Credibility 2 Old Man Relating

This is long but worth it

The church of Jesus Christ in the US has a credibility gap. This gap is between the message the church proclaims and the way its members live. Not every believer in the church falls into this category, but I believe that most of us do. In order for the church to enjoy an effective ministry in this generation, its individual members must allow the Lord to purify their hearts to be like Christ. In this article we will continue the discussion of the reasons why all Christians need to be purified through spiritual growth. We will examine the sin nature and the relationship beliefs we all build as unbelievers who are born separated from God. The repetition in this article is intentional to drive home specific concepts.

Sin nature
Before we look at our old relationship approach, let us first discuss the sin nature. Our natural tendency to sin is an inherited characteristic that has passed down from Adam. The sin nature is passed down genetically through the father’s sperm to the body of the new person (Rom 5:12). The sin nature, whatever it really is, comes to us in our bodies and stays with us as long as we remain in our human bodies. We keep it all of our lives and are free of it only when we die and leave our bodies behind. The sin nature goes to the grave with the human body while the soul and spirit return to God who sends the soul to its final abode. The point is that we retain our corrupted nature throughout this life and we will be tempted by its selfish influence until we pass into the next life.

Belief Systems
We retain the sin nature all of our lives but the nature to sin is not our biggest problem. The bigger problem is the corrupting influence the sin nature has had on our belief system. Every normal human being, beginning after birth, builds a system of beliefs that guides them and determines the way they view everything in life. This system is developed over time as we grow through the normal stages of development. Our beliefs are built by individual choice (responsibility) as we interpret our human experiences and are influenced by the beliefs of others in our environment (modeling).
God designed the heart to use the belief system to control what we think and how we behave in relationships. Whatever we choose to believe becomes part of the system and we automatically form behaviors that are compatible with our beliefs.

Sin nature Influence
As we grow up from infancy and pass through the normal stages of human development, the sin nature influences us to build self-centered and self-serving beliefs. We see ourselves as the central figure in the universe. Born without knowledge and having to build our own ideas, our selfish nature confuses us about who really is the central figure in the universe. These self-centered ideas form our viewpoints about others and ourselves and out of these ideas we build our personal strategies for relating. Before salvation, because we cannot process the truth of God, every idea we build is human viewpoint and is contrary to the will of God. It is these human viewpoint beliefs built from the influence of our selfish nature that God calls upon us to lay aside. These ideas were formed without God and the truth of God’s word. They place self instead of God at the center and serve self rather than serve God. These old man ideas have to be purged from our hearts for us to become servants of God rather than servants of sin. In the following paragraphs I would like to describe how these old man beliefs corrupt the way we conduct ourselves in relationships. It is in personal relationships that old man beliefs are best exposed so that they can be identified and then discarded.

Supply for Human Needs
Human beings are born with the primal instincts to pursue pleasure and prevent pain. These two basic directives give us a working outline to understand the beliefs we built and the behaviors we must tear down. The drive to pursue pleasure is the instinct to find ways to supply our divinely designed needs. God designed the human soul with needs and designed us to need someone else to supply what we need. He made us so that we are incapable of meeting our own needs. By divine design, each of us is born with the need to be loved, the need to belong, the need to make a significant contribution to others and the need to be recognized for our contributions. God offers a plan to meet these needs to all and provides for these needs to all who will trust in Him.

God made some of our needs (marriage) to be met by other humans. Our core needs (spiritual needs) He designed to be supplied only by Him. God made us to need both the human and divine supply of our needs for our souls to be completely fulfilled. We especially need what He supplies. All of us need His love, need to belong to Him, need to contribute to other believers and need to receive His approval. The bible offers us God’s love (Rom 5:5), belonging (Eph 1:13), power to contribute (Eph 1:18-20) and approval (Mt 25:21), as the great motivators of the Christian life. Only when we allow God to meet our core needs can the human soul be happy. In the garden, Adam and Eve were able to attach the right needs to the right person. They had each other for their human needs and they had God to meet their spiritual needs. After they fell from the garden, their sin has caused all of us to be born separated from God. Now that we are all born separated from God, the only option is for us to attach all of our needs to man. We are born with needs and born with the instinctive drive to have them met and because we are born without God, we build a core belief that man can meet all of our needs. As babies we don’t even know about God but we do know about mommy and we attach all of our needs to her. We believe that attaching all of our needs to other humans is the right thing to do and that if we can make it work, we can find happiness with this approach to life.

At the core, fallen man believes that all of our needs can be met through relationships with other humans. After they sinned, Adam and Eve turned to each other to resolve their problem rather than God (Gen 3:7). Man has been looking to man ever since to meet the needs that only God can supply. Believing in and depending on man for what only God can supply is idolatry and instead of resolving problems, it actually multiplies our problems.

Idolatry & the Pain of Unmet Needs – Pursuing Pleasure
Idolatry can be defined as believing in and depending upon anyone or anything to provide what only God can and is meant to provide. Idolatry not only insults God but it causes deep disappointment in those who practice it. All of mankind practices idolatry by believing that man can provide for the needs that only God is designed to supply. One of the most tragic results of looking to man for these needs is the inevitable disappointment that occurs when these needs go unmet. Man cannot provide for needs that were designed to be met by God, he is unable. Man cannot even be consistent in meeting needs that he was meant to supply. Looking to man leaves us empty, needy and hungry for love. The desire for love when unmet or unsatisfied turns into a frantic demand for love. Frantic demand motivates us to manipulate others to give us the love we need. Attaching needs to man results in certain failure and frustrated desire, which turns into deep disappointment, which turns into frantic demand, which motivates manipulation and blame. As our efforts to find love fail and our frustration grows we begin to fear that we will never be loved and that we are not worthy to be loved. We assign blame and trade partners. We move from person to person using the same strategy. We implement self-improvement to increase conditional worthiness by looking better or thinner. When man looks to man to meet core love needs, the result will always be the same, emptiness. It is the pain of repeated failure in these relationships that eventually causes people to despair, become depressed and give up hope of ever finding love. Some finally commit suicide.

The core belief that man can meet our needs creates an idolatrous approach to relationships. The pursuit of pleasure by seeking to meet our needs through man always ends badly because it never works. It cannot work because man doesn’t have what only God was intended to supply. The old saying, “you can’t get blood from a turnip” applies to this situation. Also, it cannot work because God won’t allow it to work. He hates idolatry and allows all who practice it suffer the inevitable heartache of unmet needs. This is the story of man’s relationships.

Defense Mechanisms – Preventing Pain
When we pursue pleasure by looking to man to meet our needs we end up with pain. It is the inevitable pain of failed idolatrous relationships that evokes the second primal instinct, the drive to prevent pain. Born without God, our only alternative is to look to man to meet our needs. This pursuit of pleasure is man’s attempt to meet his needs without God and preventing pain is his attempt to deal with the pain of life without Him. Looking to man eventuates in the pain of disappointment, feelings of emptiness and the conclusion that we are not worthy to be loved. We follow this pattern over and over again starting with parents, then peers, then a partner in marriage and then followed by our children. Every relationship seems to end up the same way – painful. In order to manage pain, which we hate, we instinctively implement defensive strategies that are meant to prevent pain. Freud noticed these strategies while counseling his patients and named them “defense mechanisms”. Defense mechanisms are instinctive mental tricks that we use to minimize feelings of pain. There are too many to list in this article so I will list the two most common.

Repression
The first and most common is emotional repression. Repression is an instinctive move to numb ourselves so that we don’t feel emotional pain. We simply tell ourselves to stop feeling so that the feeling of pain will ease. Repressing our emotions is effective in easing pain but it also has an unfortunate side effect. When we stop feeling pain, we stop feeling anything. The numbing of pain becomes the numbing of joy, the numbing of pleasure, love and happiness. Emotional repression is the defense mechanism most often used by abused children. Paul describes it in his letter to the Colossians:

Col 3:21 Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged.

The word discouraged is the Greek word athumos meaning without passion. Thumos is a word for anger, emotion or passion of any kind. When a parent abuses a child, the child is unable to resolve the pain of abuse by thinking it through with biblical principles. Instead, the child will use athumos to ease the feelings of emotional pain. All of us have used this defense to some degree and all of us are numb inside to some degree. The pain of many unsatisfying relationships beginning with parents on to those in adulthood has motivated us to become numb in order to just function. In fact, going numb and then moving on without truly resolving the cause of the pain with God’s word is what most of us call dealing with it. The biblical solution is to reject the idolatrous approach to relationships altogether and look to God to meet our needs rather than man.

Denial
Another very common defense mechanism is called denial. Denial is not a river in Egypt goes the old joke. Denial works by simply pretending something is not what it is. It is a form of self-deception where we pretend the painful situation does not exist. Scarlet Ohara in Gone with the Wind with her famous, “I’ll think about that tomorrow” phrase was a master of denial. John discusses this mechanism when describing the enemies of truth:

1 John 1:8 If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us

Denial is self-deception. Rather than face the fact that we inherited a sin nature form Adam, we will just pretend that we didn’t and make the problem go away. Many Christians that I know pretend that they are spiritually successful because they have amassed a great deal of bible knowledge. The fact that they are filled with pain, anger, self-hatred, self righteousness and guilt is denied by pretending that knowledge is synonymous with spiritual maturity.

Invisible Lie
When we operate from the idea that relating to one another is God’s plan for giving us happiness and fulfillment, our relationships will always be a source of disappointment and pain. You would think that after being hurt so many times, that we would wise up and abandon our idolatrous approach to relationships. You would think, but you would think wrong. The belief that man can meet our needs was one of the first ideas we adopted. We built it from the feeling of security we felt with our parents as infants. Even those who had a horrible childhood believe it. Everyone believes it because when we were born without God, man was our only option to believe in. It is the terrible plight of all of Adam’s children. Some, having been hurt have given up hope of ever achieving this kind of love, but still believe that a love relationship with man is what creates happiness. This lie is so deeply ingrained and so core to the system that it is almost impossible to see it for what it is.

Credibility at Last
Now, if you have stuck it out and followed the logic of this discussion this far, don’t miss the real point I am trying to make. I know you must be asking what any of this has to do with building credibility for the church. The answer is that it has everything to do with building credibility for the church. When a believer is still operating from the lie that people can meet his needs, then he is still relating to others to gratify self and still relating to others conditionally. This believer, saved by grace is still involving himself with others for one reason, to meet his own needs. Everything he says, everything he does is still for self. He is still hungry for love, for approval, for recognition, for acceptance and everyone he relates with feels it and knows it. His whole life strategy contradicts the message that he has delivered, that God will meet all of our needs through a grace relationship with Christ.

If and when a believer learns to detach his neediness from people and reattach his neediness to God, only then can God meet the core needs He designed in the man. God can never meet the core emotional needs of a believer who is seeking to be fulfilled through idolatrous means. God will refuse to meet the needs of anyone seeking fulfillment through idolatry. It is only when we have allowed God to fulfill our hearts that we gain the capacity to give in grace and love without conditions. It is only when we have gained the capacity to give without strings and love without conditions that what oozes from our hearts can be consistent with the message of the gospel. It is a love relationship with God through Christ that fulfills the human heart and overflows to those around him. The overflow is the ministry to others. When you have enough love from God for yourself, He keeps pouring so that your cup runneth over to others. When you finally “get it” that He loves you because He chose to love you based on the merits of Christ and is looking for nothing from you to evoke it from Him, then you are able to stop trying to earn it from Him.

Fellow believers, this capacity to receive grace and then give it and receive love until it overflows and spills out onto others, is what creates credibility for the message. It is what fulfills your heart and what others see that they want for themselves.

In the next article I will finally discuss God’s method of dismantling this wicked belief system Paul labeled the “old man”.