This is the fourth in a series of steps I took in my spiritual journey. I pray you gain tremendous insight into the spirit realm as I take you through the years on the journey that would, one day, end at the throne of God.
When I started this spiritual journey, I had innumerable questions and was desperate to find the answers. I felt like a trustworthy journalist who was willing to go to any length to get to the bottom of all the contradictions - opinions and ideologies - and come to grips with any reality I discovered. It seems and sounds like I was so cool, but as I write it now, I realize I had so many more questions than I ever thought and hadn’t really arrived at the point of being willing to submit to whatever I found. In all honesty, I can say I was hoping to find something: an end to my feelings of inferiority and insecurity — the very things we all must deal with in our lives. These two things, if not dealt with, can wreck our lives.
I was hoping by learning about the human mind and how it works, I would be able to overcome them and live the life I’d only imagined. I imagined my mind should be organized and packed with wisdom, understanding, and discernment. I hoped I could discover that my fellow human beings had gotten a grip on their minds, if not arrived at a much more complete inner- world view than I possessed. I figured if they had some really good ideas, but only had gotten close, I could get mankind over the finish line.
I’d already started putting many things together in my own mind and discovered that, though I had a multitude of general questions, there were really just a few specific questions once the general questions were boiled down to …
‘Why are we here?’
‘What is mankind?’
‘Who or what is God?’
Photo by João Jesus from Pexels
In seeking the answers, I discovered that what I was really after was to better understand why people (well, me, really) act the way they do, especially when there are many possible responses and we humans choose only one at a time. Most of our responses seem to be based on a reaction of perceived love-or-threat and/or truth-or-lie. (Yes, there are many ways of complicating this, but life does boil down to these responses.)
So there I was reading the usual Freud, Jung, and Adler commentaries and case studies. Did you know Sigmund Freud was a cocaine addict? Neither did I until I read his biography. But I digress. I was vastly interested in studying pleasure, pain, knowledge, motivation, nature versus nurture, rationality, consciousness, mental health and illness, and personal development and was eager to utilize the wisdom I gained to find my place in the world. There was so much potential and the possibilities were seemingly endless!
Until I started to deeply consider many ideas, I was very open-minded. I quickly discovered that these men and women could not agree on basic principles of the basis of human behavior. When all was said and done, these psychologists confused me as to what makes us “human.” Fortunately, a man arose from the clamor and concluded, “To err is human; to forgive, divine.”
“Ah ne’er so dire a Thirst of Glory boast,
Nor in the Critick let the Man be lost!
Good-Nature and Good-Sense must ever join;
To err is Humane; to Forgive, Divine.”
To study mankind, we must adhere to firmly established truth and there was far too much “pixie dust” in most of their ideas for me. Adler and Jung seemed the closest to reality as it appeared to me because they included concepts of God. I determined that those who excluded God from the equation were already wrong. To wit, Skinner, Piaget, and Maslow’s theories did not appeal to me because they were mistaken about mankind’s position within the universe from the get-go.
Evolution theory cannot begin to explain the origin of life, let alone the reason for life. All these psychologists who adhered to evolution theory, therefore, were eliminated from consideration. (For Pete’s sake! I had a near-death miracle that included voices of God and Satan. If these theorists could not include the whole truth, how was I to agree with them?)
As I narrowed my scope of reason and logic to, well, reason and logic, I increasingly became more and more suspicious of the methods and studies because they all seemed to have a preconceived slant to them. These seemed to be rather self-propagating and self-serving as if psychology as a whole required an additional … something. This really was the gorilla in the room for me and many people around the world. There seemed a basic “illness” or “fatal flaw” inside all human beings that caused us to be and remain broken that was being either avoided or unknown and most certainly not discussed let alone dealt with.
“For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.”
That “illness” inside all human beings is sin. Sin is rebellion against God. The problem all humanity has is that we are subject to the sin curse that arises like smoke from the Meal Covenant between mankind and Satan (the devil) which was formed when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. That covenant remains in full force today and the only way out of it is to enter the Blood Covenant in Jesus Christ. He is the only One who redeemed sinful (all) mankind so we no longer have to remain subject to Satan’s tyranny of sin.
The study of Psychology ended for me when I had my nervous breakdown. At that point, I had studied psychology for 20 years — and I still crashed! With all that learning and perspective, I should have known what to do as the house of cards started to fall. In that moment of stark and utter darkness, I came to the very firm understanding that the problem isn’t simply in our head, the spiritual battle is. Until psychology as a science owns that hard and fast truth, that we are right smack in the middle of the battle for our lives, it will ultimately fail to offer the help it aspires to provide. Until then, the best the field can offer a human being is counseling and medication.*
Enjoy this teaching from the wonderful people at The Bible Project.
Prayer
Father God, I lift my face with my eyes focused on You as they are the windows to my soul. I ask that You would illuminate my eyes with your glory and lead me and inspire me to freedom of mind. I have been in bondage and I want out. I ask that You would break these chains from my soul. I confess I have believed that by seeking knowledge I might have the power to overcome my personal issues and the problems of the world. I release this ideology to You now, my Lord and my God. I hoped by learning about the human mind from a humanistic standpoint that I would gain the correct perspective, but that never materialized. The world seems filled with psychological concepts and “psychobabble” that has led many people astray, Lord. The mass media, governments, marketers and advertisers, and corporations use psychology to manipulate and control while counselors, sports teams, and life coaches use it to help people do their best. Psychology permeates society in manifold ways and I need Your divine assistance to gain freedom from its clutches once and for all. I repent of, renounce, and reject the use of motivational material based on psychological concepts that do not line up with the truth. Please lead me away from the trust of the ideas of fallen man and into Your loving arms! In Jesus’ holy name I pray, amen.
*If you are currently seeing a counselor and taking medications, do not stop treatment until you have been completely freed from depression. Do not do a “faith walk” only hoping God will heal you. Unless God has specifically instructed you to do so, remain on your prescribed program until your professional(s) release you from it.
Banner photo by Josh Felise on Unsplash