I Hate Valentine’s Day
Love & War part 1: He Said
by John Eldredge

“My soul finds rest in God alone…”
(Psalm 62:1)

This week’s devotional is from Love & War by John and Stasi Eldredge.

I hate Valentine’s Day. There, I said it.

Most of the guys reading this just thought, “Yes! I can’t believe he said that.”

Most of the women just thought, “What a jerk! I can’t believe he said that.”

But it’s true. I hate Valentine’s Day. Stasi loves it; it’s one of her favorite holidays. (God, what are you thinking?!) I hate being told, “Today, you will be romantic.. Today, you will be amazing. Today, you will ‘Get It All Right.’ And tonight, you will arrange for one of the most romantic evenings you two will have this year. Tonight, sex will be on a level with the Hallelujah chorus. Hollywood will have wished they had filmed this day.

Who wants to live under that kind of pressure?

The rule of human nature seems to be this: The harder you push, the more the heart flees. The more we demand the heart show up, the more it disappears. We may try to Get It All Right, out of fear or guilt (like most guys on Valentine’s Day), or maybe even out of a desire to be good. But that is not the same as loving.

So I find myself dreading the approach of Valentine’s Day. Can I pull it off? Will she be happy? And now we’ve got a culture crazed with the upgrade of everything. Dinner and a card used to be a home run. That sounds so blasé these days, like you barely even gave it a thought. Now you have got to make it an all day. We have blown this day way out of proportion. It has taken all the fun out of it.

And the truth is, women feel the pressure, too – the pressure to be beautiful, the pressure to have just the right earrings to go with the right dress, the pressure to have the perfect hair – to achieve “sexy” without tipping over into “skanky.” A woman feels the pressure to make all the right conversation, not to order too much at dinner, and certainly don’t eat it all. And a woman feels the sexual pressure coming – either to offer sex “because it’s Valentine’s Day” or because she wants to win her man.

Real romance doesn’t work like that.

Romance seems to happen not because you have turned your google-eyed attention to romance, but because the two of you are focused on other things – a beautiful fall day leads to a spontaneous walk in the woods.. An evening out “just because” becomes lovely after the two of you stumble on a great little restaurant.

Romance requires free hearts.

Pressure, on the other hand, kills everything it touches.

I don’t think most of us have any idea how much pressure we bring to our marriages.

There is the pressure one of you feels from the other “to be happy.” Usually because somebody’s childhood wasn’t all that happy and they can’t bear the threat of unhappiness in the marriage, or because we deeply believe that If you’re not happy it’s because of me. The message comes across loud and clear: “Do not be unhappy.” The spouse feels the unnamed pressure and comes to resent it.

Christian couples feel the added pressure to have a model marriage, to be a “witness” to our families and neighbors. Therefore nothing can ever be wrong. We’ve got to present a good face to the world. We feel the pressure to pray together, to have family devotions, and to love going to church. We feel the pressure to be “Christ-like” in our marriages – and since none of us are even close to that level of sainthood, we feel a lot of guilt and shame. But we feel compelled to hide all that because, after all, we are Christians.

There is the pressure – and how bizarre is this, really – that someone love you. Of course we want to be loved. Of course it hurts when we feel we are not loved, especially by the closest person in our life. But insisting that someone love you is like telling a fawn you have just seen slip into the woods to “Come Back Out,” or commanding a hummingbird to land on your finger and “Stay There.”

And then there is the Biggest Pressure Of All – the pressure we feel to make each other happy. After all, this marriage is supposed to make me happy. Right?

The human heart has an infinite capacity for happiness and an unending need for love, because it was created for an infinite God who is unending love. The desperate turn is when we bring the aching abyss of our hearts to one another with the hope, the plea, “Make me happy. Fill this ache.” And often out of love we do try to make one another happy, and then wonder why it never lasts.

It can’t be done. You will kill yourself trying.

We are broken people, with a famished craving in our hearts. We are fallen, all of us. It happened so early in our story, back in the Garden of Eden, that most of us don’t even realize it happened. But the effects of the Fall are something we live with every day.

Every woman now has an insatiable need for relationship, one that can never be filled. It is an ache in her soul designed to drive her to God. She aches for intimacy, to be known, loved, and chosen. It also explains her deepest fear – abandonment.

Men face a different sort of emptiness. We are forever frustrated in our ability to conquer life (Genesis 3:17-18). A man aches for affirmation, for validation, to know that he has come through. This also explains his deepest fear – failure.

Now, take these fears, brokenness, and this famished craving, throw them together into the same house and lock the door. What ensues is the pain, disappointment, and confusion most people describe as their marriage. But what did you expect?

Of course you are disappointed; your spouse is disappointed, too. How can we possibly be enough for one another? Two broken cups cannot possibly fill one another. Happiness flows through us like water through a volleyball net.

Your unhappiness – and your spouse’s – means you both have a famished craving that only God can meet.

You have to have some place you can turn. For comfort. For understanding. For the healing of your brokenness. For love. To offer life, you must have life. And you can only get this from God.

Trying to sort your way through marriage without God in your life is like trying to be gracious when you are utterly sleep-deprived. At some point, you lose your ability to be kind; you lose all perspective.

We live in a great love story, set in the midst of war. The great and terrible clash between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of darkness continues. They are fighting for the human heart.

Jesus is the hero of this love story and we are His Beloved. So the greatest gift you can give to your marriage is for you to develop a real relationship with Jesus Christ, where you are finding in God the life and love your soul so desperately needs.

This Week
Ask the Lord to show where you have put pressure on yourself and your spouse to be enough to satisfy the craving in your soul, then ask Him to meet you there so that you can know the rest that is found in Him alone.

Prayer
“Lord, help me to have such a powerful relationship with you that I can give and receive love freely, without the pressure to be or need to demand from others that which only You can provide.”

If you are serious about understanding why you can know the truth but be unable to fully implement it into your life, why you try with all your might to be and do what the bible commands, but still find yourself giving in to old patterns of behavior, then these sessions are a place to begin a journey that will open your eyes to the difficult reaalities of the spiritual war. I encourage you to listen to these 11 sessions, to read the articles you find there and here so you can develop the spiritual strength and maturity to live a life that is compatible with the Lord Jesus Himself. I wish you well on your journey to intimacy with God, the sweetest experience available in this life and the next.

http://brettell.org/webex.htm

Biblical Terminology
The terms Old Man (self) and New Man (self) found in the bible refer to the person we were in our old life without Christ and then our new life after salvation. The terms are not actual as if we were a different person before salvation and another after we trusted in Christ. The terms are personifications that describe our personal characteristics, our beliefs, our ideas, our relational strategies and behaviors before Christ and afterward. When Paul, who alone uses the terms, refers to the old self (Rom 6:6, Eph 4:22) he is thinking about our whole lifestyle before salvation. When he talks about the new self, he is thinking about our different lifestyle after salvation. This article will delve deeper into the old and new selves by discussing the beliefs, ideas and emotions we develop and use in our old life. Notice how the different pieces of the human puzzle are presented here and put together to explain why and how we are the way we are.

Sin Nature
As discussed in the previous articles, Adam’s sin has caused all of us to inherit his selfish nature. This selfish, sinful nature causes us to view our self as the center of the universe and our self-interest as the most important issue in life. We naturally put our self first above God, others and any other concern. As we grow up and build our own ideas about life, self-interest is the overriding concern in all of our beliefs. Our thoughts and feelings are controlled by selfishness and our sin nature causes us develop views that promote self above all other concerns.

Human Needs
God created Adam and Eve and in His creation He designed the human soul. We have all inherited the basic design God created in our original parents. By design, He made us all with human needs that we are compelled to have fulfilled. We experience our needs as desires. All of us hunger and long for what we need and we know that we need because all of us have wants. Our God given human needs drive us to seek others that will love us, accept us, approve of us an include us. The human soul is empty by itself and naturally seeks relationships with others to meet our needs. These God designed needs can be observed in the raw by watching young children relate to parents and peers. All human behavior can be understood and motivation traced back to the drive to meet these basic human needs.

Knowing Nothing
We begin life as babies with no knowledge, understanding, ideas or beliefs. We are born only with some basic instincts that guide us. For example, we are born with the instinct to cry when we feel need and the instinct to nurse on our mother’s breast. Almost immediately though we begin to build our own impressions about self, others and life itself. It is these earliest impressions and ideas that form the core of our own views about our self, others and about how life works. As we grow up, we build all of our beliefs on these core ideas. Additionally, our core beliefs determine how we will interpret all further life experiences. Once our core ideas are in place they control how we view life and everything we experience in life.

Stages of Development
As we progress in years, life comes in stages. It is during these stages of human development that our ideas are constructed. These stages correspond roughly to ages 0-2 years, 2-5 years, 5-12years and 12-18 years old. Each stage brings its own developmental challenges that must be mastered for a child to grow properly into the next stage. For example, the earliest stages are focused on developing the motor skills of walking and using our bodies to negotiate our world. The latter stages focus more on our mental development, relationships and the building of a worldview. The most important development in our growth is the way we learn to relate to others. The methods we learn and develop by relating to our parents are termed our relational strategies.

Life Experiences
Beginning early with the most basic issues of life we build our beliefs out of our human experiences. From the toddler stage through our teen years and beyond we form our ideas about self and others based on how we are treated, loved and nurtured. If our parents love us unconditionally, treat us kindly and discipline us fairly we develop the healthy core idea that we have intrinsic worth and expect that others will also care for us. By contrast, if we are treated harshly, loved only when we behave and disciplined with anger, we conclude that we are worth little and expect others to care only when we produce something they want. We learn how to relate by relating to our primary caregivers, developing our relational strategies based on what works with them to gain their love and approval. Whatever works with mom and dad to make them laugh, smile and praise us, we learn to use over and over. We then store these effective approaches in our inventory of ideas where they become our primary methods of relating to our peers and the opposite sex. Because we know nothing and have nothing to think with, we base all of our ideas on our immediate experiences either good or bad.

Development Summary
We are born with a nature to put self first and driven by the need for love, approval, acceptance and inclusion with others. We are born knowing nothing and having no frame of reference on which to draw accurate conclusions about how to meet our needs. We grow and develop in stages building our core beliefs first and then constructing more complex ideas upon this foundation. We build our ideas based on our primary relationships and reach our conclusions purely on the basis of how these significant others relate to us. We learn what works to induce others give us what we need and we use these methods over and over. Based purely on our own experiences with our parents and peers we build our own life views about everything in our world. Your personal opinions and views that you hold in your heart today did not form there by accident or happenstance. Your personal viewpoints were formed by choice as you interpreted your life experiences, reached your own conclusions about these experiences, believed these conclusions you reached and then used these personal conclusions as the basis of your relating and behavior in your life.

Conclusion

We believe, think, feel and behave according to the inner program running in our heart. All of the ideas we have believed and used to live our lives form this self-chosen belief system that controls our life. Driven by our needs that feel like desires within us, we pursue relationships with people using the relational strategies we learned from interacting with our parents. Growing up in stages, we built our own ideas based on what seemed to work, seemed to induce others to care and what we hope will work to get love for ourselves in the future. We are, we think, we feel and we behave the way we have chosen using the freedom of soul designed by God. The good news is that we are what we have chosen to be. It is good because if God has enabled us to choose what we will believe and we have chosen what we are, then we can also choose to change what we are. God has made us so that we can choose making us responsible and He made us so that we can change giving us opportunity.

Stay tuned for the next discussions where we will talk about how and why we feel the way we do and what God has provided so that we can think and feel like Jesus.

Old Sin Nature (OSN)
The OSN is the selfish nature or natural tendency of fallen man. In order to understand our fallen nature, we have to revisit the Garden of Eden, look at our original nature, see how Adam corrupted his nature through sin and then passed the corruption down to all of the human race.

Original Nature
God created Adam and Eve perfect, with perfect natures. I believe their original nature caused them to put God first, as the center of their world, loving Him most and serving Him as a natural response. They naturally were in flow with God and His plan with no struggle or anything to struggle against. They lived this way for a time, we are not told how long until there was a change in Eve.

Original Sin
Eve apparently became bored with the garden, with her position in the chain of command and even with her husband. She grew dissatisfied with her place in God’s order and began to spend more and more time with her new friend, the serpent. We know the story of how satan seduced her to believe his lies and how Adam chose his love for her over his love for God. They sinned by eating the fruit and when they sinned they lost everything God had given them. They lost their righteous standing with God and He was forced to condemn them forever. They lost the garden and God was forced to curse them and the earth with thorns and thistles. Finally, they lost their perfect natures and sin corrupted their natures so that their natural tendency was to be selfish, to put self first and to sin as a way of life.

Selfish Self as the Center
After they sinned, the presence of sin itself in their bodies corrupted them. They became selfish, self centered and naturally put themselves first ahead of anyone else. It was every man for himself and everyone else was there to serve their needs, even God. Their nature now was to put their self in God’s place, on the throne of their own hearts. Their sin caused them to naturally follow the same path that Lucifer had taken, to want to be like God, to want to take God’s place. The sin nature, passed down to their children and other generations caused mankind to be totally corrupted as discussed in Gen 6.

Genesis 6:5 The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.

Every motive of the thoughts of man’s heart was only evil all the time. The sin nature caused the hearts of the whole human race to process nothing but sin and evil. This desperate condition was the result of the OSN being inherited by the whole human race.

OSN Inherited from Adam
Adam and Eve’s sin created the OSN that was passed down to their children through the body. The OSN is inherited genetically from father to the child in the mother’s womb.

Romans 5:12 Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned.

The one man is Adam who allowed sin to enter the world of man through his own original sin. The man is the carrier of the OSN which is passed to the fetus in the womb through his sperm. Every baby, male and female inherits the OSN when the male sperm fertilizes the woman’s egg and is born with the OSN fully operational. It was this fact of the male carrying the OSN that necessitated the virgin birth. Through bypassing the male’s role in conception, Jesus was conceived in Mary’s womb and then born without inheriting the OSN from Adam. Since He had no earthly father, Jesus didn’t have an OSN, making Him perfect in His birth. His sinless life made Him the perfect sacrifice for the sins of the world.

OSN Influence
The OSN is corruption that resulted from sin that was allowed to enter into the physical body of the human race and has had an influence on all of us. The OSN causes our thoughts to be corrupted, therefore our emotions to be corrupted and we all build a system of believing, thinking, feeling and acting that is totally disoriented from God’s person and ways. In the next article we will discuss the person the bible calls the Old Man, who is the personification of our old way of life.

In a recent online discussion about Christian spirituality, the discussion turned to the Old Man, a biblical term used by the Apostle Paul to describe our pre-salvation way of life. One of the listeners, Ed, was new to the term and so in a follow up e-mail he asked the following question:

Question
I hope that you brethren can help me with the term “old man”. I don’t think I have ever heard it used with reference to an unbeliever having an old man. From implication of the term itself it seems to imply that there is such a thing as a “new man”. We know that a believer receives his “new man” at rebirth, but we also know that there are myriads of unbelievers that will perish because they never will have a “new man” because they have never exercised saving faith in Jesus Christ. I ask that you help clarify the term “old man” as referenced to an unbeliever.

The following is an answer to Ed’s question written by Dr. Jim Brettell. Dr. Jim’s excellent response is a great place to start our discussion of the Old Man.

Answer

Definition #1: The term OM is a personification. OM is the term used to personify the human soul when it is under the influence of the old-sin-nature.

Definition #2: The term NM is a personification. NM is the term used to personify the human soul when it is under the influence of the Holy Spirit.

Since every human being is under the influence of the old-sin-nature from the moment of physical birth, every human being has an OM from the moment of physical birth.

Since every human being born into this life has a genetically prepared old-sin-nature in every cell of his/her body, and the very fact that God the Father imputes Adam’s original sin to his/her genetically prepared old-sin-nature renders every human being born into this life totally depraved, lost without Christ, in need of spiritual salvation, all characterizing the UNBELIEVER – which he/ she is.

Since the NM concept is not decreed for creation or function in the plan of God UNTIL the Church Age, everything man did in previous dispensations unless temporarily endued with power was default function from his/her old-sin-nature. This included obedience to Inherent Law and Mosaic Law during their respective dispensation. This means that obedience to Inherent Law and Mosaic Law was carried out by the OM (remember definition #1).

The only reason for the NM concept is that during the Church Age God the Father has placed the standard for obedience out of reach of the OM who functions under the influence of the old-sin-nature, and He has given to Christians the proper mechanic (tool) for reaching that standard, namely, Christ-likeness by NM function.

The fact that the OM is not even mentioned in Scripture until referencing the born-again Christian in the Church Age epistles should not lead to the conclusion that an unbeliever does not possess an OM, and it should not lead to the conclusion that the OM was non-existent in the OT or the Gospels. The OM has been present in the life of every human being, except Jesus Christ, since the first procreation outside the Garden of Eden.

Since salvation does not purge the OM from the newly born-again Christian’s life, the OM comes into the Christian way of life with him/her.

In the progression of human history from the time of the Garden of Eden right up to today, the resolution of the angelic conflict in the two prior dispensations of time did not require obedience from any other source than OM function under the influence of the old-sin-nature; therefore, although every human being, believer and unbeliever has an OM under the influence of the old-sin-nature, there is no need to mention the OM in either the OT or the Gospels. It’s not until the resolution of the angelic conflict requires a higher standard that the NM becomes an issue. Hence, we learn of both the NM and the OM.

Again, it’s imperative to our understanding that just because the OM is not mentioned in the OT or Gospels, this does not imply that human beings do not have an OM. In fact, the opposite is true. By physical birth, every human being has an OM, including the unbeliever because he is a human being, BUT no human being has a NM until he/she becomes born-again.

Conclusion: Yes, even the unbeliever has an OM, but it was not worthy of mention or distinction UNTIL the Church Age standard for believer resolution of the angelic conflict required function beyond OM capacity.

As you can see, Dr. Jim gives Ed an excellent and complete answer to his question. In the following articles we will discuss the Old Man beginning with the Old Sin Nature and its resulant way of life the bible calls the Old Man.

Stay tuned for the next article to be posted soon.

Isaiah 28:10 For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little:

Belief Systems

1. The human soul operates using a belief system to determine our views, motives, feelings and behaviors.
a. Definition – assembly of associated ideas & principles joined together to form a system to determine our viewpoints, philosophies, attitudes, feelings & behaviors.
b. God designed the human soul to form and operate using a belief system.
c. Our belief system is formed out of our life experiences by the conclusions we reach & believe based on personal experience.
d. Our belief system is formed from whatever ideas we believe to be true.
e. What we believe controls how we view life experience and the relational strategies we develop to meet our God designed needs.
f. What we believe controls how we feel and behave in our relationships.
g. Old Man (OM) belief systems are built on human viewpoint while New Man (NM) belief systems are built from divine viewpoint.

2. God’s purpose for church age believer is to glorify Him through the New Man belief and behavior system enabled by the ministry of the Holy Spirit.
Glorify: doxazo – to make manifest God’s character and qualities causing praise, honor, respect to be directed toward Him.

a. In the church age (CA), the believer is enabled to form the mind of Christ within his own soul & operate from Christ’s same beliefs, motives, attitudes & behaviors.
b. The mind of Christ built and functioning in the soul of the believer is called the New Man (NM)– Eph 4:24; Col 3:10
c. The mind of Christ is assembled in the heart of the believer by learning and believing accurate categories of bible doctrine – pieces of truth
d. When the New Man (NM) is assembled, the believer’s soul then contains the same beliefs that Jesus used to live His earthly incarnation.
e. The NM is the beliefs, attitudes, viewpoints and behavior system provided to the humanity of Jesus for His earthly life.
f. NM function in/through the believer’s soul produces the character of Christ through the believer’s life bringing awareness of and praise to the essence of God.
g. The Church Age believer glorifies God by building NM beliefs in his soul and using NM behaviors to live his life, thereby exposing the character of Christ to the world.
h. Mechanics: perception & application of categorical bible doctrine

3. The CA believer is commanded to submit to a growth process called transformation.

Romans 12:2 Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is– his good, pleasing and perfect will.

a. The believer is commanded to choose between 2 systems of thinking.
· Conformity to the world – cosmic system of Satan – Old Man (OM)
· Transformed to be like Christ – NM belief & behavior system
b. The progressive present + me means to stop something already in progress, which is described as conforming to the age (aion) – common pattern of the times.
c. The passive voice indicates submission and/or allowing yourself to be influenced by 2 different system’s of thought.
d. Conforming to the world refers to the first belief system built by the unbeliever the bible calls the Old Man (OM).
e. From birth until the new birth, the unbeliever is unable to process spiritual phenomena and therefore unable to understand spiritual truth – only LDE.
f. From birth to the new birth (and beyond), the unbeliever builds a belief system by which he operates out of what he can understand – human logic, worldly philosophy, Satanic philosophy.
g. Notice that the believer is commanded to stop building the OM belief and behavior system as the first order of business in the transformation process.
· Functioning in NM requires more than building NM thinking in the soul
· Operating in NM requires that we stop using OM logic first.
h. Building NM, or being transformed is accomplished by renewing our thoughts.
· Renewing the beliefs by which we evaluate life experience and choose strategies to relate to others.

4. In Eph 4:22-24, Paul describes this same process involving 3 steps.

Ephesians 4:22-24  That ye put off with reference to your former conduct the old man, which is being corrupted according to its deceitful lusts; 23 And be renewed in the spirit of your mind; 24 And that ye put on the new man, the one after God having been created in righteousness and holiness from the truth.

Take off – Renew mind – Put on

a. There is a taking off action – apotithemi AMInf – take off clothing
b. We are instructed to take off the OM belief and behavior system we developed as unbelievers without God’s influence in our lives.
c. The OM’s root motivation is desire and these desires cause a deception in our belief system – build false strategies to meet our needs/desires.
d. Renewing the mind – building the NM belief/behaviors through knowledge of truth
e. There is a putting on action – enduo AMInf – make the NM our operating system
f. NM is according to God – the beliefs and behaviors of Christ – divine viewpoint
g. NM is created to produce righteous and holy living
h. NM is created from truth – built by pieces of truth assembled in the soul.

5. Building the OM Belief and Behavior system.

a. Fall of Adam has caused mankind to be born spiritually dead & separated from God – Rom 5:12; Eph 2:1
b. All mankind is born without a relationship with God, without access to God’s truth.
c. All mankind is born without understanding and ideas to live in the devil’s world.
d. Man’s dilemma at birth: spiritually dead, eternally condemned, w/out access to truth, w/out knowledge, with compelling needs, sin nature, sinful parents, in the devil’s world.
e. Man begins to form his ideas at birth and builds his beliefs from experience.
f. W/out God & truth, all of the ideas we build are human viewpoint and false in the context of spiritual world.
g. Unbeliever is able to use LDE as beliefs but unable to process spiritual ideas.
h. All of us build a system of beliefs designed to pursue our needs and make our way in the harsh environment of the devil’s world.
i. The OM belief and behavior system is the system we build based on experience, w/out God or truth, built on human viewpoint.
j. This system controls our viewpoints, motives, attitudes, feelings & behavior patterns.

6. The impact of the sin nature on our belief system.
a. In truth, the universe is centered around God, His purposes and His principles.
b. The sin nature corrupts the human soul by causing us to see ourselves as the center.
c. As infants, we see ourselves as the only important person – about my needs.
d. We build our beliefs on the idea that meeting my needs is the universal mission.
e. Our OM beliefs not only contain false ideas but are built on false self importance.
f. Nothing in the OM BB system is acceptable to God or serves His purpose.

7. The OM BB system is carried with us into the Christian life.
a. At salvation, only a small part of our belief system is exchanged for truth – gospel.
b. After salvation, we retain the core ideas of the OM – motives and strategies for attaining happiness.
c. After salvation, we use God to achieve our OM motives and methods.
d. After salvation, we build NM ideas into the soul and seek to implement them by human will.
e. OM beliefs do not lose power to influence because we still believe the ideas we believed before – must be taken off by no longer believing them.