Exodus 12:9 Do not eat the meat raw or boiled in water, but roast it over a fire—with the head, legs and internal organs.
The head symbolizes the throughs, the legs symbolizes the actions, the internal organs symbolizes the heart. In our faith life, we learn God’s words and understand God’s love and practice this love. But the problem is that sometimes we only receive God’s words with our head and reason, we could not understand the words with our heart, we do not know God’s love deeply and have no response to God’s love, so we also do not have actions to practice our faith.
How to change this kind of situation? We need to pray for our heart, to understand God’s words and God’s love well. We need to learn more of God’s words, because we have many of our own wrong thoughts and secular values from the world, and also there are a lot of lies and temptation from the work of the devil. We need to study the truth and let truth guide our thoughts, emotions and behaviors.
But this is not all. Sometimes we need to practice the words first so we can understand the words. It’s easy for us to learn things through our reason and scientific method. But the world of faith is not like this, it is beyond the reason, we need to have faith first. For the truth, we could not understand a lot of teaching fully. But we can not say because I don’t understand so I can not do it. We need to build our faith first, we need to pray to God, Lord, help me to understand your words, but even I didn’t understand it yet, help me to have faith in You, help me to obey to your words, live my life according to your will and your plan, help me trust in Your promise and Your faithfulness, help me to practice the truth in my life. Through this kind of faith and obedience, the Holy Spirit will help us enter the truth and get freedom from all wrong thoughts and life.
When Jesus asked Peter to “put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch.”(Luke 5:4) Peter said they have worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything. Peter was a professional fisherman, he knew the work well. But Jesus actually was the son of a carpenter. Now Peter explained their situation, it is like an excuse and he would refuse the Lord. But this was not how the story ended. Peter continued to say, “But because you say so, I will let down the nets.” Probably Peter still had doubt and an unwilling heart, and did not understand why Jesus asked to do this, but he obeyed the Lord and finally he caught a large number of fish and he realized his sins of disbelief.
Love is similar. Many times we need to love with actions first. In the world, people love according to their feelings and emotions. No feeling, no love. But Jesus gave us the commandment of love. It is love, based on freedom. But at the same time, it is a commandment. It is not an option, but a must. Jesus even taught us to love and pray for the enemy. How can we live this kind of life? We need to understand God’s love to us first, we are His enemy, but He still loves us and the Lord even died for us on the cross. And we also need the help and power of the Holy Spirit, we need to receive God’s unconditional love so we can give this love to others. This is the common order. But sometimes we need to make efforts to love first, even if we did not understand this kind of world yet. But when we practice this kind of faith and love, we can understand, our faith and love will grow.
