This post is the eighth in a series titled “Transformation Workbook“.
Review
The Transformation Workbook (TW) is a study about how God changes a lost sinner into the likeness of His Son Jesus Christ. The study encompasses God’s purpose, our created pattern, how we process information to be reprogrammed, the great problems caused by the fall of Adam and finally God’s provision for transforming us into His own image.
In sections 1 of the TW we discussed God’s purpose for creating us, which is to glorify Him. I suggest you return to the beginning and read those sections if you are just now joining the discussion. Section 2 talked about our created pattern after the likeness and image of God, or our divine design. We discussed how God created us compatible for relationship, with needs that only He could complete and with a mind and heart so that we could communicate with Him.
Preview
We now are entering the third of the 5 sections in the TW. This section will discuss how God designed our minds and hearts to process our life experiences and relationships. In this section we will discuss bonding in relationships, the building blocks of human development and belief systems. Bonding describes the trust attachments we make in relationships that open us to influence. It is part of the worship instinct that God designed in us. The building blocks of thinking are formed as we go through the normal stages of human development from birth until death. Bonding in relationships as we travel through the stages of development works together to form a belief system that determines our thoughts, feelings and behaviors.
BONDING – TRUST & ATTACHMENT – THE WORSHIP INSTINCT
Inner Longings
All of us are born into this life with a great need and longing for love, protection and the compulsion to totally trust someone. John 7:37-38 explains that God made us with a koilia Grk, an empty place out of which these longings for relationship originate. Jesus goes on to say that His provision for this “soul thirst” is to be indwelt and filled with the Holy Spirit, ie a relationship with God. At this moment, I encourage you to look within your heart and make contact with your own desire for love and intimacy. Along with these divinely designed needs, we are born with instinctive behaviors that drive us and enable us to meet these needs. In the first years of life we instinctively bond and attach ourselves to our caregivers trusting them to love us and provide for us.
Worship Instinct
God made man as a worshipper. He made us to have deep longings and to have a sense that we are unable to control our own lives. He also gave us the drive to find and attach ourselves to someone we think will love us and take care of us. The emptiness He created in us causes us to yearn for love. The immensity of life and our failure to control life conveys our need for help. The instinct to bond ourselves by attaching our hearts with total trust to some provider of love and protection is the instinct to worship i.e. the “Worship Instinct”. We worship anyone who we trust to meet our core needs, depend upon for life wisdom, for whom we feel a great sense of adoration and whom we conclude ourselves to be totally dependent. Trust bonds cause us to attach our needs, adore and become totally dependent on the object of or bonding.
Trust Bonds
The mechanics of trust bonding is found in Heb 4:1-2 which describes the mechanics of attaching faith to an object.
Hebrews 4:1-2 Therefore, since the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us be careful that none of you be found to have fallen short of it. 2 For we also have had the gospel preached to us, just as they did; but the message they heard was of no value to them, because those who heard did not combine it with faith.
The writer explains that the Exodus Generation failed to benefit from the gospel that was preached to them because they refused to combine the message with their faith. The word combine is the Grk sugkerannumi meaning, to combine, to mix together, to unite, to attach. In this passage the trust bond they failed to form was with God and His gospel message. We form a trust bond when we attach our faith//trust in a person
Lets look at a series of principles to gain an understanding of this instinct to bond, which is part of worship.
Principles of Trust Bonds
1. God designed the human soul to be able to attach to others with trust. Attachment is a connection of one soul to another that occurs when we totally trust the person and believe they will meet our needs.
2. Babies instinctively form a trust bond with those who care for them. Attachment is driven by the need for love and need for stability & security. All babies are driven to bond with their caregivers. Born without God, our only option is to bond with people.
3. A trust bond is an attachment that opens the trusting soul to total influence. When we attach, we attach our faith/trust to the person to love us, treat us kindly and not abandon us. Attaching causes us to hold a high, adoring view of the person and makes us open and vulnerable to the influence of their beliefs, attitudes, expressions and behaviors.
4. This instinct to trust & attach is the instinct to worship someone or thing. Our bond is based on need and opens the core needs of our hearts that only God can meet. Connecting core needs is part of worship. Part of worshipping God is humbling ourselves and looking to Him to meet our core needs.
5. Children sense they are helpless and look for someone to fully trust. Babies are fearful and have no illusions about their own human ability being sufficient to keep them safe of provide their needs. This is the soul condition Jesus suggests to the disciples in Mat 18:3.
6. Children attach to parents, peers, mates, children and hopefully God. Children attach to people: first, parents who they look to like God; peers who become a primary source of influence; mates to whom we depend upon for love and hopefully God, if they are given a good model and choose to pursue God for themselves. I pray now that my children will understand their need and pursue God on their own.
7. We grant the objects of our attachments the power to influence us. Whosoever we trust with our hearts has great power to influence what we believe and great power to hurt us if they reject us. This is why “being in love” at an early age is usually a mistake that leads to a broken heart. Going steady in high school inevitably causes a bond to form that feels like a marriage. Add sex and the bond is complete. When it inevitably breaks up, the result is a broke heart that feels like a divorce and scars the soul
8. We naturally love and emulate those people to whom we bond. Our trust bonds open us to the influence of those to whom we bond. We naturally adopt the ideas and emulate the model they present to us. Children either believe what their parents believe or react by believing the opposite. Regardless, children will talk, walk and act like their parents and then their peers.
9. The consistent goodness & giving of parents with bonded children has a major influence on what ideas children adopt to form their belief systems. Children bond with parents. When parents treat their children with grace and love, children will want to be like their parents and follow their examples. They in turn will pass the same values and behaviors down to their own children. This is how the church builds a Godly nation.
10. The failure to be consistent, to be present, to be loving, to have an open soul, to train/teach, to provide, to communicate, to be affectionate, demonstrate integrity and to set an example of following Christ has a major influence on a bonded child’s belief system. When parents who have been mistreated themselves pass their hurt and anger down to their children, the same pain will be developed in their children. They in turn will pass their pain down to the next generation – Exo 20:5.
Importance of Bonding
One of the most important issues in our lives is the formation of trust bonds. To whom we attach our hearts and open ourselves up to will determine who influences our beliefs and how much unresolved pain we will carry into our adult life. When you ask yourself why you feel the way you do inside and why you have specific problems that seem to be a mystery, look back at your parents and your primary influences. You will often find that those you trusted the most are also the ones who hurt you the most. The reason for so much pain is that when we bond with someone and they break the bond through some form of betrayal, it causes us to feel knifed in our core. Trust bonds were not designed to be broken, like marriage, one of the major trust bonds, was not meant to end up in divorce. Broken trust bonds are the source of deep unresolved pain in most of the human race and a major hindrance to trusting God.
Influenced by Bonding
We almost always pick up the mind-set and ideas of those who were most dear to us. We also find ourselves emulating the relationship approaches of our primary caregivers. For example, when you were a child, you observed the way your parents related to one another. You made an image of each parent and their relationship and stored it deep in your heart. This image is called an imago by Harville Hendrix in his book, “Getting the Love you Want”. When you go to select a mate, you will compare your potential selections to these images. You will compare the way you relate to that person to the image of how your parents related. This is true even if your parents related horribly with one another. When you find someone that resembles one or both of your parental images, that person will feel very familiar to you. When you find another to whom you relate in a similar fashion as your parents related, it will feel like home to you. You will be strongly attracted to that person and their relating style, even if the whole situation is unhealthy. Perhaps you understand now how you ended up in a relationship that is similar to your parent’s relationship.
Trust – Worship God
The ultimate object of trust and worship is God. Only He is able to meet our core needs and only He will never fail to give us the perfect provision of unconditional love. When we bond with people with the idea that they can meet our needs, we always end up disappointed and disillusioned. We end up hurt and confused about ourselves and about how relationships are supposed to work. How many people do you know that are angry and jaded about love relationships? Most of us spend the rest of our lives trying to overcome the damage done to our souls through the trust bonds we make early in life. Our early bonds that we formed were beyond our control because God designed us to bond with our caregivers. It was Adam’s sin and the psychological damage it has caused in the whole human race that causes bonding to be problematic. If you are now an adult, you must make very wise choices about who you bond with and to what degree you allow the bond to impact you.
Overcome your Pain
If you are reading this and you are living with damage that came to you through the sins of your parents, do not give up or lose heart. God has made a way to overcome the pain and false ideas we built as children. Exchanging our old ideas we developed before we began to listen to God’s word for the principles of God’s own mind is the focus of life after salvation and the purpose of this workbook. It is my goal to present the “how to” of the transformation process. Stay tuned for the next installment where we will discuss the building blocks of our ideas that we put together as we go through the normal stages of human development.
Father, help us discern the deep longings of our hearts so that we might direct them toward you. Help us also to discern the unresolved pain in our hearts from the trust bonds that were broken by those we adored. Teach us how to rethink our disillusionment and tear down our self protective walls so that we can trust you with our whole hearts.
Questions for Self
1. Are you aware of your longings for love, acceptance, belonging, significance? These are your God give needs.
2. Istead of feeling your desires, do you feel nothing? Are you numb?
3. Do you remember how your parents related with each other?
4. Do you fid yourself attracted to someone who thinks and acts like one of your parents?
5. Are you in a relationship where you are recreating the parent image?
6. Are you willing to break your uhealthy habitual relating strategies?
View all posts in the Transformation Workbook series
