of course, all this is connected, Yeshua said, to loving our neighbor as ourself.