In the postmodern world, many Christians have questions about the role, if any, of psychology in their lives. Can modern psychological principles discerned through observing human nature and behavior be reconciled with the bible?  Or, is the bible sufficient in itself to deal with all the complexities of a believer’s life? Is the Christian counseling movement a legitimate, godly means of solving personal problems? Can psychology and the bible be reconciled, synthesized or brought together into a workable belief system?  It is important that these and many more questions be asked and answered as more and more believers seek counseling from therapists trained in psychological methods.  Let us ask and answer the first of many questions.

The first question: “is all truth found only in the bible”?  Or, asked another way, “are there any sources of truth other than the bible”? We know that the bible is God’s complete and total message to man about redemption from sin.  When we say the message is complete does that mean that we need look no farther or need no other information or should we assume that God has provided all we need in the 66 books of the bible.  I believe the bible gives us the answer through Paul in the book of Romans.

Romans 1:19-20 because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. ²⁰ For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.

 Paul tells us that by observing the visible creation, even unbelievers can discern the character of God. By observing the orderliness of the natural creation, man is able to see that God exists and even His eternal power and divine nature. This is a remarkable statement, that man without the Spirit can observe the creation and see into God’s own character. Apparently, God has invested important truths in the natural order to be observed and discerned by man, outside of the bible. If God has revealed His own essence in the natural order, able to be observed, then what other truths can be discerned through the nature?

In the last 100 years social scientists have brought scientific methods of observation and testing to bear upon human behavior. They have studied and observed man’s problems and the patterns they follow as man seeks to solve these problems without God.  They have offered human solutions that can and do make people feel better but bring man no closer to God. They have catalogued many different types of sin (though they would never use that term) and different manifestations of man’s sin based belief system. The service to Christians has been to give us greater insight into the sin patterns created by our false belief system and to give us a greater understanding of how God designed the human soul.  The knowledge that has come from these studies can help Christians better understand why they fail and give us insight into the way the Holy Spirit ministers to the human soul.

No man can know Christ and therefore God without trusting the death, burial and resurrection as their only means of being saved. But once we are saved as newborn babies, we are designed to grow into maturity and live a productive life for God. We grow through learning, believing and living the word of God, there is no other way. Those who would push believers into programmed, cookie cutter service as baby believers do a disservice to those Christians and the church at large. Instead, the church must teach the word and learn the word so that believers can form the mind of Christ in their own hearts. Only then can a Christian believe, think, feel, speak and act like Jesus did in His earthly life. The point of this discussion is that when these categories of knowledge observed by modern science are used properly, they help us understand our bibles, they do not compete with it. They help us understand how biblical principles apply to the human soul and especially the heart with its complexities.

The challenge:  Open your mind to the understanding that can be gained through Christian Pastor-Teachers and counselors. Even more, let us use what has been learned to further spiritual growth and formation within the church and to learn how to better nurture one another in the Christian faith.

Wilson could not figure out what was wrong. He was doing everything he had been taught to do but he just couldn’t find any peace with God. Ever since his business had gone under, he had been struggling to settle himself when he prayed like he used to be able to do. Always before, he would come to God in prayer, he would confess his sins, he would give thanks, he would pray for others and then last of all he prayed for himself. This is the correct order like I was taught, he said to himself,  but for some reason, he couldn’t sense God’s presence like before. He rolled over and went to sleep and as he did, he said one last thing to God. Lord, help me understand what is wrong, what is different now, because I need to be at peace with you and I am not.

He felt himself fighting it and not knowing what it was. It was big whatever it was, bigger than anything he had ever fought before. He pushed hard against it but it didn’t budge! How could it be so hard to push? It was then that he knew he was dreaming and in his dream he was fighting something and he knew it was important. Wilson woke up with the covers twisted around him and saw his wife sitting up looking at him like he was crazy. You were dreaming she said and fighting with God in your dream. Fighting with God!, he exclaimed, that is unbelievable. I can’t be fighting with God, I love God and He is my Boss, I would never fight with God. He said to his wife. Who could hope to win in a fight with God? But as he said these very words he knew it was true. He was fighting with God and he was afraid of what that might mean. He rolled over and went back to sleep the fitful sleep of a man who was fighting within himself and fighting with God.

He was on the way to work listening to his morning talk show when the host introduced a man who was going to talk about how he had been in a fight with God and won because he lost. Wilson couldn’t believe his ears. He looked up and said, what are you trying to tell me God, am I really in a fight with you? As he listened the man described how he had lost his wife several years back to cancer and how he had been so angry with God for allowing her to die and leaving him here alone. Every word he said seared into Wilson’s soul and he saw for the first time how he really was mad at God for allowing his business to fail. The economy this and the sales force that but he knew that only God could have stopped it, changed it. For the first time, he realized, I really am mad at God. I am now very afraid, he thought because God can squash me like a bug if He wants and here I am mad at Him. He continued on to work and put the thought aside for later.

Wilson climbed in his car and made his way out of the parking lot, on his way home. As he began the trip, once again his thoughts turned to his relationship with God. He could see now that his anger was about his business and how God had allowed it to go under. He remembered back to the moment when he knew that the business was going to go under and nothing could stop it from happening. It was the same moment that he had looked up and said thanks a lot God, his voice full of sarcasm. Thanks for nothin! He had said to His heavenly Father, knowing that God had already known this day would come. He had known and allowed me to go through this anyway. That was the moment he had decided to be mad at God. He shook his head as he recalled that moment and said, Lord, help me let this anger go and help me think right about this situation. He felt the anger deep in his soul, welling up and he thought, how do I stop feeling this way? I know this is wrong but I can’t seem to stop feeling angry with Him! All the way home, he felt his anger growing more real and his feelings growing stronger and coming closer to the surface. It was almost at the surface as he pulled in his drive and parked his car.

He got out and walked to the gate to the back yard. He walked onto the patio and sat down in one of the chairs. He felt almost out of control now with this crazy anger choking him. I’ve had enough of this he thought, you could have stopped this and saved my business God. My dad started that business before he died and gave it into my hands for me to care for it and you just threw it away like so much trash. I don’t understand how you can say you love me and yet you let me come to this moment. Listen, Wilson finally said as he looked up at God, even if you burn me I have to tell you how I feel. I hate your guts God and I don’t know if I can ever trust you again. I trusted you with everything and you do this! Wilson stood up and kicked his chair up against the house, how could you do this, he said and shook his fist at God with tears rolling down his cheeks. As he said these words he saw an image of Leut. Dan in Forrest Gump screaming at God atop the mast of the shrimpin boat.  He hung his head, his passion spent and looked up to see the lightning bolts coming down from heaven. None came. He waited a minute more continuing to look up to God, knowing he was about to be a black spot on his perfect lawn. Still no fire from heaven. But wait, what was that he heard in his soul? A quiet sense of something, an awareness that God was speaking to him. The voice said, thank you son for finally being honest with me. You have been going through the motions but not giving me your true heart. I know you are hurt, I know you are confused and I know you are angry. Now come here, sit with me and let’s work this out.

Wilson almost fell down. Out of every possible response he could have gotten from God after what he had just said, this kind, loving voice was the last one he expected. The Lord of Hosts, God of the Angelic Armies who he had just insulted instead of burning him to a crisp, had thanked him for his truthfulness and invited him to come close and work out their relationship. He slowly sat down in the remaining chair and looked up at the evening sky. The moon was just coming up over the trees and the air was cooling quickly but he wasn’t ready to go in just yet. What do you mean work it out Lord? I don’t understand what just happened. I violated your justice! I came close to threatening your existence and you thank me for it? Apparently the things I have been taught about you were not true or sadly lacking in details. He heard another quiet chuckle in his soul and the Lord said in the way He speaks to His children, yes and no, He said. Just relax, you are my son, I will never let you go and I am going to show you how much I love you. No child of mine really comes to know me until they have suffered heartache and until they have learned how to be honest with me about it. Son, I don’t care about the rituals of prayer near as much as I care about you and that you tell me what is really in your soul. Just talk to me like I am a real person and stop doing what you think I want from you. I don’t understand that Lord, what is doing what I think you want? It means you do the right things thinking that by doing the rituals in the right order I will be pleased with you. I am pleased with you because you are in union with my Son Jesus. When you pray, just talk to me as you, like you talk to your wife.

Wilson felt the anger melt out of him like hot butter. He let out a deep sigh that came from the core of his soul and he felt all the fear and bitterness escaping like hot air. He knew he was wrong to be angry and that God had good reasons for allowing his business to fail. Just like the man’s wife who was now in heaven and not suffering with cancer, he was now free to leave his work and come home without it. He was free to spend time with his wife and kids without the business taking all his time. Wilson knew he was just at the start of realizing God’s love and grace that was involved in his business going under. Instead of being angry now, he felt excited to learn all of God’s good reasons for allowing the business to fail. Most of all Wilson felt excited about talking to God. He was going to have to develop a whole new system for praying now. The old rigid way of praying for things in order to get the answers he wanted was out. Now, he could just talk to His Father about what was on his mind and just be himself. Wow! What a day! The things he had learned since last night when he had been fighting with God in his dreams. He looked through the back window and saw his wife working in the kitchen. He smiled to himself and headed toward the back door. He wondered what to tell her about what just happened with God. Would she even believe him that God had just spoken to him? What would she say when he told her about giving God a piece of his mind? He smiled again as he opened the door and she looked up at him, well here goes. Honey, you will never believe what God just said to me. Wilson walked in and closed the door.

Wilson is like many of us, mad at God and not even aware of it, actually afraid to be aware of it. We fail to understand the significance of our position in Christ that makes us His children and how that eternal position has attached us to His perfect love. He will never leave us or forsake us and even when we are angry with Him, He doesn’t take offense. At least anger is honest though misguided. When God allows our earthly hopes and dreams to fail, it is natural for us to be angry. After all, only He knew what was going to happen and could have prevented it, but He allowed it knowing we would be hurt. He allows us to be hurt and we ask, what kind of love is that to have the power but refuse to use it on our behalf to keep us from being hurt. Well the point is that these earthly hopes and dreams set us up to be hurt, not God. They compete with Him for our love and focus and we are unable to fully commit to His will while we are committed to our earthly life so arraigned. He is right and even kind to let them fail so that we can be free of them to fully give our self to Him. None of us wants to lose our mate but most of us will sooner or later. None of us wants to die even but we will and because of Jesus and His great love, we will go to be with God forever. If you are mad at God, then tell Him and tell Him how you feel too. Tell Him but be willing to let your anger go when you realize that He will never let you go and that He has a great plan for you. Oh yeah, this Wilson guy, that is not his real name. Bet you can’t guess his real name.

Al

The following article was published here in a previous form. I have rewritten it, improved it for your edification. It is long but if you will endure to the end, learn, believe and use what it teaches, your life will be improved permanently and for the good

Lazy creatures that we are, we seek a way to avoid doing the hard work of living for God and hope in vain for a shortcut to victory. Early in my Christian life, I heard that knowledge of biblical principles was sufficient to change my soul and transform me into the image of God’s Son. I was attracted to such a teaching because it required little of me except the amassing of biblical information and allowed me to avoid looking too deeply at myself. While I am an advocate of knowledge and of great learning, it is the use of this God knowledge that makes the difference. Knowing alone is not sufficient to change a man, he must put his knowledge to good use and in doing so He will be blessed and will bring glory to His Maker and Savior.

Knowledge Applied Through Imagination

The gaining of knowledge, true or false produces only the potential for impact, blessing and glorification of God. It is the actual use and application of these principles that brings blessing and glory to God. It is the application of God’s word that is the focus of this article. This article explains how the Holy Spirit uses our human imagination to enable us to see the absolute good that God is seeking to bring about in our lives. Our natural tendency is to imagine everything that can go wrong and how hard and bad everything might be. It need no longer be that we are slaves to negative images of loss and pain. We have been empowered and commanded to lay the old way aside and put on a new way of thinking in Christ.  For us to manage this change, we must learn His divine methods for enlightening the soul and enabling us to use what He has promised.

Battlefield of the Soul

To begin, it is important to realize that all use of God’s word takes place in and through the soul of the believer in Christ. The soul of the born again believer is the tool the Spirit uses to manifest the message and plan of God to the world of unsaved humans. He used the soul of the human authors to write the inspired text of the Old and New Testaments. He uses the soul of the Spirit filled believer to read, understand, believe and apply the word to human experience in any age or time in human history. The soul of the Christian is literally the battlefield of the spiritual war between God and the devil. In his great book, The Invisible War, pg 137, Barnhouse writes, “There are hundreds of millions of battles being fought every day in the invisible war. The field of each battle is the heart of man.”  Barnhouse is discussing the war in the hearts of mankind over the gospel of Jesus Christ, whether man will believe in Him for salvation or reject His saving work and be damned to eternal perdition. His premise for the whole book is that God’s enemy and ours, the devil has continued his assault on the human race and especially those who trust in Christ. Barnhouse makes it clear for us that the decision about who to believe occurs as God’s message is processed through the human soul and either accepted or rejected.

The Spirit uses our Human Faculties

The writer of the book of Hebrews aids us in understanding how the Spirit uses the human soul to spread the message of God. In Heb 5:14, he discusses the milk and meat of the word and how the meat of the word is used for spiritual exercise by the adult believer to develop his human faculties.

Hebrews 5:14 But solid food (meat) is for the mature (adult), who because of practice (use) have their senses (faculties) trained to discern good and evil.

When the adult Christian learns, believes and then applies the truth of God’s word, his faculties are exercised to the discernment of good and evil. The word faculties is what interests us here. The Greek aistheterion literally means the mental organs of the mind, the visual and verbal faculties of the soul that enable us to think, envision, discuss and act upon whatever we have placed into their inner regions. The faculties of mind (nous), heart (kardia), human spirit (pneuma), conscience (suneidesis) and the mind’s eye (ophthalmos) are all involved in the metabolizing of the spiritual food of God’s word. It is these same faculties that the Spirit uses to form the mind of Christ in us and then through us to express His message to others.

Why Study Human Faculties?

Why is this important to study imagination and human faculties you ask? Simply because it is part of the biblical record and every word of God is important? That in itself would be enough but there is more reason to consider this great topic. It is because the bible calls upon us to use our human faculties, illuminated through the human spirit by the Holy Spirit, to apply the word of God to life experiences. If we don’t understand the role of our faculties, then we will be unable to fully use them to fully live the abundant life left to us by the Lord Himself. Many is the believer, sitting passively in the pew waiting on the Spirit to inspire him to some great work. Having been taught the principle of Grace that says “God does all the work and man is the beneficiary”, while a true principle, a believer can wait in error until Jesus returns for the Spirit to inspire him to do what scripture has already commanded, when he already has the ability and mandate to act now, using his human faculties. One such situation was facing the Jewish Christians of the first century when James, the pastor of the First Church of Jerusalem, wrote to them about what to do with the great persecution and famine they were facing. Let’s look into his wonderful writings and see what he expected them to do.

God Honors His Word When We Do It

First, let us be reminded that God’s promises are guaranteed by His essence. His veracity guarantees their validity and His omnipotence guarantees that He will be able to do what He promised. God honors His word regardless if any man know it or believe it. Yet He honors it in the believer’s life, not when we know it but only when we do it. James, the pastor of the First Church of Jerusalem saw his congregation struggling with great adversity from persecution. He also saw that what they had learned they were failing to use. They were good hearers of the word but not faithful doers of the word. His passionate plea is as applicable today as it was then:

Jam 1:21-25 Therefore, get rid of all moral filth and the hatefulness that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you. 22 Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. 23 Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror 24 and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. 25 But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it– he will be blessed in what he does.

Spirit Led Imagination

While it seems like James begins his discussion of doing the word in vs 21, it is actually one of the themes of the whole book. In vs 2, when talking about the great adversity they were facing, he speaks to them about the use of their human faculties, about what was going on in their minds and especially what they were doing with their imaginations.

James 1:2 Consider it (Guide your mind)  pure joy (cause for celebration), my fellow believers, whenever you encounter various kinds of trials,

The English word “consider” is the Greek word hegeomai, which literally means to guide/lead the imagination/mind. Hegeomai comes from 2 Greek words, the first is ago which means to lead/guide; the second is oomai which means mind or imagination. In English, the word hegemony from this same Greek word means to lead another or to be in a leadership position. What James told his people who were struggling with depending on God in the midst of adversity, was to purposely guide their imagination using what the Spirit had taught them so that they could see adversity as an opportunity for God to do good. The word means to take the pieces of your personal puzzle, the situational pieces and the biblical principles and combine them in new and creative ways. Hegeomai means to envision your situation under the management of God and visualize all the good things that God is going to bring about. Rather than imagine all the negatives possibilities that might come about or visualize all that might be lost in these adversities, the Spirit leads our minds to see the good that God is doing.

God Uses Human Imagination

Our imagination is simply the creative use of our mental faculties to combine known pieces of knowledge in new and creative ways. We take the information we have and put the pieces together to form a picture we have yet to see. We imagine scenarios we have yet to play out and embrace. Normally, most of us use our imagination to visualize the negative, the horrible, creating scenes of loss and images that evoke sadness or fear. When we are still dominated by our earthly agenda found in our old worldly belief system, any kind of situational adversity is imagined as a hindrance to this agenda. If we are trying to get debt free, then any monetary loss from an adversity is decried as a loss that hinders our goal and ought not be. It is only when we can see our life under God’s management and control that we can do the opposite and visualize adversity as His way of exercising our faculties to faith and to endurance. This visualizing, according to James is where doing the word actually begins, by imagining God doing good in our life.

God Makes Good from Everything

The principle and promise of Rom 8:28 is one of the greatest insights gleaned by mortal man and one of the most powerful statements ever written on paper. (FAR)

Romans 8:28 And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.

We know, meaning that we have learned, that God causes, meaning that God Himself is in the management of the affairs of His children and controls the outcome of all the events of their life. He cause all things, not some things, but all things including the most difficult of adversities we will ever face, to work together, meaning all the different pieces of the situational puzzle are brought together in new and exciting ways by Omnipotent God who is able to do anything He pleases. He causes all things in our life to combine creatively for good (agathos). Here we must stop and look deeper into the meaning of the word good. The Greeks spoke of two kinds of good. The first is kalos, meaning pleasant, enjoyable, desirable, beautiful, the kind of good we hope for each day we awaken and venture forth. The other is agathos, meaning that which is good for you, that which furthers God’s plan even when it has no immediate pleasure associated with it. For example, in the plan of God, the cross of Jesus Christ was good, agathos good in that it resolved the sin issue for all mankind. In no way and by no means was it kalos good, pleasant, enjoyable and so forth. Jesus did not enjoy it in any way and willed His own death immediately when it was finished. Yet, in the mind of God, it was the most good ever accomplished by a man and He has rewarded Jesus with the highest blessings ever given for His willingness to submit to God’s good.

Now, in the following discussion of good, realize that we are not saying that God makes everything we experience into a pleasant, fun time. Yet, He takes all that we endure and uses it for our growth and His glory, the ultimate good and in this we can consider our adversities an occasion for great joy.

Imagination, the Beginning of Application

So, James tells us that application of God’s word begins in the mind and is a function of the imagination. He says that when adversity comes, guide your imagination to visualize the good that God is seeking to bring about through it as we just saw in Rom 8:28. Visualize the growth, the increase of inner strength, the increased capacity to endure future difficulties and the peace of mind that God is bringing about in your soul. As hard as adversity can be, the acquiring of these inner virtues is well worth the cost of pain and suffering it brings. It is normal for our old belief system to hate losses in the material world or the loss of an important relationship. Yet it is these very losses that God uses to enable us to shed our materialism and embrace spiritual ideals.

Reject the Negative Scenarios

The first move toward application of the word is to reject the negative possibilities that immediately come into your mind related to the events of your life. As you begin to write a sad story about all the losses you will endure, tell yourself that these negatives, while possible are a lie in that they mean nothing. Decide to look at these negative possibilities and reject them as the important issue at hand. Realize that the loss of earthly goods is of no consequence to God who can return all of your stuff many times over as He did with our brother Job.

Imagine the Good God Intends

Second, use your imagination to explore all the wonderful blessings of growth that might happen out of this event. When our daughter ended up in the hospital with pneumonia, my wife stayed with her for several days, leaving me home with the three youngest. When it was over and they were back home, we listed over 15 positive outcomes that had occurred because of the event. These positive outcomes were good things God wrought using the opportunity afforded by this adversity. Throw away your fearful images and words and embrace the possibilities that might occur if an omnipotent God were at the helm of your life. If God was in control of your life (and He is) what good could possibly happen? What limitations does He have apart from the ones we put on Him with our insistence that all blessings come in the form of earthly possessions.

Embrace the Good

Third, visualize yourself entering into these possibilities and see yourself enjoying total victory rather than total defeat. Imagine yourself receiving the good things God has designed to come out of every adversity and see yourself celebrating as each one comes into your possession. Feel the joy that comes into your soul as you see each blessing and thank God for what He might do, can do, wants to do and surely will do when it is time.

Putting it all Together

Once you have rejected the negative images of loss and fear that enter your mind, then having imagined the right images given to you by the Holy Spirit, then when you have embraced these right images by believing them and finally when you have imagined yourself actually experiencing the benefits of these possibilities, you are ready to take a mental position about the event and take appropriate action in response to the event. This is how application happens and how the Holy Spirit leads you to be a doer of the word. There is no shortcut to application if you are going to obey the command found in this verse. James does not command us to simply be faithful as we endure adversity, he commands us to be joyful about it, to celebrate it and that requires that we hegeomai, guide our imagination to anticipate God’s good even before He brings it about.

Imagine an Example

Several years ago Hurricane Ike roared through the coastal city of Galveston and brought massive flooding. Many people stayed behind instead of evacuating. Imagine a man, in his home as the water was rising and he is beginning to wonder if he will live through it. As the water continues to rise, imagine that a bible floats by and the man decides to pick it up. As he picks it up, it flops open to the book of John and he reads John 3:16. (God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten son that whosoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life) Then the wind blows, the page turns to Ephesian 2:8-9 (For by grace you are totally and permanently saved, not from yourself, it is a free gift of God so that no one can boast) and the man reads the passage. As he considers what he has read, he puts his faith in Christ and is eternally saved. Even though he is losing every material thing he owns, he has just secured his eternal soul. Can you visualize the eternal good that came from this temporal disaster?

If you followed this story in your mind, using your imagination to visualize what happened in the story, then you have just used your human imagination to apply the word hegeomai. You have visualized the good that God intends to bring out of every difficult event of life. It is this function of imagining the good that our loving God is bringing about that enables us to enter into the life of joy,  power and victory He has prepared for us. It is this proper use of our imagination that prepares us to reach spiritual conclusions, believe them and take spiritual actions.

Now that you can see the good God is bringing about instead of cringing in fear from what you might lose, you can begin to strategize about the most effective action to take that will bring blessing to you and glory to God. Your mind has been guided into the truth and now you are ready to take effective action.

Knowledge of the truth is necessary for the Holy Spirit to be able to give you truthful images of divine intentions. Without accurate knowledge, you have limited what the Spirit can reveal to you. Consistently filling your soul with truth opens up incredible options for the Spirit to empower your imagination to visualize the will of God. This is why a good church that teaches these kinds of principles is so important for us to find and faithfully attend. It is when we commit to rejecting the lies we often imagine about adversity, commit to allowing the Spirit to show us all that God is doing and allow Him to show us entering into these great blessings that we are actually at the beginning of doing the word of God. It is from this place of absolute conviction and confidence that we can move into doing God’s will and experience the victory he desires for us.

Allow God to show you what he wants to do with you and for you. Imagine yourself doing what He has called you to do even though it will be hard. Imagine that hard is not impossible and that He will enable you to perform what He promised.

One of the great mysteries of life is why “the heart wants what the heat wants”. All of us feel longings deep within our hearts that drive us, depress us and move us to make decisions that even we don’t understand. Lacking a logic we can explain, we finally stop trying to understand our hearts and simply live with our unfulfilled dreams and desires.

The bible, God’s message to mankind, is the answer to the mysteries of the heart. God does not want us to give up trying to understand our hearts, instead He wants us to seek out the answers in His word. The following discussion is the result of 30+ years of looking for answers in the word, from the sciences and from my own personal observations as revealed by the Spirit.

One of the ways we can discover the root causes of why our hearts want what they want, is by observing our own daydreams. Daydreams are a window into our motivations and into the beliefs we hold about happiness, relationships and personal fulfillment. This article will discuss the way we formed our original ideas that still motivate us and reveal what God has provided that will enable us to change our deepest motives of the heart.

Covert Influence

Our subconscious beliefs, thinking and ideas continue to influence us under the level of our awareness just as much as when the ideas were conscious choices. We consciously chose to adopt these ideas based on life events, consciously chose to implement them until they became habitual choices and then they faded from our awareness. They are still part of our total view of life and they are still being implemented from their covert position in the subconscious. Every idea that we have ever believed functions in the soul this same way.

Old Man Beliefs in the Subconscious

When talking about our way of life before salvation, the bible terms our unsaved belief system the Old Man (OM). The OM was our way of meeting our needs, dealing with the pain of disappointment and making life work using our own ability and power, without God. The Old Man (OM) was never prepared nor is it capable of successfully meeting our needs or resolving the painful events that occur in all of our lives. All of us have experienced painful events that overwhelmed us. When these events happened because we were on our own without God, we misunderstood what the events meant to us, about us and our relationships with others. Therefore, out of these events we have adopted false ideas and used them as corrupted strategies to pursue pleasure and prevent pain. The heart of man has a logic in accordance with God’s design but corrupted by the sin nature and by developing in an environment without God. The logic of building false ideas as follows:

Order of Events

We are born separated from God, with a nature to sin, in the devil’s world and with relationship needs that compelled us to find fulfillment. He made our needs so that only He could meet them. Yet because we are born separated from God to meet our needs, we automatically turn to the only relational option we have, each other. So, we begin to pursue fulfillment of our relational needs by reaching out to other people, hoping to get them to love us and want us. I call these initial pursuit Primary Functions . We falsely believe that by relating successfully with other people that we can fulfill the needs of our hearts.

It does not take long before we experience failure in our attempts to form love relationships. It might be with our parents or our peers but very early in life we all perceive that we have been rejected or left unwanted by someone in our life. When love relationships where we have placed our total trust fail us, it creates a terrible pain in our hearts. If we had a relationship with God and understood His plan, then we could use new man logic to resolve the problem, think it through and come to a place of peace about it. But in our unbelieving state without God we are unable to successfully think through painful events that inevitably occur in our lives. So we get stuck with pain in our hearts without the knowledge or strength to resolve it. Hunger for love caused us to seek out and attach our hearts to others, trusting them to love us in return. Almost all of these love relationships fail us and hurt us deeply causing soul pain.  Soul pain drives us to adopt a defensive approach to life, implementing policies of relating designed to keep us from being hurt again. These defensive policies are called Reactionary Functions. We reach false conclusions that tell us “If trusting in love caused us to be vulnerable to be hurt, then we will never trust again”. “If loving another made me vulnerable to pain, I will never love again”. “If I have pain in my heart that I cannot shake, I will numb my emotions so that I cannot feel it”.

Our false conclusions when believed become OM strategies in the heart but are ineffective for fully resolving the pain we feel and the confusion we experience. As we use these false OM strategies in our relationships, they become habitual, unconscious choices. When we believe an idea and use it as the logic behind our choices, it becomes programmed into our belief system as part of our overall view of life. As we lose touch with our conscious awareness of these beliefs, they become part of the subconscious program of the heart.

Still residing in the subconscious is the heartache and confusion we felt when the events happened and these unresolved thoughts and feelings seek to be corrected. The heart is programmed to resolve any inner turmoil we have from holding conflicting beliefs. These inner conflicts reveal themselves in different ways, seeking to be brought out into the conscious mind so we can resolve them.

One of the ways that our conflicted beliefs reveal themselves is through our dreams, both those we have while sleeping and those we experience while awake. When we are doing some task that is so automatic to us that we don’t have to think about it, like driving, we will often use the time to daydream. We will imagine scenarios of events that express hidden desires, fears or unresolved conflicts.

Wikipedia contains an article with the following statement about daydreams. “A daydream is a visionary fantasy, especially one of happy, pleasant thoughts, hopes or ambitions, imagined as coming to pass, and experienced while awake. There are many different types of daydreams, and there is no consensus definition amongst psychologists. Daydreams may involve fantasies about future scenarios or plans, or reminiscences about past experiences, and may include vivid dream-like mental images. They are often connected with some type of emotion.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daydream

The purpose of the following questions is to examine your daydreams to find unresolved OM ideas that need to be removed from your soul. Answer the questions as honestly as you can. Not doing so serves no purpose other than revealing your own self-deception and commitment to

Questions

What scenario of events do you consistently imagine when you are alone and your mind is occupied with a simple task like driving? Briefly describe all of them that are consistent.

Ex: winning the lottery and giving the money to the Lord

What is the theme of your scenario of events?

Ex: Venting anger at someone; winning a sporting event

What specific actions do you perform as the scene unfolds?

Ex: Telling off mother-in-law; Embracing loved one

How does the scene end?

Ex: happy ending? Sad ending?

What feeling dominates the scene? More than one?

Ex: Anger, fear, exultation

What significant people are involved in the scene?

Ex: Mother, father, spouse, boss, God

Are these people from the past, present or future?

Ex: Father returns from long absence

Whatever you consistently imagine and envision reveals an unfulfilled desire of some kind that is connected to a belief that says “if I could just accomplish this” or “if this would just happen” then I would be happier, I would be at peace, I could finally move on with my life.

1. When you have answered the questions, ask yourself what event or situation connects with this daydream?

a. Is it an unhappy event from your past that you long to reconcile?

Ex: Parents divorced and you imagine them reconciling and in doing so, you feel like your world is right again

b. Is it an ongoing conflict in your present life?

Ex: Ongoing marital conflict that you imagine being resolved to your satisfaction allowing you to feel good about your present marital situation and even giving you hope for the future.

c. Is it a future event that evokes feelings you long to feel?

Ex: You are given a lot of money giving you financial security.

2. Whatever resolution and the feeling that comes from the resolution is what you want to happen in your life and is what you believe will give you happiness in this area of life.

a. Financial gain gives you security – your real desire is financial security

b. Marital reconciliation causes you to feel loved – real desire is to feel loved

· Whatever feeling you get from the scenario and ending is what you really desire.

· The scenario in the daydream is the way you believe it must or could happen for you.

· The desire reveals what you believe is necessary or could possible provide happiness

3. When you identify how you want to feel and the scenario/strategy you believe must be employed to create the feeling, then ask “how has God already provided for this desire?”

a. The daydream reveals a desire connected to a false belief about your happiness in life.

b. The desire reveals a false idea you believed at some point about happiness.

c. The goal is to discover the false idea you believed and are still believing about what is necessary for you to be happy in this life.

d. When you can watch yourself using this false belief to create the desire and then watch this desire being fulfilled in the dream creating the state of happiness, then you can get enough of a handle on the false idea to change it.

e. When we can see and then speak to our self about the false idea, we can tell our self to stop believing it and that it is not true.

f. When we consistently reject the false belief by telling self to stop believing it and by visualizing the false idea being removed from our soul, the false belief will lose its power to influence us.

g. Consistent disbelief toward the idea will remove it from its place of influence in our soul.

h. Once the false idea has been removed (Paul – taken off Eph 4:22) from the heart, we can then replace it with a New Man (NM) idea from the bible.

i. By visualizing the rejection of the false idea and the embracing of the NM idea, the NM idea replaces the OM idea in the heart of the believer and transformation takes place.

j. We solidify the NM belief in the heart by believing it for application to life experience.

k. Consistent application of the NM idea causes it to become a new subconscious habit that has replaced the false OM belief, allowing us to access the power of God.

l. When the NM belief has become the new habitual response to life events, your soul naturally responds to life the same as Christ did and you are glorifying God.

Your heart believes whatever you tell it is true. When your daydreams reveal the false ideas that people or events of this life can make you permanently happy, then realize that you believe that because at one point you told yourself that idea and told yourself it was true. When you did, you told yourself to embrace the idea as your own to use it in life. We use our ideas to pursue pleasure through relating to others (Primary Functions) or to prevent pain by defending ourself from others (Reactionary Functions). Either way, these ideas built and used before salvation are false, are not from God and are still operating as unconscious habits in your subconscious. God wants us to remove all of these false ideas and replace them with the ideas Jesus used in His life. The step by step process described in this article is the way to remove and replace any ideas in the heart.

We first must find the false idea. It will often be revealed by your daydreams. Then we must remove the idea by telling ourself it is a lie and not to be believed. Then we must replace the idea using the corresponding principle found only in the bible. (Notice that you must have learned concepts from the bible to have something to replace the false one. This requires a church where the word is taught in such a way that real answers are provided) We replace the false idea we have removed by telling ourself the biblical idea is true and that we are embracing it and turning it into action.

My friends, this simple system works. I have used it over and over many times to change my own heart to become more like Christ. Every time I remove a false idea and replace it with a biblical idea, I gain more freedom in my soul and I grow more and more like Jesus in my heart. I wish you good hunting as you track down all the false ideas in your heart.

Transformation Mechanics

One of the benefits of in-depth bible study, especially categorical studies, is that the mechanics begin to emerge as the pieces come together. It is one thing to tell a believer to change the way they live to be like Christ and quite another to give him/her the means of making the changes. The church today is not producing credible Christians for many reasons, one of which is that the clergy does not teach with any depth, providing the pews with enough insight into the process to succeed. These articles are intended to supplement the food that hopefully you are getting from your pastor-teacher. The following article is one of a series of discussions that will provide you with some of the “how to’s” of the Christian life. This article deals with the Old Man, how to recognize false beliefs in our souls and then what to do with them when we discover that we have believed a lie.

Eph 4:22-24 You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old man, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; 23 to be made new in the attitude of your minds; 24 and to put on the new man, created to be like God in  righteousness and holiness from the truth.

The next few articles will provide insights and exercises intended to help Christians discover their false Old Man beliefs that are hidden in their subconscious minds. These false beliefs are ideas we believed at some point in our lives as a reaction to a life event(s). After consistent use of these ideas over time, they became our natural, habitual viewpoint and way of reacting to similar life situations. A brief description of how/why these beliefs came to be programmed into our souls will help us understand the normal design of the soul and help us see other false ideas we hold.

Old Man Beliefs – An Example

The Old Man (OM) belief system contains false ideas that we adopted based on our human experience growing up through the stages of human development. The OM system contains positive ideas intended to give us pleasure and negative ideas intended to protect us from pain. The following example is an altered but true story of how and why a person known to me adopted a false belief(s) in reaction to a painful event(s) that occurred when he was 12 years old.

Joe’s Story

Joe was 12 when his parents divorced. This was the time of his life he describes as when “the world as I knew it came apart”. Joe was old enough to know what was happening when they began to fight all the time and when the arguments turned into bitter fights and he was not really surprised when the announcement came. He was a little surprised because he remembered that the fights stopped real sudden like and he had hoped for a moment that they had worked out their differences. When they sat him down though, he knew what was coming before they said a word. He saw his dad’s bags by the door and he knew. He had been dying a little inside every time he heard the hateful tone they used with each other but this was the moment when his heart just stopped and he stopped feeling anything for a long time. For half a second he considered begging them to reconsider but the look on his father’s face told him to “never mind”. As his mother sat beside him hugging him, telling him what was happening, he could feel himself growing cold inside, totally numb to anything. When she was through, he just nodded his head and went to his room, shutting the door quietly behind him. Joe’s heart was toast.

It was 18 years later that Joe recounted this event to me in a counseling session. He was there in a last ditch effort to save his own 4 year old marriage. He and his wife Sue had come together for the first session and now he had come by himself when they were both scheduled, not a good sign. Her complaint was that she no longer believed that Joe cared for her in any way, to any degree. She explained that her many tears shed in the first session and the many more before they came to me meant nothing to him. He does nothing when I am hurting she said, he says nothing, does nothing and he finally admitted the other day that he feels nothing when I try to tell him that I can’t live like this any more. He listens without offering a word, he just looks at me like he doesn’t care and then just walks off and turns on the TV.

He wasn’t like this when we dated, he was kind, caring and we used to pray together all the time. We met at church you know and I thought he was the most spiritual man I had ever met because he knew more about God than anyone I had ever met. He never was very expressive or emotional about his love or anything else for that matter she added, but I had no idea that he would be so distant and unfeeling. Joe sat, looking down at his hands folded in is lap, passive, unmoving, not a blink or show of any emotion on his face. Sue went on until her emotional complaint finally came to an end and she sat silent, looking at Joe, waiting for some sign that he had heard her, that he was alive. I had also sat silent looking at Joe, waiting on him to say something. He finally looked up at her, then at me and said, I tried to tell you that it wasn’t you, I don’t feel anything about anything, ever. I don’t know why, but I just don’t feel anything for anyone. He then lapsed back into his silent vigil, making sure his hands stayed attached. The first session ended soon after that and now Joe was here by himself because she had told him that she was at the end of trying and maybe they would both be better off not married to each other.

Joe sat across from me, trying to remain unemotional as he told me what she had said, but for the first time I could tell he was anything but numb. For just a split second when he was talking I could see the pain in is eyes and almost like a desperation showed through. I decided to use the time by trying to get Joe to open up a little. I asked him, Joe, do you know why you don’t feel anything for your wife’s pain or as you said, anything for anyone? No, he shook his head slowly, trying to keep his composure but I could tell he was close to breaking down. I wasn’t this way with her at first, he said, I was normal for awhile when we dated and then when we were first married. Normal for awhile I asked with sudden peaked interest? Hmm, I said to myself that is an odd way of expressing the situation. Yes, he said, normal for a time, not like I used to be. Ok Joe, you have my curiosity aroused, what do you mean, like you used to be? Well, Joe began, for as long as I can remember, I have felt numb inside, almost like God didn’t include feelings when He made me. It’s not that I don’t feel anything at all, but I don’t seem to have a wide range of feelings or very strong feelings about anything. I remember when we won the city championship in football and I was playing running back. I scored the winning touchdown and everyone else went nuts but not me. I was glad we won, but I just didn’t feel all that much about it or like I said, for anything else in my life either. How long have you been this way Joe? I asked. For as long as I can remember he said, way back into my childhood.

It was then that I began to explore Joe’s past and discovered the event that had resulted in Joe numbing out his emotions. We could go on with the story but hopefully you are beginning to see why I have told you about Joe. At 12, when his “world as he knew it came apart”, he decided that the pain of his parents failed relationship was too great for him to bear and he had shut down his emotions, repressed them, so that he wouldn’t feel the agony of losing his world. He had shut them down even further after the divorce when he went to his dad’s house and had to hear him running his mother down and then several other life events that were difficult had motivated him to turn the dial on his emotions even further. Let me explain what happened to Joe, why it had hurt his marriage and how his story applies to our exercise using daydreams.

Joe had discovered what most of us counselors call defense mechanisms, a term coined by Freud. The term describes a range of instinctive behaviors that all humans use to avoid the pain that results when our life comes apart. The mechanism Joe used is called emotional repression or suppression which is simply where we tell our self to stop feeling our emotions because something in our life has hurt us deeply. When we are hurt like Joe was by a failed relationship and the loss of a primary relationship like his parents, all we know how to do as unbelievers is to make it stop hurting any way we can. Joe’s instinct to avoid the pain worked for him and he was able to stop thinking about the divorce so much and stop hurting so bad in his soul. When Joe saw how well numbing his emotions worked, he decided to believe in this mechanism as a good way to deal with all the pain in his life and he adopted it as his strategy for handling pain. He told himself that he couldn’t control people disappointing him and causing him pain but he could control whether he felt any pain from their failures. He discovered this mechanism by instinct but then he attached his faith to it and used it as a strategy to deal with the pain of life in the devil’s world. Joe had built a primary old man belief and had used it until it became so habitual that he no longer even remembered that he was doing it. Going numb had become so habitual and so automatic that every time pressure came to his life, he did his turtle act. Joe continued to numb his pain but discovered that this mechanism had a bad side effect. When he numbed his emotions to avoid pain, he found that it numbed all of his other feelings as well. He didn’t feel pain but he didn’t feel joy either, nor love, nor sympathy nor as Joe said, he didn’t feel anything for anyone, even for himself. This side effect of all his feelings going numb had hurt his marriage. Sue still felt her feelings but Joe couldn’t feel his and he couldn’t relate intimately with his wife, he couldn’t feel sympathy when she was hurting and he couldn’t feel passion when she felt loving toward him. Joe had made himself emotionally unavailable to the world and even to his wife.

Sue was a normal young woman who loved her husband and wanted his love and approval in return. Soon after the honeymoon year of marriage, Joe settled into his life and his numbed emotions began to reassert themselves. The first time they had a fight, he ducked into his shell a little, then a little more and by the time they came to me, Joe had placed Sue in the same category as every other person who had hurt him and he simply felt nothing to guard against being hurt by her even more. Sue for her part, not knowing what was wrong, pursued Joe every time he backed off from her. The more he backed off the more she felt like he didn’t love and approve of her and so she became critical and complaining toward him. She pushed him to give her love and he pushed back to protect himself from being abandoned and feeling criticized. At this point Joe’s use of self-protective mechanisms was so habitual he didn’t even know he was doing it. The two together created a vicious cycle where she pursued him with criticism but wanting love, feeling hurt at his withdrawal and he withdrew even more to avoid being hurt and out of fear of her leaving him.

Both of them as Christians were still dominated by their old way of thinking, feeling and acting. They related to one another using the strategies they had built in their life as unbelievers. They desperately needed to take off their old man beliefs, replace them with the mind of Christ and yield their hearts to the Spirit moment by moment. They needed to surrender to transformation, God’s process by which He causes believers to grow spiritually from babies at the new birth to mature adults able to shoulder adult Christian responsibilities. They needed to take off their old man beliefs, strategies and actions and put on the new man beliefs, strategies and actions so that they could believe, think, feel, speak and act like Jesus Christ.

It was during the sessions we spent discussing his life that this exercise was introduced to me. Joe said to me that during the first year after his parents divorced that he used to daydream about them getting back together all the time. He said, I daydreamed about them getting back together so much it began to interfere with my schoolwork. My teachers began to get on to me for zoning out. I asked him, what did you get out of daydreaming about them getting back together?  Well he said, I would see them together in my mind and it would feel like it was real and I would feel like everything was all right for a moment. It was the only time I could feel anything, especially anything good. When I heard this, I realized the power of our daydreams as a window into the subconscious mind and as a tool to discover the hidden agendas in our old man belief system.

In the next article we will look at our daydreams and learn how to use them as a tool to discover what old man ideas you have programmed into your soul. Once you identify a false belief, then you can choose to reject it, to delete it from the program and replace it with the appropriate concept taught in the bible. This is how God designed the process of transformation to work.

God designed man to be needy. He created us with different kinds of needs, both physical and needs in the soul. Our physical needs are met by logistical grace that provides all that we need to function in the physical world. Our soulish needs are related to our inner longings for love and relationships. In this article we will discuss how mankind is confused about how to have our needs met and from whom. We will give a representative list of human needs and explain what Jesus said about fulfilling the emptiness of the soul.

Celebrating Human Strength
The world tells us that we should admire other human beings that use their human ability to be strong. Darwinism, the dominant idea of our day, tells us that “the strong survive” and emphasizes “the survival of the fittest”. Many of our popular movies lionize those who are callous, have no compassion and have pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. It is no wonder that the world celebrates human strength since it is all the world has on which to depend. The world admires those who use their own abilities to meet their own needs or even better, those who successfully pretend that they have no needs. The bible tells us another story.

Weakness Made Strong
God did not make us to be strong. He made us to be weak and needy. The human soul is incredibly fragile and needy. In fact, in the real world, which is the spiritual world, we are totally helpless. Helpless to save ourselves, make ourselves spiritual or meet the God given needs He placed within us. We are needy by design. God made our souls in such a way that we need Him in order for us to be complete and fulfilled. His great mercy designed us to need Him so that perhaps we might seek Him, having exhausted every other means of achieving happiness. The bible teaches that if we will enter into an intimate relationship with God, then our hearts will find rest and fulfillment.

Dependence on People
We are confused though. Instead of needing God, we think we need people. Born without God and having only people with whom we can relate, we conclude that our needs are to be fulfilled through people. All of our relational strategies are built around the goal of inducing people to like, admire and accept us. We believe that if we can maximize our human assets to cause other people to praise us then our souls will be complete. This is why we are so fearful of rejection, conflict and loss of human support. If you have raised children, you have seen the power of peer pressure, which is the raw evidence of our false dependence on people.

Dependence on Human Ability
We are also confused about the role of human ability. Most churches teach us to use our human abilities to produce Christian works as the way to please God. We learn what God considers right and wrong and we try to comply with His standards through human will. We focus on producing the appearance of spirituality so that other humans will give us respect and approval. We believe that this approval will fulfill our souls and even believe that human approval is the same as God’s approval. Having developed our beliefs using people as the objects of our needs, we hunger for the love of man more than the love of God. We must come to understand that in our humanity we are bankrupt, helpless and totally dependent on God for our happiness.

God made the human soul with needs. Those needs are evident in all of us from the moment of birth. As we reach adult status we learn to hide our neediness with the appearance of strength. We learn how to play the game so that others will think we are strong but our neediness remains. It is this neediness that drives every pursuit of our lives.

Needs Experienced as Desires
We experience our needs as desire and deep longings. Our desires and longings are the expression of our divinely designed needs. In the bible, Jesus calls these needs/desires hunger and thirst. Each of us experiences deep cravings and longings for affection, acceptance, admiration and a sense of accomplishment. Every desire and longing we have shows us that we have needs that ultimately only God can complete. The complete list of human needs is beyond the scope of this article but the following represent our core divinely designed needs.

Man’s Needs – God’s Provision

1. Unconditional love – from God, man & self. We all want to be loved as we are in spite of our flaws and failures. God provides His love in total to all who trust in Christ as their Savior.
Rom 5:5 and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.
· At the moment of salvation God directed all of His love to the baby believer who must then grow into a mature state where he can experience God’s love.

2. To fully know and be know by another – All of us long to be able to fully share our hearts with someone who will understand us.
1 Corinthians 13:12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I shall know fully just as I also have been fully known.
· In heaven, we will be able to freely & fully interact with God and others.

3. Acceptance, inclusion and belonging – family – We are herd bound. God made us to crave a position where we belong in a group.
Ephesians 2:19 So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God’s household
· At the moment of salvation we are accepted as natural citizens of heaven and are adopted into God’s family where we become children of God.

4. Recognition, praise and appreciation for our contributions – All of us desire to be recognized and praised for our accomplishments
Matthew 25:21,23 “His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful slave; you were faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many things, enter into the joy of your master.’ 23 “His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful slave; you were faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.’
· At the Judgment Seat of Christ, our legitimate Christian service will be evaluated and rewarded by Christ and our need for recognition will be fully met forever.

5. Ability to edify and impact others – make a difference – God designed us to contribute to the betterment of others.
1Cor 12:7 Now to each one (Christians) is given the manifestation of the Spirit (spiritual gifts) used for the common good
· We have been given the power of God through the Holy Spirit and also given a divinely enabled ability to supernaturally serve the members of the church, having an impact and spiritual influence on their lives.

God designed us to have needs that we could not meet on our own. He made us to need Him if our souls would experience the fulfillment of our needs. When we come to God through Christ, at that moment, God provides the supply to meet every need of the human soul. As we grow in grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, we are able to abandon our attempts to meet our needs through people (take off old man) and accept God’s gracious provision in Christ (put on new man).

Driven by Desire
These core needs drive and motivate all human behavior. All human behavior can be traced to the desire to fulfill these core needs. Both God and the devil use man’s needs/desires to motivate us.

Peter tells us that the corruption in the world is caused by misdirected desire.

2 Peter 1:4 Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.

Paul tells us that the corruption of our old belief system is motivated by desire.

Eph 4:22 You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires;

The Holy Spirit also uses our desire system to motivate us to spiritual life.

Gal 5:17 For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want.

Phil 2:13 for it is God who works in you to will (desire) and to act according to his good purpose.

Jesus discussed God’s answer to our thirst for relationship in John 7:37-39

John 7:37 On the last and greatest day of the Feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. 38 Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from his innermost being 39 By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.

Thirsty Souls
Jesus called out to those who were “thirsty”, meaning those who were aware of their need for God. Jesus talked about our human needs experienced as hunger and thirst in in Mt 5:6 – hunger & thirst for righteousness – desire for rightness with God; Jn 6:35 –Jesus, who is the Bread of Life – come to Him and you will never hunger; believe on Him never thirst; Jn 4:6-26 – woman at the well – living water & you will never thirst again. Jesus called out to identify those who were aware of their need for God. He knew that we experience our God given needs as deep desires and longings.

Empty Souls
He said that we feel these desires in our innermost being. The Greek word koilos means an empty place, a cavity, a hole, it is most often translated as the womb and is used for the stomach. When used for our needs/desires being misdirected toward sinful objects it is translated as our appetites (Rom 16:18; Phil 3:19). What we learn from Jesus is that God designed an empty place in the heart of mankind and from that empty place we feel deep desires. It is also in this empty place in the heart of man that we experience fulfillment when we attach our desires to God. Without God, man chooses to fill the emptiness with false objects of happiness. When we bond and attach or hearts to these false objects of pleasure, it causes us to become addicted to them.

Filled by the Spirit
Finally, Jesus explains that the divine answer to the needs/desires generated by the emptiness in our hearts is found in the ministry of God-Holy Spirit. The living water that fills and overflows from within the heart of the spiritual believer is the ministry of the Spirit. The divine means of meeting our human needs is a relationship with God Himself. The Holy Spirit who indwells our bodies making us the temple of God guides us into the understanding and application of all truth. It is God’s truth that sets us free from our false beliefs that lead us into misery and transforms us and gives us the same joy experienced by Jesus Himself.

Questions to Ask Yourself
Let me prompt your thinking about your needs with some questions:

1. What would you say is your greatest need/desire?

2. What is your most noticeable need/desire in relationships?

3. How successful have you been in your close relationships?

4. Describe your relationship with your parents

5. Did you feel loved and secure as a child?

6. Describe your parent’s relationship. Was it close? Was there a lot of fighting? Did they divorce?

7. Do you find yourself seeking something in your relationship with your spouse that you can’t seem to ever get?

8. Would you be willing to redirect your need/desire toward God?

9. Would you be willing to admit that you are seeking something from a member of the opposite sex that you can only get from God?

10. Are you hungry for praise from people?

11. Are you terrified of rejection?

12. Do you avoid conflict at all costs?

13. Have you been married and divorced a number of times?

14. Are all of your relationships filled with conflict?

15. Are you so disillusioned with relationships that you have given up?

16. Are you truly happy?

17. Are you overly concerned with appearances?

We all begin our lives seeking what we need from people. It never works and eventually after enough conflict and failure, we give up. We may stay married for the children’s sake but our hearts are filled with despair. We lose hope in ever finding happiness in our close relationships. If this describes you, then great!!!

Now, maybe you will stop trying to squeeze from people what you can only get from God. Now perhaps you are ready to seek God in a different way. Stay tuned. I will try to help you learn the new way to meet your needs.

Joe was born with a debilitating disease, common to many, that he inherited from his parents. This disease was terminal in time and for many years, without a cure. One day, the cure was found and Joe was totally healed. His excitement and elation was off the scale but to his surprise, short lived. After he was cured, Joe thought that he would no longer experience any of the symptoms of the disease but soon discovered he was wrong. He continued to exhibit many of the feelings and behaviors associated with his original condition. Joe asked his friends about the situation, read articles on the internet and wracked his brain for an answer. Finally, he went back to the doctor who had given him the cure to find the answer to his riddle. The doctor said, Joe, you were born with this condition, you lived many years with it and with the problems that it caused. Your mind and body adapted to it from the beginning and formed methods of compensating for it. Your mind and body are so used to living with the disease that they are still functioning as if it were still there. What do I do about it Joe asked. How do I retrain myself to live like a man who is cured? You learn everything you can about it Joe, the doctor said. You learn about what it is like to live a healthy life, you learn all about the problems and patterns your disease caused and you learn the methods of renewing you mind and body. As you learn about all of these things, you put them into practice, slowly, daily, changing the way you think and act. As you catch your mind and body acting like a sick man, you confront the problem, stop doing it and practice acting like a cured man. It will take time but if you will commit to the process and stick with it, you will be able to totally renew your mind and body to live like a healthy man, cured of your disease. Joe’s mind was now more at ease. He understood why he continued to have the same problems and now knew what to do about it. He left the doctor’s office with new excitement and a desire to help others experiencing the same problem by teaching them the solution to the hangover behaviors.

The Analogy

Knowing that I am a Christian Pastor-Teacher and counselor, you no doubt have surmised that Joe’s story is an analogy that I created. It is an earthly story with a spiritual meaning. I wonder how many of the parallels you have put together. Let me give the interpretation of the story.

Interpreting the Story

The Meaning of Joe’s Story:  Joe is any and every born member of the human race. The disease is sin that we inherited genetically from Adam and Eve passed down through our own parents. The cure is the death burial and resurrection of Jesus that paid for all of our sins. We are given the cure when we believe that Jesus died to pay for our sins and was resurrected to defeat death for us. Once we take the cure, we are saved from the judicial penalty of sin and we are secure in Christ forever. The surprising ongoing symptoms are the sins and the destructive patterns we continue to think, feel and practice after we are saved. These patterns are surprising because we are saved, indwelt by the Spirit and have the power to reject sin as a way of life, yet we don’t. The search for answers corresponds to the difficulty we all have trying to understand our own souls and why we continue to struggle with negative feelings and actions. The doctor’s answers are analogous to the teachings of the bible that explain this mystery.

The rest of this article will expand the explanation so that we can understand our struggle and have solutions to resolve it. We will discuss that all mankind is born separated from God with a sin nature, that we all develop habitual thoughts and behaviors that are brought into our new life and finally we will examine the concept of transformation where we take off our old ways and put on the new ways in Christ.

A Choice – A Disease

Joe’s disease is called sin. Originally sin was a decision to disobey God. When sin was chosen, it infested the human body and soul and became like a disease. Sin resulted in all mankind being born spiritually dead, separated from God and we also inherited a sin nature. Joe, like the rest of us was born separated from God because of Adam’s sin. When Adam sinned, he caused the whole human race to become spiritually dead. Spiritual death means that we are unworthy to be accepted by God and that we are unable to function in the spiritual realm. Let’s examine the impact of spiritual death.

Human Needs Unmet by God – Frustrated

God created the human soul with inner needs. Adam experienced these needs even in perfection. Man was designed to need God and to a lesser degree, to need one another. All of us are born with divinely designed needs that only God can meet. In the garden, God was there to meet their needs but after the fall we are born permanently separated from Him. Our spiritual death and separation from God causes us to be unable to have a relationship with Him to meet our needs. In addition, spiritual death renders us unable to understand anything spiritual that He might say to us. The result is that our deepest needs go unmet as we develop our own ideas about life. We grow up without God. As we go through the stages of human development and build our own views about life, we experience continuous frustration from our unfulfilled longings and don’t know why. Only God can fill the emptiness within the heart of man but the heart of man is cut off from Him. Driven by these needs, we are left to our own feeble devices to find a source to fulfill them. Human ability is unable to create a solution so that the human soul is left hopeless and helpless to change our situation. Therefore, spiritual death separates us from God, frustrates us as we try to meet our needs and leaves us confused about why we cannot find happiness through relating with other members of the human race.

The Sin Nature

The second result of Adam’s sin is the corruption of our human nature. God created us with a nature to love and worship Him. The corruption of sin causes us to redirect all of our loyalties away from God onto our self. This corrupted nature is called a sin nature and it causes us to view our self as the most important person in life. In contrast, the bible explains that God is the most important person and His plan is the primary goal of the universe. Our corrupted nature driven by needs, causes us to build an idea system that is contrary to God’s truth. The inner hunger we feel so dominates us that we view our self and our needs as the primary issue in life. We are loyal first to self and then to others only after we have what we need. Our sin nature corrupts the development of our ideas so that our belief system is built around self first. We believe that meeting our own needs is the most important task of our life. All of our thoughts, ideas, feelings and actions are built around meeting our needs. Our hunger for love, belonging and significance becomes our dominant goal and all of our thoughts are arranged with this priority in mind. The sin nature causes even the best of us to be selfish and build our ideas around the belief that selfishness is justified and right. From birth and beyond, we begin and live totally disoriented to God.

The Cure of God’s Grace

The disease is sin. Its results alienate us from God both judicially and experientially, both in our thoughts and our behaviors. We are born condemned to die physically and then to die a second time by being placed into the Lake of Fire forever. The disease is terminal and without a cure, all of us will die and then die again. But God, whose great love motivates Him to show mercy devised a plan to cure us from sin and save us forever. God’s plan to save man is called grace. Grace is God’s genius plan to personally resolve the judicial penalty for sin on our behalf and then offer this resolution as a free gift to the undeserving. He sent His Son Jesus to defeat spiritual death by paying for our judicial debt and then to defeat physical death by returning from the dead. Having accomplished this great mission of mercy, God offers what Christ earned as a free gift to be accepted by believing that He did it for us. When we hear the gospel (the cure), understand it and choose to believe it, God credits the work of Christ to our individual accounts. This is the cure, the only cure that God has provided. Once we accept Christ and His work as our means of salvation, God settles the issue of our sins in the courtroom of heaven and pronounces us pardoned forever. We are cured from the terminal disease of sin, never to be condemned again. Yet, our problems are not over. At first, we think we have it made and in the judicial realm we do. But in the experiential realm of beliefs and behaviors we still have a long way to go.

The Old Man

Habitual Beliefs and Behaviors:  God made both the human mind and body to operate on habits. We form ideas and behaviors that become habits that we use instinctively and unconsciously when the occasion arises. The beliefs we formed when we were separated from God and on our own have become deeply seated habits of thought that fire off almost without conscious choice. From these habitual thought patterns come emotional, verbal and overt behaviors that we use to interact with our world. Before we were saved, we all formed a habitual way of life that we unknowingly carry into the Christian life. Our beliefs chosen over the course of our lives with their corresponding behaviors are deeply ingrained and operate habitually under the level of awareness. These old beliefs are called the Old Man in the bible. After salvation, we still have the same needs to be met and we are just as driven to meet them. A great difference is that after salvation we now have God to meet our deepest needs. The problem is that initially we don’t really know what is going on inside of us and don’t realize that we are still using habitual ideas that promote selfishness and sinful behaviors. Even though the Spirit indwells us, we are still unconsciously thinking the old ways and therefore acting in old ways. Some of these old ways can even look like the spiritual life but are motivated to serve self rather than God. We are saved, secure in Christ, the Spirit indwells us giving us power but we still find ourselves sinning in the same old ways. We have to find an explanation to this disturbing hypocrisy.

The New Man in Christ

After we are saved the old habitual ways of living that we developed continue to function within us. These old ideas producing sinful behaviors become apparent as we learn about Christ and see His perfection. As we know Him better, He shows us our inconsistent behaviors. As we grow in Him we also begin to feel new thoughts, feelings and practice new behaviors that are like His. This new belief and behavior system is called the new man (NM) and is created by the Spirit in the heart of the believer who learns and believes the truth. Individual pieces of truth are built together into a viewpoint of life that produces Christ like behavior when we operate from His view. We grow and build divine viewpoint into our souls so that these ideas can become our habitual, unconscious thoughts, feelings and actions. It is the new man that thinks, feels and acts like God. It is the new man that we now want to be and who we want others to see in us. It is the new man we thought we would just automatically become when we were saved. Some churches even teach that from the beginning you have the ability to say no the old and yes to the new, totally and completely. But, nothing could be farther from the truth.

The Old Way Endures

The old way has been our way for a long time and it operates under the surface, without us even knowing. It is the fruit of the old way with its sinful, destructive behaviors that blows the whistle and reveals that something is very wrong inside of us. We try to resist the temptations of the old way and fail miserably. We try harder to no avail. We study more, pray more, seek counsel from the wise and still the old way resists our attempts to put it aside. We keep our mask in place to hide our inner confusion and our habitual sins. We learn Christian words and emulate those we believe are enjoying success in the Christian life. Inside we are still driven, frustrated, fearful and we still struggle with sins that threaten to destroy us.

The Old Man Exposed

The old man is revealed through his sinful behavior. The old man is exposed through good bible teaching. None of us are able to see the truth from God’s eyes on our own. God made us so that we would need His Spirit within us and need each other to teach and encourage us. God gave each of us a spiritual gift that works in unison with the other gifts to edify the church, both individually and collectively. One of these gifts is Pastor-Teacher, which is the ability to look into the scriptures, see the truth and communicate it in an understandable way. As we listen in bible class and learn how/why the old man was built, how/why he operates and how we can put his ideas aside, we grow in our capacity to say no to his desires. To see the old man requires much knowledge and a measure of maturity. Baby Christians are not ready to take on the challenge of our deepest inner motives. When a Christian reaches the adult stages though, he/she must look beyond the surface and begin to seek change in the depths of the heart. It is at this stage of growth that we take on the challenges of transforming the inner man.

The Old Man Rejected

The old man (OM) is the belief and behavior system built into the heart by humans during the time period from their birth until they are saved and in a relationship with God. The OM is a belief and behavior system that views life without God, without God’s truth to see His perspective, without God’s power to contemplate victory and without God’s love to deal with the shame of being weak and selfish. The OM is the system we all built seeking to meet our needs in the devil’s world, using our own abilities, using our own understandings while looking to people for what we need. Before we were saved it was our only option and the only way we knew to protect our self and find happiness. After salvation though, now we have God. God’s Spirit is inside of us, His truth is in the bible that we can learn and use inside of us. After salvation we are able to learn God’s perspective, adopt it as our own and use it as the basis of our emotional attitudes and actions. Now we have the option to reject the ideas of the OM and replace them with the ideas used by Jesus in His humanity, the NM. Now we can say no to the OM because we can see that his ideas are disoriented to God’s plan and disobedient to God’s will. What was the only truth we knew has now been exposed as a lie and we have been given the power to lay it aside and replace it with what God has said in His word.

Transformation – Renewing the Mind

In the 1600’s Spinoza said “nature abhors a vacuum” meaning that nature has a tendency to fill empty spaces. This principle seems to hold true for the soul as well. When we reject the ideas of the OM it leaves a hole in the heart that we are compelled to fill. The opposite is also true as demonstrated by many sheltered college freshmen who went off to school, abandoned their parent’s morality leaving a void they filled with another type of morality. When we reject the OM, we must replace its ideas with NM ideas and allow them to become our way of life. In the bible this process is called in Greek metamorphoo, translated transformation. Transformation is the process God uses to cause believers to grow spiritually. In transformation, the believer lays aside specific ideas previously adopted by the OM and replaces these ideas with specific principles from the word of God. The transformed Christian stops believing the ideas of the OM and therefore rejects them as a basis of action and then replaces them by believing ideas from God’s word and uses them as the basis of action. The Greek metamorphoo is the root of the English word metamorphosis, a process of change that occurs in stages resulting in the emergence of a different way of life. After salvation, God enters all of His children into this process where they grow in stages, taking off the OM, putting on the NM, finally resulting in the believer being like the Lord Jesus Christ.

Summary

After salvation we retain the belief and behavior system we built before we were saved. We carry these ideas into the Christian life and operate on them unconsciously, below the level of awareness. As long as these ideas remain in the heart as an object of faith, we will continue to view life from their vantage point and use them as the logic for our actions. At the point of salvation God enters His children into a process of change called transformation, the mechanics of spiritual growth. We have to enter it willingly and endure in it and when we do, the Spirit will change our hearts to be like Christ. He frees us from slavery to the hunger, fear and self-destruction of the OM and enables us to willingly enslave ourselves to the Lord and live our life by means of the influence of the Spirit. We learn/believe the concepts taught in the bible, assemble them into a belief and behavior system called the NM. When we habitually use the NM as the logical basis for our actions, it becomes our new nature and our natural way of life. We live as imitators of our Lord Jesus Christ, to Him be the glory and honor forever.

Introduction
The amount of money spent in treatment centers for addictions in America is on the rise. Either more people are falling into addictions or more people are educating themselves about addictions and seeking help. I believe the second idea is closer to the truth. Also professional counselors have classified more kinds of behaviors as addictions than before. Now it seems we can be addicted to anything, food, sex, the Internet and a whole host of things that can become the objects of compulsive behavior. It is clear that humans can become compulsive about anything and believe that any person, state of mind or inanimate object is necessary for us to be at ease within our minds. This article will examine some basic issues related to addictions and offer the beginning of God’s solutions for believers who struggle with addictive behaviors.

What is an Addiction?
Addiction is defined as a state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming, as narcotics, to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma. (Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009). Addiction is enslavement or a habit that causes extreme suffering if we try to do without the object of the addiction. The slavery can be mental and/or physical. We can be addicted to a substance like alcohol, to a person like a mate or a situation like the feeling that comes from gambling. Addiction can be mental without a physical dependency, thinking that we must have the object of desire or we can’t be at ease. The addiction can be to substances that cause a physical dependence like drugs or alcohol.

Addiction vs. Dependence
In the medical field, a distinction is made between physical dependence and addiction. A person can become dependent upon a medicine for their body to function in a healthy manner, like diabetics are dependent upon insulin. Addicts on the other hand use their drug of choice for the pleasure and to hide from pain. They have a psychological use for their addiction that is related to escaping from the reality of life. When a person has a medical problem that requires that they become dependent on a medical solution, they are not considered addicts.

Pleasure and Pain
Addiction usually has 2 sides to it. The obvious side is the pleasure involved in the relationship to the object of addiction. Few people become addicted to something that causes them pain but many become addicted to things that bring them pleasure. Alcohol, drugs, gambling, sex, a person and other substances and situations can be a source of pleasure that can become an addiction. When we conclude that the pleasure gained from the object is necessary for our daily life or for us to be at ease, we have become attached to the object in an unhealthy way. The bible explains that our craving for pleasure comes from the corruption of our desires through a selfish nature inherited from Adam and a false belief system that tells us that gratification of our desires is a sufficient substitute for the joy that God wants to give us.

1 John 2:16 For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world.

Lust is normal desire gone wrong. When desire, which is normal in itself is corrupted by the false idea that gratification is happiness, we can become fixated on gratification to the point where it becomes our primary goal in life. God offers the Christian a better way to find happiness that is genuine and lasting.

Gal 5:16 But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh.

When we allow the Holy Spirit who is God, to influence the ideas we use to live our life and make our decisions, He leads us into life of meaning, purpose and fulfillment. The joy and contentment that comes from living a life filled with God’s purpose, is the better life He offers in place of our addictions and gratification as happiness.

Avoiding Pain
The other side of addiction is the use of pleasure as an escape from pain. Life in the devil’s world causes deep soul pain for all of us. This life is full of loss and the loss of important people and things causes grief in our hearts. This life is also filled with injustice and unfair treatment that causes us to feel unfairly treated and cheated by those who hurt us. When we are hurting inside, we naturally look for ways to make the pain go away. The bible talks about the natural reactions of children who have been mishandled by their parents.

Colossians 3:21 Fathers, do not exasperate your children, that they may not lose heart.

To exasperate means to make angry through overbearing treatment. Fathers can allow themselves to become angry with their children and discipline with anger. When they use anger to bully their children, it feels like unfair and unloving treatment to the children. The children naturally react to parental anger by losing heart. The Greek word athumos means to be without passion or to numb your feelings. Children have very few options when parents treat them unkindly. They are too young to leave and go on their own so they have to stay and find a way to cope. One way children cope is to numb their hurt by repressing their feelings. Repressing emotion creates a split in the soul because they lose touch with their pain by forcing it into the subconscious. The pain is still there, hidden but the child no longer remembers it and thinks he has effectively dealt with it, but has not. It will remain unresolved deep in the heart and can lead to depression later in life.

Unresolved Pain
Unresolved, repressed pain eventually comes out in adult life. It shows up in our primary relationships of marriage and raising our own children (see the Angry Dad article). When the pain surfaces, we will have forgotten where it came from, why it is there or what to do about it. We just know that we are sad and we hurt inside. Not knowing how to resolve the pain, we look for any way we can find to not feel it. A convenient pain reduction method is the pleasure of alcohol, drugs, gambling or a love relationship. When we use a substance and get pain relief, we begin to hope that we have found a good way to reduce our pain. The pleasure and relief cycle begins to perpetuate itself but offers no real resolution to the pain. In addition, the more we use pleasure to distract us from pain, the less effective pleasure from substance use works. We build a tolerance to the substance so that we have to use more and more to get the same relief. Tolerance is why addicts lose control of their using behaviors. Eventually, they have to use so much that they spend all of their money to obtain enough to find relief. Their behavior spirals out of control and they become enslaved by their substance of choice. The bible explains that when we abandon our self to pursue pleasure, we become more and more desensitized to pleasure and pain.

Ephesians 4:17 This I say therefore, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind, 18 being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart; 19 and they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality, for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness.

The Fatal End
When we reject God’s plan for happiness and pursue happiness through addictive behaviors, we end up callous and abandon our self to a frantic search for happiness through pleasure. We end up enslaved to a progressive addiction producing less and less satisfaction, still in pain and caught in a trap. Additionally, some will also eventually lose their health because overuse of alcohol or drugs kills the body. If our addiction is to gambling, we lose all of our money, then our family, our jobs and maybe everything we love. The end of an addiction is a bad place where losing everything is inevitable.

The Better Way
Many people fall prey to addictive behaviors but God has a better way to live. He offers the pleasure of His presence through the Holy Spirit, which provides more pleasure and satisfaction than anything in this life. When we trust in Christ for salvation, God gives us eternal life as a present possession the moment we believe. Following our salvation, He offers us a life of victory over all of the difficulties of life. Using His grace to faithfully endure hardship in every stage of life brings great fulfillment in this life and reward in the next. God’s plan offers the human race a far better life than a life dominated by addictions. His way builds us into strong, loving, giving people who can gracefully endure everything life brings all the way to the end. His way involves an addiction, but an addiction to God who is the only one worthy of our total dependence and worship.

Ephesians 1:3-7 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, 4 just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him. In love 5 He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, 6 to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. 7 In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace,

Before God created the world, He saw each of us and created our blessings for time and eternity. He decided to send His son Jesus to pay for our sins and chose us to be saved in Christ. Before time he decided to adopt us into His family and lavish His grace on us so that when all is said and done, His love and grace will be glorified and He will be praised forever. We have a chance to be a part of this great plan and that is a far better opportunity than being dominated by an addiction to hide from our pain.

I hold several images in my mind that I use to motivate and guide me every day. My favorite for the moment is Jesus walking on the water, which I will explain momentarily. First let’s talk briefly about images. All of us make and hold images in our minds that we use to evaluate and guide us in the different aspects of our lives. A few examples will help clarify what we mean here.

Relationship Images
All of us have an image of what/how our relationships should work. We have an image of how to treat our friends and how they should treat us. We hold an image of how our marriage should work and how our partner should treat us. We hold an image of how children should act both in public and in private. All of us have endured someone’s over indulged, under disciplined children that violated our image of how children should behave. Our minds form and store images that correspond to ideas we have learned.

Origin of Images
We formed most of our images from our own experiences. Most of our images came from the way our families operated. As we grew up, we observed how our parents related to one another, how they trained their children, how they prioritized their time/money and we stored images of the way these relationships were structured. These images form our beliefs about how relationships and priorities are supposed to work. We use these images to evaluate the success or failure of our relationships.

Guided by Images

In fact,we are all compelled to recreate these images in our adult life. We are compelled to relate in our marriage the way our parents related. We raise our children the way we were raised, even using the same phrases our parents used. We find ourselves choosing similar priorities as our parents did. The images we hold determine our expectations and guide our actions. Our images are the expression of our belief system and are the guiding factor in all of our behaviors. We live by our stored images

False Images
Some of our images are totally false while others are skewed versions of the truth. Most of us formed our images (ideas/beliefs) by observing people who were dominated by false beliefs and living under the dominance of their flesh. I had loving parents but their knowledge of the truth was very limited and their relationships were only moderately healthy. What they modeled became what I programmed and stored as my image of how relationships are supposed to work. As I entered into adult relationships, it became obvious that I was relating with unhealthy expectations. My relationships revealed that the images I was using to guide my behavior were unhealthy.

Exchanging Images
It was then that I realized the need to exchange my old ideas for biblical ideas. I began to better understand what spiritual growth was intended to accomplish. God intends that we surrender our old images for images based on biblical principles. As you consider this, remember how things worked in your family and look within at your images of how life is supposed to work. Look especially at how your relationships are working out. You are conducting them according to the images you are holding in your heart.

Now, back to the image of Jesus walking on the water. This image has special meaning to me in my relationship with God and with the difficulties of life in the devil’s world. I use it to keep myself moving ahead when circumstances appear to have me blocked. I use it to help me keep a divine perspective about what looks like a problem I cannot overcome. Let me set the scene as taught in Mark 6:45-51.

Feeding the 5,000
Jesus and the disciples had traveled across the sea of Galilee to find some solitude away from the masses. The crossed the water and went up into the hill country so that He could pray and rest. As He was looking out from the mountain, He saw a great crowd that had followed them. This crowd had come without food to find Him, looking for the miracles For which He was famous. He used the occasion to test His disciples and then He fed 5,000 people with 2 fish and 5 loaves of bread. When He had dismissed the crowd, He sent the disciples back across in the boat while He retired up into the mountain to be alone with His Father. Mark tells us that He could see them out on the water from His position on land and went out to help them. This is where the story gets very interesting for me.

Jesus’ Faith
Imagine Jesus coming down from the mountain, heading for the water. He descends into the hilly area and finally to the beach area. Ahead is the water between Him and the disciples in the boat. Now think for a minute. Most of us, if not all of us would consider the water to be a problem, an obstacle standing in our way of doing God’s will. We would hesitate, look for a boat and consider it impossible to reach the disciples. He didn’t see it that way. Jesus approached the water and just kept going. I wonder, as He approached the water, if He even slowed down. I doubt if He did. He knew that His place was with the disciples, this was His Father’s will and He just kept going, knowing that His Father would make the water hold Him up. Now that is faith! Notice in the scripture that His faith inspired Peter to believe that he could walk on water as well.

Keep Moving
When I am faced with difficulties and it seems that there is no way to keep moving, doing what God has left me to do, I bring this image to mind. It helps me to remember that human logic is not the way to discern God’s will. He will make the air hold me up if need be, for me to accomplish His will. I just keep moving ahead into God’s will and God’s plan for my life. No money? No problem, just keep moving. No way? Yes way, just keep moving. The image of Jesus not even breaking stride as He approached what appeared to be a serious obstacle, motivates and guides me to do the same with the obstacles in my life.

Build your Own
Use the bible to build your own images that help you in the spiritual life. I love the image of Joseph as a slave in Egypt. He was the best slave anybody ever saw. He was faithful to the Lord and God was with Him in such a visible way that everyone could see that God was with Him. His life is a great image when life feels unfair. Jesus knew the importance of imagery and taught in parable and stories. Paul used many different images to communicate the message of the New Testament. He used the image of the Roman soldier, the athletic games, the human body and many others. These images give us a way to visualize the concepts of the scripture so that we can apply them to life. Build your own images out of the scripture and use them to keep moving toward God.

This post is the ninth in a series titled “Transformation Workbook“.

Review
God created us to glorify Him by expressing His character through our lives. He made us to be like Him, in His image and likeness so that we would be compatible for relationship with Him, complete only in Him and able to communicate with Him. He made us to be relational beings so that we could interact with Him and with one another. Interaction requires an exchange of ideas and the ability to build and process these ideas. Our hunger for relationship moves us to trust and bond with others. When we bond, we form a dependence and open ourselves to be influenced by the beliefs of the person we trust. It is through our most intimate relationships that we build our own ideas as we grow from childhood to mature adults. These relationships are experienced at different stages of life and the ideas we gain at each stage are the building blocks of our beliefs and behaviors. It is the first of these stages leading to adulthood that interest us in this article.

BUILDING BLOCKS – STAGES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
We grow from birth to adulthood all the way to death, in stages. These stages are experienced at different ages. Normally these stages correspond loosely to age brackets, like 0-2 years old, 2-5 years old and so forth. Each stage has its own developmental tasks that challenge us, like learning to walk and talk. The purpose of each stage is to develop the skills necessary to master these tasks before we move on to the next one. The first stages of human development deal primarily with motor skills and physical growth. As we enter into the training phases of life, it is our ideas that take center stage as developmental tasks.

Biblical Termonology
The writers of the bible recognized these stages and used different Greek words to describe children of different ages. Modern day psychologists have also studied these stages and have written about the different developmental tasks that challenge us at each stage. It is the challenge of these growth tasks that motivate us to grow and build our own beliefs and behavior systems. These stages are briefly described so that we might recall some type of influence, either positive or negative, that occurred in one of these stages, that still impacts our behavior today. It is especially the negative experiences and influences of our youth that motivate us to hold on to false beliefs and behaviors that can hinder our intimacy with Christ. The following chart gives a brief description of each stages of human development up to adulthood.

BIBLICAL TERM            AGE                                   DEVELOPMENTAL TASKS

BREPHOS-NEPIOS 0-2 yrs                     Develop senses & motor skills – sucking, grasping, looking, listening, crawling, walking, comprehension, talking, self-awareness, attachment, trust. Infants use their senses and motor skills to relate to their world. They begin to develop basic categories of concrete objects in memory (hard, soft, color). None or light discipline advised. Secure mother attachment and constant care is necessary to form a healthy sense of self

PAIS 2-5 yrs Development of symbols-language to understand & relate to the world. All thinking is concrete and the child is not yet capable to conceive in the abstract. Imagination flourishes and language becomes the primary means of influencing their world. Light and immediate discipline is effective. Short-term mother separation and exploration is normal (mother’s day out) and healthy. All day, Daycare creates insecure bond with mother and can result in habitual anxiety and feelings of abandonment.

TEKNON 6-11 yrs                              Development of logic and examples (parables). Learning about classification of categories & numbers. Sharing & sympathy can be taught; Age where planned training & discipline based on rules is effective. Choices & consequences. All day school is appropriate with nurturing teacher (mother figure). Public socialization begins, bringing social pressure to conform & compete; Fear of social rejection & being different; Need for parental reassurance & training about peer pressure to protect against discouragement from social competition.

HUIOS –                         12-Adult                          Development of abstract thought and hypothetical concepts. Understanding of ethics, law, morality, social issues, theoretical concepts. Focus on adaptations to society and how the person fits into the world. Able to understand concepts without concrete examples. Focus on choices & consequences as the person interacts in relationships. Puberty, sexuality & preparation for marriage. Pressures of developing sexuality and interaction with opposite sex. Personal attractiveness issues; Need for ongoing parental training to maintain perspective about self-concept related to attractiveness. Reminded that God has a plan for sex and marriage.

Principles
1. Each stage of human development opens new challenges that motivate the child to grow and develop new skills to accomplish the mission of each stage
2. Each stage requires new beliefs to build an overall life view. Beliefs are formed in small and simple pieces that combine to form more complex and abstract ideas.
3. The child’s environment in each stage influences what the child believes about self, others and life in general.
4. Beliefs are adopted in response to environmental pressures and based on how adequately or inadequately the child’s needs are supplied.
5. Parental care influences a child’s beliefs about security, self-esteem, love, belonging, trust and personal ability.
6. The security of early attachment & bonding is necessary for a child to build positive beliefs about himself and his worth in relation to others.
7. Security as a person is the foundation to accept eternal security in Christ and to think of God as a loving parent.

Summary
The early stages of growth are focused on building security that comes from the stability of parental love and nurturance. At each successive stage, children grow more independent and their ideas become more abstract and complex. Even into the adult stages, children need parental interest, guidance, support and availability. The latter stages still require supervision and structure that guides a child into healthy activities and peer groups. As God is ever present and available to us, so we can be to our children. As God has a plan for each of us based on our gifting, so we can help our children see their own abilities and steer them into healthy areas of growth.

The discussion above describes healthy growth and good parenting. Educated and attentive parents have a chance to produce healthy children who make good choices in adult life.

Unhealthy Development
Many of us didn’t have healthy parents who provided a positive environment or who were interested in our daily struggles. Many, especially in latter day USA, were raised in single parent homes by mothers who were overworked and overstressed. Many that I have spoken with felt abandoned and cut adrift in their early years. They were allowed to form unhealthy love relationships and peer groups that led them into early sexuality and adult life. Some were even abused by a member of their own family at an early age destroying their ability to trust. Many of us bonded with very unhealthy parents who were so occupied with themselves that they had no heart to give much to us. They were so busy trying to overcome their own hurtful childhood that they had little love left to share with their children. If you will be honest, you will find yourself somewhere in this description. There are no perfect parents but some parents give more than others and some are wiser than others.

Unhealthy Ideas
It was during these stages of growth that we built our false ideas. Our need met with disappointing circumstances and we reacted to pain by building false ideas. Even when parents have the best intentions and parent well, children become overwhelmed by life in the devil’s world. We misunderstand, reach false conclusions and build false ideas about our self and our life. The old man belief and behavior system is built by human viewpoint developed during the stages of human growth. It is these false ideas that we built growing up without God that block our ability to apply the word of God. It is these false ideas that we must detach from our faith so that we can reattach our faith to the truth. Let’s look at an example of a man that I counseled:

Example
JD’s parents fought often and loudly until he was 6 years old when they divorced. His father came home unexpectedly one day and found his wife in bed with a mutual friend. JD’s dad became violent and sent his soon to be ex-wife to the hospital. She filed charges and his dad went to prison and JD was never allowed to visit him. When he was released from prison, rather than visiting his son, he left for parts unknown. JD didn’t see or hear from his father until he was 24 years old and then he received a birthday card in the mail.
For JD it all happened fast. One morning he said bye to his dad on his way to the school bus and then he never saw him again. Not only that, but his mother was never the same again. The new “dads” she brought home for brief periods had not been kind to him. JD was confused to say the least. In fact, JD was very angry. Angry at his dad for leaving him, at his mom for becoming a basket case and at the new dads for resenting his very existence. Inside, JD was still a 6-year-old boy who came home from school and his whole world had been taken away. How many times had he wished that he could do that day over? He wouldn’t go to school. He would stay home and change how everything had happened. He would control his world to be more to his liking. Who could blame him for wanting to take control away from God and recreate his world and life experience. Many of us would like to change what happened in our lives.

JD seemed to be a normal young man, well adjusted and moving ahead in his career. Looks quite often are deceiving. We even can deceive ourselves. Inside JD was needy and angry but he didn’t know it. He had forgotten his pain. He had buried it with repression so that he no longer felt it. He didn’t feel mad, or sad, or much of anything really. In fact, JD had ceased to feel at all, except when his team won or lost or sometimes when he ran out of things to keep him occupied. When that happened and he had a chance to reflect, which was seldom, he would grow frantic and quickly find something to keep him from feeling his pain, like food, alcohol or TV.

One day, JD heard the gospel, believed it and was given eternal life. When he went down to the stage, the counselor congratulated him and told him that God was now his Father. Talk about conflicted inside, he was so confused. What did this mean? If God was his father, would He now abandon him or abuse him unfairly like all of his other fathers? This was supposed to be good news but to JD it was horrible. His belief system told him that fathers were only good for letting you down or treating you unfairly.

It was with this inner turmoil after many years of bible study that JD came to counseling. It took some time for him to turn his feelings back on so that he was no longer numb. It took even more time for him to recognize that he was still in pain over what had happened in his life. He thought that because he had repressed his pain and was no longer aware of it, that he had resolved the issue in his heart. When JD was able to feel his pain again, he was able to see what he had believed as a reaction to the events of his life. He had believed that it was somehow his fault and he was angry with himself for not being able to control the will of other people. He believed that he was not worth loving and that anyone who told him that they did love him was either a liar or crazy. He had believed that men in general were unfaithful and cruel, causing him to question whether he would ever have children of his own. Most importantly, he thought that all fathers either left or treated you unfairly and he was unable to trust and accept God’s love as a reality in his heart. He knew the concept and agreed that it was probably true that God loved him, but God’s love was not real to him.

When I last heard from JD, he was still struggling with these issues but struggling with hope. He had come to understand that his earlier conclusions about fathers and himself were false and was prayerfully looking to God to change his heart. He had made good progress with his numbness and was able to feel passion for the truth and compassion for the lost. JD is on the journey to spiritual maturity and health. I am glad for him and even more grateful to have been allowed to help him on his way.

Look at Yourself
Look at your own development and review the events of your life. If there was great turmoil then it stands to reason there is great pain hidden in your heart. I am not suggesting that you go looking for trouble, just go looking for the truth. If you are also unfeeling as a rule, then realize that you are most likely numb as a defense from hurt and pain. If you know God loves you but do not experience His love as a reality in your life, then realize you are only experiencing a small part of what God wants for you. Be courageous, look into your heart and see if your old beliefs are hindering you from fully experiencing the truth of God. If you find that they are, keep reading, Christ will lead the way out of this place that Adam took us.

Questions
1. Do you know truth from God’s word that you don’t experience as reality?

2. Are you numb to pain and sadness as well as joy and peace?

3. Did you have a difficult time as a child?

4. Did your parents divorce? Remarry?

5. Were you raised in a home with a step-parent?

6. Did one of your parents leave and stay gone for a long time?

7. Do you blame yourself for things that are not your fault?

8. Do you believe that you are not worthy to be loved?

View all posts in the Transformation Workbook series