Salvation is a total personal experience--you cannot leave anything out of it--and that includes intellect.
Salvation is a total personal experience you cannot leave anything out of it--and that includes intellect.
Shadow we are to love God with our minds. But the blind natural eyes do not see it. Only those that have spiritual eyes can see the gospel..the intellectual understand comes later not first.It is a result of the New Birth not it's cause!
1 Corinthians 1:18 For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.
Remember what Paul said in Romans
8:7 Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.
The unregenerate mind does not seek God ,it does not want God. It is deaf to the gospel message.consider this
2 Corinthians 4 3 But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost:
4 In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.
5 For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus' sake.
And this
Ephesians 2
2 Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience:
3 Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.
4 But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us,
Ephesians 4
16 From whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love.
17 This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind,
> 18 Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart:
The mind can not comprehend the things of God Shadow..God has to make what is dead in you alive before you can see it..The blind see and the dead live because of His Grace not their intellect, You must be a new man ..born again spiritually to hear and understand the gospel
Ephesians 4 22 That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts;
23 And be renewed in the spirit of your mind;
24 And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.
The mind that sees spiritual things comes from God Shadow,you have it backwards
2 Timothy 1 . 7 For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.
Of course there is such a verse. Such a conversion requires a prior act of God:
Jeremiah 24:7 And I will give them a heart to know Me, that I am the LORD; and they shall be My people, and I will be their God; for they shall return unto Me with their whole heart.