This post is the sixth in a series titled “Transformation Workbook“.
In the first section of this series we discussed God’s purpose for the believer which is to glorify Him. We glorify God as He transforms us into the image of His Son and we express His character through our souls in our daily lives.
In the second section we are discussing our relationship with God. In the first article (2A) of this section we talked about the way God designed or souls to be compatible with Him. The second article (2B) explained how God completes and fulfills our human needs and this third article (2C) in the second section of the series will discuss the system He created for He and us to communicate with one another.
I feel the need for a disclaimer at this point. As you may have surmised, this workbook is not intended to be a complete theological discussion. For example, the discussion of God’s progressive revelation could easily be fleshed out with more scripture and explanation. While I am fully capable of providing that kind of theological information, that is not my purpose in this workbook. If you find yourself lacking information about theological issues, then e-mail me and I will help you specifically in specific areas. The purpose of this workbook is to make applications to human life using both theological and psychological principles.
Communication between God & Man
God created us so that He could communicate with us, share His heart with us so that we can know Him, love Him and imitate Him (Eph 5:1-2). Throughout human history God has progressively revealed Himself and His plan to man. He speaks to us through His word, which was first written by Moses and which we have in a completed written form. He also speaks to the soul of believers through God-Holy Spirit (GHS) to reveal the meaning and practical application of His word. GHS takes the written word and makes it the living word in our souls by revealing an image of the person of Christ and His will for our lives.
The purpose of communication is the transfer of thought from the mentality of one person to the mentality of another/others. Communication allows one person to share ideas with another so the other person can think the same. God communicates His ideas with us so that we can understand His ideas and think like He thinks. He patterned our mentality after His own to facilitate the transfer of His thoughts to us. He made our souls with the specific capacity to understand and utilize His thoughts. The human soul is made to for the purpose of understanding and imitating God in keeping with our divine purpose discussed in the first section of this workbook
God created the human soul with faculties (Greek aistheterion) as found in Heb 5:14. Faculties are mental organs that perform the function of processing mental phenomena in the same way that bodily organs process nutrition. These faculties are the divinely designed system for the perception of knowledge. Our mental organs have the capacity to learn, habituate and develop. God designed our faculties to process information and use it to build our ideas and beliefs. It is these faculties that GHS uses to process the word of God in our souls.
Driven to Understand
Before we examine our human faculties, it is important to understand a basic human drive that God programmed into the soul. We are compelled to understand life. We are born with no knowledge whatsoever, only a few basic instinctive behaviors like the instinct to cry and nurse. We know nothing about life before we are born and then poof, we are alive and caught in the pressures that come with being alive as a human being. We didn’t plan to be alive, ask to be alive and weren’t allowed to prepare for life. When we arrive in this life we are compelled to understand the things we need to know to be able to meet our needs. We are driven to observe, analyze, evaluate and reach conclusions about our human experience so that we can form opinions about ourselves, others, God and life itself.
Faculties & Function
God created the human soul with two separate mental faculties called the mind (Grk nous) & the heart (Grk kardia). These distinctions of our mental faculties and their functions used by Jesus and Paul were actually developed by Plato and Aristotle. Let us define these faculties and examine how they function to build our life views.
MIND – nous – mental organ of perception, evaluation and concluding.
The mind perceives information and human experience for the purpose of evaluation and reaching conclusions that explain our experience. The mind is the faculty that evaluates facts or what we perceive as facts. We observe the events that occur around us, compare them with other or previous events so that we can reach conclusions that enable us to understand them as they relate to our own person. The mind’s purpose is to perceive, understand and conclude.
HEART – kardia – mental organ of unconscious control that contains the belief system built from all the conclusions we believe. The heart is the faculty that uses the perceptions formed by the mind to determine our values and priorities. The heart takes the conclusions formed by the mind and arranges them into a system of ideas that generate our views, opinions, attitudes and behaviors. All of the conclusions that are believed and only those that are believed are used to form the belief system. The heart uses this belief system to develop behavioral strategies designed to relate to others. The ideas programmed into the belief system control our attitudes and actions. The heart is the control system of the soul. It uses whatever ideas we put into it as the boundaries for our attitudes and actions. We think, feel and act according to the ideas that we build into our hearts and these ideas control our thoughts, feelings and actions. The heart is the unconscious control center for the human soul.
Let’s develop some principles to make sure we have a handle on the function of the faculties of mind and heart.
1. The heart and mind were designed to process the truth of God.
2. The mind evaluates life events to understand and reach conclusions
3. Conclusions in the mind are seen as theories or possible explanations
Often our initial conclusions are educated guesses to explain our experience
We form many conclusions in life that we never accept as true
We are taught ideas that others have accepted as fact that we never accept
The ideas that we postulate or learn that we never accept remain as theories.
4. Only the conclusions that are believed actually influence the heart
5. Conclusions the heart believes are formed into a cohesive belief system
6. Pre-fall A/E had the spiritual capacity to understand & believe God’s word
7. Post-fall, we are all born separate from God and unable to process truth
8. Post-fall we conjure our own theories and accept the ideas of the world
We are all compelled to explain and make sense of our experiences. We are also compelled to develop life strategies that maximize pleasure and minimize pain. We evaluate our life experiences and arrive at conclusions that influence the way we conduct ourselves in relationships. We are especially influenced by those life events that cause us great pleasure or pain. Whatever conclusions we reach and then believe, we use to program the heart and form our belief system. Most of our heart beliefs operate under the radar of our consciousness. We all believe things and then forget what we believed. We all lose awareness of our old logic that can cause us to react illogically to present life experiences.
Our minds evaluate our life experiences to understand and reach conclusions that explain our life. The conclusions we believe are transferred to the heart and become part of our belief system. Our beliefs control our thoughts, feelings and behaviors.
The full significance of these distinctions will be developed in a latter section of this study. For now, let’s find some application for life.
1. You are the way you are because of what you have chosen to believe.
2. The conclusions you have reached and then believed are controlling your viewpoints, feelings, attitudes, words and behaviors.
3. You are the way you are because of what you continue to believe.
4. Once we believe an idea, that particular idea continues to influence us until we choose to stop believing it.
5. Once we choose to believe an idea, we keep believing it until we stop – runs automatically
6. To change your inner feelings and/or behavior, change your beliefs.
EX: The bible promises that GHS will produce peace in the heart of the believer. The production of inner peace from the ministry of GHS will be hindered by wrong beliefs. Believers can be confused about the promise of inner peace because they don’t understand that false beliefs telling us to be anxious or feel guilty can hinder the ministry of GHS.
7. Elimination of false beliefs frees the soul to accept the spiritual logic as revealed by GHS that creates peace.
A host of believers have learned many great things about the Lord and His plan for our lives. These same highly educated believers have great difficulty making application of these principles. We know the truth but don’t feel the truth, don’t speak the truth in intimate relationships and don’t behave in alignment with what we know to be the truth. In spite of being walking bible commentaries we are unable to love, to give in grace, to forgive, to express the fruits of the Spirit or live like Christ. The answer to this situation is not to attend another bible study unless it is this one. The solution is to remove the old beliefs that controlled our lives before we came to Christ. We believe the truth but we are still controlled by our old beliefs. The changing of our belief systems is the subject of this workbook and the only way to truly live the Christian life.
View all posts in the Transformation Workbook series
Good job, hun! Well explained, thanks.