God Gave You A Mind, Heart, Body, & Spirit. Why?

God gave you a human nature -- a mind and heart, body and spirit -- to grow closer to him.

The Human Mind

The mind houses cognition, where people think about their life experiences, store past learning, plan for future contingencies, and make choices about whether or not they seek God as an intimate companion. 

For all who seek a living relationship with the Trinity, the mind plays a crucial role, capable not only of conversing with God, but of understanding God’s self-disclosure received through the Bible, God’s living and lively Word, which conveys a historical record regarding God’s attributes and expectations about people’s personalities and patterns of behavior.

For good reason Paul says, “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Ro 12:2). 

The pursuit of God requires intellectual commitment, a hunger to know God interpersonally, and a willingness to develop conceptual constructs in accord with the Word of God and in the person of Christ. To think about God is a good thing, to pray to him even better, asking what matters to him, and what his plans are for one’s life. This takes the discipline, mental focus, and thoughtfulness that only the mind can bring. 

The Human Heart

While the mind plays a crucial role in self-understanding and perceiving enough about God to trust in him, it is the heart, one’s emotional attitude, where God encounters the person.

Whether it is God speaking through the prophets to the Israelites or Christ speaking about what really matters in a relationship with the Father, the heart holds high status in the eyes of the Lord.

“I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the Lord. They will be my people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me with all their heart” (Jer 24:7).

Parents want their children to love them. Spouses want to give and receive love. Friends share love through their loyalty and enjoyment of each other. The Trinity desires to experience heartfelt human love, and wants persons to know and trust God's love for them.

Carrying on a relationship with God brings inclusion in the active love flowing between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Though it has received little emphasis in the history of the Church, God is far more interested in people feeling warmly connected to him than he is in all the rites and rituals and rules combined—and not just connected by way of membership in the church, but interpersonally connected to the Lord by way of attraction, excitement, curiosity, delight, and celebration. 

Jesus experienced John as the beloved disciple precisely because John more than all the rest cared for Jesus, treasuring the time they could spend together, the many talks they shared, the good times and frightening times they walked through together as friends, including the Last Supper, where John, alone among the disciples, rested his head on Christ’s shoulder, and at the cross, where Jesus entrusted his mother Mary to John’s tender, faithful care.

The sharing of one’s emotions with God is not limited to love, but within that love, encompasses occasions of frustration, confusion, depression, irritability, complaint, anguish, insecurity, anxiety, loneliness, and even doubt. God, for his part, never turns a deaf ear or tries to change the subject in order to cut short a person’s cathartic release. The Lord draws especially near when one is processing and ventilating human emotion, knowing that some feelings are crucial to express before gaining a larger perspective. David, the Psalmist, a man after God’s own heart, knew this well.

The Human Body

God views the human body as good. He created it. He wants people to cherish it. “Do you not know,” Paul says, “that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?” (1 Cor 6:19). The human body—whose tangible bone and tissue, muscle and sinew, brain and spinal cord, central and autonomic nervous systems—is home to that mystery called the human spirit, something that scientists can never explain. Paul declares that the body and spirit are raised together in a personal resurrection that transfigures the corruptible biological body into an incorruptible one like Jesus Christ’s (1 Cor 15:39-44; Ro 8:23).

Yet persons are called by God to live in their bodies in the here and now: touching, tasting, seeing, hearing, moving, dancing, making love, playing sports, walking, running, swimming, exercising, eating, drinking; using one’s hands to express caring, write a poem, create a science experiment, or fold in prayer; lifting one’s arms to embrace another with a hug, carry a load of groceries, shovel snow, or praise the Lord: surely reason to celebrate the body—as does the Son of Man during his time on earth. 

As embodied persons, human beings need techniques for reducing the distraction of body tensions that mount in a stressful day. Teeth grinding, chest tightness, migraines, or lower back pain need attention not only for bodily health, but for finding the source of the underlying psychological stressors; not only for mental health, but for the health of one’s relationship with the Trinity. Relaxing the muscles and deepening the breathing helps the Holy Spirit move through the human body to inspire the human spirit.

The Human Spirit

The spirit rounds out the fullness of human nature, the gift of God to Homo sapiens, a gift that differentiates them from other mammals, bringing a level of awareness, choice, and responsibility unparalleled in the animal or plant kingdoms.

While no field of study can objectively account for the spirit within human existence, we can say that when people are dispirited they are depersonalized, losing the sense of meaning and purpose that would otherwise enliven them. This awareness increases the trend for health professionals, including psychotherapists, to respect and utilize spirituality as a healing force within human nature.

The human spirit is not an ethereal, otherworldly affair, but rather a concrete, embodied dimension of one’s grounding in Christ, the “life-giving spirit” (1 Cor 15:45). While persons can live apart from a relationship with God, they cannot abandon his image within them as the true origin of their existence. They can repress the spirit that comes as part of human nature, or distort it to such an extent that their behavior is far removed from God’s will. But they cannot escape the reality that God loves them and is calling them into his family.

Christ’s entry upon this earth unites the human spirit with God the Holy Spirit, who in turn assists the human spirit to form an intimate, inner connection with God, a connection that generates a conscience, not in the sense of Freud’s rule-shackled superego, but in the sense of a living union with Christ, an inspired yet vulnerable capability to know and do the Father’s will. 

In other words, the Holy Spirit is sent by the Father and Son to indwell the person, bearing witness with their spirit that they belong to God. “And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Gal 4:6). Invited to serve God with the same intentionality that Christ did and the Holy Spirit does, individuals can now learn to do so, not by following the letter of the law, but because God is so loveable. 

For more, read:

TRUSTING IN THE TRINITY:

COMPASS PSYCHOTHEOLOGY APPLIED 

 

Childhood Origins of Personality Health or Dysfunction

Human development is complex, yet comprehensible. A human being’s biogenetic heritage, psychosocial development, and spiritual propensity all influence the ongoing development of personality and interpersonal relationships. 

There are sensitive periods for particular developmental tasks which emerge at particular times during this process. Infants, for example, are genetically predisposed to form an attachment bond with an adult in the first year of life. Yet whether or not this developmental need is met depends upon the intricate interplay between an infant’s biological predisposition, the style of parenting the infant perceives, and the immediate socio-economic environment.

How does compass psychotheology regard the developmental process? By viewing personality and interpersonal development as significantly influenced by the ratio of core trust versus core fear a child experiences. If core trust prevails, the child grows increasingly capable of exercising compass choices. Love in rhythm with Assertion, Weakness with Strength. But if core fear outweighs core trust, personality contracts, leaving the child fewer and more rigid behavioral options. 

Thus, in compass terms, the process of personality development is framed within a continuum that ranges from the actualizing balance of compass living to the rigidities of trends or patterns. All four compass points are present as potentiality in children, since humans are made in the image of God.

The developmental tasks that lead toward personality wholeness emphasize some compass points more than others, depending upon the child’s particular stage of growth. In the first year of life, in which infants and their parents enter a dance of budding intimacy, the Love compass point is the primary locus for healthy intrapsychic and interpersonal growth. As infants are cuddled, talked with, bathed, and changed with caring consistency, they learn about love in sensorimotor ways, developing a sense of trust from the care they receive.

But there are potential risks for the development of secure attachment. Infants may receive infrequent, disengaged care from a mother who is depressed and withdrawn on the weakness compass point. Or, if an infant is biologically predisposed to irritability, the parent may respond in kind, especially if the parent already exaggerates the Assertion compass point.   

In the second year, toddlers explore the Assertion compass point by testing interpersonal boundaries as they investigate their immediate world. Avidly curious, they move to learn, searching out the nooks and crannies of their universe with their bodies, hands, and mouths. If their parents set limits with kindness, toddlers learn a rhythm between rudimentary self-expression and restraint. They protest out of Assertion and acquiesce from Weakness, while feeling grounded in the comfort of the Love compass point.

Toddlers will have difficulty developing this rhythm if parents rigidly over-control or under-control their exploration. Toddlers may respond by developing a compensatory rigidity of their own, moving into frequent temper tantrums or inhibited fearful behavior. The situation can be complicated by the toddler’s predisposition to shyness. The potential result is either Assertion or Weakness, exaggerated at the expense of a rhythm between the two.

Preschool children expand the context of Assertion to include the exploration of their creativity. They test limits with newfound verbal skills. Increased social and cognitive skill brings more sensitivity to their own and others' feelings as well as more awareness of behavioral standards. One of the consequences is short-term healthy guilt. In compass terms, children of this age are deepening their experience of the Weakness compass point.

But if preschoolers are frequently judged or punished, or if they are primarily ignored when rude or aggressive, then their behavior polarizes into incipient withdrawn, dependent, or aggressive trends.   

During the school age years, the heart of motivation lies in the Strength compass point. Children experience a sense of competence when they read out loud, complete a science project, or collect coins. These activities are fueled by the desire to accomplish something concrete—an end product that compares favorably to the efforts of their peers. 

When confidence grows in rhythm with healthy Weakness, school age children develop a beginning ability to assess their strengths, yet are realistic about their limitations. But if given an over-inflated sense of their capabilities, school age children can exaggerate the Strength compass point, feeling entitled to praise with little effort. Or if they are treated as incapable or unintelligent, they can retreat to the Weakness compass point, avoiding the needed risks for growth.   

Then adolescence, that period of life when the challenge of existential identity awakens. This is not to imply that a child forms little sense of identity before adolescence (or subsequently, for that matter). It means, rather, that identity formation takes precedence at this stage in order for the development of an actualizing person to proceed. Identity is a developmental task that calls upon the entire Self Compass.

The increasing ability to think abstractly allows adolescents to construct theoretical concepts. To see one’s self as separate from others. To begin the search for ideals. To pursue dialogue with God about goals, friends, and work choices. In actualizing development, adolescents learn to know and prize themselves as persons separate from their family. They cooperate with their parents when appropriate, yet take stands if they feel their identity is at risk. These growing abilities reflect the initial rhythmic relating of loving assertion and caring strength.

But adolescents whose legitimate decisions are frequently preempted by over-controlling parents can respond by rebelling, thus exaggerating the Assertion compass point through active or passive aggression. Or they can respond by complying with the identity proscribed by the parent. They retreat into the deflated Weakness of the avoidant pattern or distorted love of the dependent.

By young adulthood, the developmental focus becomes the search for intimacy. Young adults on an actualizing path give love to intimate others. And they seek to receive it. They experiment with immersing themselves in another person while preserving their own identity. But few actually experience love in dynamic rhythm with assertion, and strength in balance with humility.

In reality, the majority of young adults function with a partial Self Compass. Rigid responses are congealing into trends or patterns. If the response is aggressive, then one refutes love by insulting or arguing with those who try to offer it. If controlling, one strives for perfection to earn love, yet one’s judgmental behavior damages others' esteem. If dependent, one sacrifices one’s identity to people-pleasing neediness. If withdrawn, one pulls back from love, seeing intimacy as too dangerous a risk. 

If left unchecked, the consequences of these imbalanced responses replace a sense of intimacy with God and others with a growing isolation, even alienation.

By adulthood, the developmental initiative centers on participation in community. If the actualizing process prevails, the life of an adult reflects the LAWS of personality and relationships in one’s work, family life, and interest in the common good. 

It is as if every adult needs to revisit the developmental tasks of 1) forming attachment bonds with others, 2) asserting one’s identity and individual differences, 3) handling vulnerability and anxiety without undue stress, and 4) developing esteem for self and others.

Three Ways to Keep Christianity Simple

Have you ever wondered as a Christian believer how to keep your faith simple and effective over all the years of your life? Have you wondered how to keep your first love for Christ alive in spite of all the cultural, financial, and psychological pressures of modern life?   

I'm going to share three insights that I hope are as meaningful to you as they have been for me in keeping your personal walk with Jesus zestful and focused.

1. Keep in mind that the core teaching of Christianity has to do with the Triune God: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. This is a great mystery and we ought to feel no shame in receiving it as a gift of divine revelation, rather than a product of our own rational deduction of what we think God could or should be. 

Other world religions have core beliefs about God that must also be accepted through faith and not rationally deduced from experience. For instance, Hinduism professes to believe in a million gods, whereas Buddhism teaches that there is no personal God at all. 

So when the Bible shows us the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit each acting as fully God in different historical situations, while existing together as One God, we do well to make this a primary building block of our view of reality. This teaching of the Trinity is especially meaningful to me as a theologian-psychologist because it answers so many important questions about humanity's existence and God's existence; how they are similar and how they differ.

We know from anthropology, psychology, and sociology that humans do not live successfully in isolation. And from your practical experience you know that those people who are loners do not do well in life. They become depressed, develop no social skills, and over time lose even the ability to converse meaningfully. There are two mental disorders that lead to this condition, known as the avoidant personality disorder and the schizoid personality disorder. In both conditions individuals isolate themselves from others, and hide in the margins of life, work, and civilization. Before long, their emotions shrivel up and their cognition becomes bleak and barren. Their spirit dies within them, and even their bodies look forlorn and forsaken.

Looking back at what the Word of God teaches us, however, offers a remedy. God declared way back in Genesis, during the foundational epoch of an ancient civilization, that it is not good for persons to live alone. Why? Because, from God's point of view He has created them for friendship, fellowship, love, empathy, communication, communion, trust, and lifelong interpersonal learning.

In other words, just as God Himself is an interpersonal Trinity, so we are made in His image as interpersonal selves. Whatever else we are called to know or to do, we can never get away from the universal calling to become meaningfully involved with others as God is and does.

Knowing this keeps your life simple in this way: you dedicate yourself to become a lifelong student of personality development and social communication, so that you're always gaining greater facility in meeting, talking to, caring for, and living together with friends, acquaintences, and family members. This calling to caring relationships won't end with your personal death, but is resurrected with your body and personality for eternal pursuit in heaven.

Think of how both in the Bible and today God is always involved in relationships — perceiving, speaking, listening, caring, confronting, feeling, thinking, and acting. And you are invited to do the same!

But you can forsake your calling in Christ altogether by insisting so vehemently on your own selfish ways that you separate yourself from God and spend eternity in hell.

Instead, why not spend your life drawing ever closer in your thoughts and feelings, sensations and spirit, to the living Triune God, and through God's love for others, to them as well. Why not treat even strangers or newcomers as potential new friends? God does, or else he never would have chosen you while you were yet His enemy.

2. Make the Bible, God's personal revelation of who He is and what He expects from you, the foundation of your life. That means reading it many times through, on your own or in a Bible study group, all the while you are going through school, working at a job, or raising a family.

You will no doubt run up against many human opinions, some of them from very smart people, who will contradict what you learn and believe in Scripture. But where were they when God laid the foundation of the Cosmos? When He set the stars in heaven and created the fish in the ocean? When He made the thousand types of butterflies, and formed them to emerge as delicately winged and beautifully colored creatures out of former worms?

Recently a person emailed me to say he had read a Bible verse in his daily devotional that reinforced just what he was in the process of doing with his relationships:

"Don’t lie to each other, for you have stripped off your old sinful nature and all its wicked deeds. Put on your new nature, and be renewed as you learn to know your Creator and become like him" (Col 3:9-10).

3. Many atheistic scientists and pseudo-philosophers have been quite enamored with themselves during the short time their enfleshed skeletons walk around, and they make grand pronouncements about God, truth, and meaning. But far greater heed should be paid to Jesus Christ, the Son who was sent by the Father from heaven to teach us about God, truth, and the meaning of life. Don't let His voice from the New Testament or His Spirit whom He sends to indwell you, get lost in the shuffle. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me (Jn 14:6)."

It's amazing how well you can do in keeping your first love for Christ, and developing a humble spirit for learning the Word of God, by just placing the Trinity, the Bible, and the love of Christ for you at the center of your consciousness. 

And if you need a little more encouragement, I invite you to read the Compass Series books that my wife and I have provided for fellow Christians or those interested in the Christian faith. In fact, when you read our words, we feel a family feeling toward you, a bond that originates in the Trinity and is passed to us on earth. You are why we write, and we always pray that our concepts are just what you are hoping to find.

May I say, since it's that time of year, Merry Christmas to you, and may God the Father, Son, and Spirit draw very close to you in the coming year!

The Narcissist, the Bible, and the Holy Spirit

What goes on in the mind of the Narcissistic Boaster?

I wait for you to admire me, to reflect back to me my astuteness. Accomplishments. Attractiveness. I am quite irresistible, you know.

And because my essence emanates these extraordinary qualities, it will take no effort on my part before you recognize them.

And applaud me. Compliment me. Orient your attention on me. 

Me.

If you try to steal my glory, you will find yourself eclipsed.

After all, it is I with whom you are competing.

With omnipotent self-assurance, Boaster patterned persons follow in the footsteps of their namesake, the Greek god Narcissus, who according to legend, fell in love with his own reflection in a pool.

Paul understood the Narcissistic pattern. Of his years as Saul of Tarsus, Paul wrote: “I was so enthusiastic about the traditions of my ancestors that I advanced head and shoulders above my peers in my career” (Gal 1:13-14). 

Christ was unimpressed. On the road to Damascus, Saul was confronted and rendered helpless; made temporarily blind, in fact. This was followed by three years in the desert. 

And then…Paul writes, “If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit,” Paul says. “Let us not become conceited, competing against one another, envying one another” (Gal 5:25-26).

These are the words of one who chose to face and surrender his Narcissistic pattern to God. Of one whose core fear was being replaced by actualizing trust. “For God is my witness, whom I serve in my spirit in the gospel of his Son” (Rom 1:9). The Spirit is the source of Paul’s serving God through his spirit. Paul’s spiritual core is yielded to God, flowing with the rivers of living water in an actualizing rhythm of weakness and strength, love and assertion. Paul did not secure such a life in the Spirit; rather, he risked realizing it imperfectly, as does anyone who grows in Christ.

Risking trust in the Lord. How? “The Spirit assists us in our weaknesses; for we do not know for what we should pray as we ought, but the Spirit makes appeal (in our behalf) with inarticulate groanings” (Rom 8:26-27). 

Fear is still present. Anxiety still spirals in wormy wisps within one’s spiritual core. But the Spirit employs the vulnerability one feels, gently handling the enormity of one’s weaknesses, and intercedes on one’s behalf. A person prays with the visceral immediacy of one’s whole being—mind and heart, body and spirit—by enlisting the help of the Holy Spirit, who understands the mind of God.

The Spirit’s aim is not to eliminate a person’s humanity, but to work through it with the “water of rebirth and renewal” (Titus 3:5). For it is the Holy Spirit who circumcises the heart so that the righteousness required by the Torah is fulfilled by those who walk in the Spirit (cf. Rom 8: 4).

The result of such surrender? Receiving as gift a growing core trust in the Spirit. Trust that erases core fear sufficiently for one’s personality to work for good; to be conformed by that same Spirit into one’s unique image of Christ.

As the spiritual core is opened to the cleansing flow of the rivers of living water, the core grows more free from the tyrannies of one’s narrowness (cf. 1 Cor 3:18-23).

For more, read:

COMPASS PSYCHOTHEOLOGY: 

WHERE PSYCHOLOGY and THEOLOGY REALLY MEET

The Inner Life of The Christian Trinity

Christ’s personality both shows how human beings are called to live and provides insight into all three persons of the Trinity, who are One in creating and redeeming humanity, inviting people to develop whole personalities and loving relationships, where loneliness and hostility are diminished, and where individuals learn to express their uniqueness in as original a manner as the Lord’s.

While God may be said in a certain sense to remain inscrutable and beyond human knowing, nevertheless, in another sense, because of the Trinity’s direct appearance and involvement in human history, it is possible to house the Self Compasses of each Trinity member within the unity of one Godhead. This arrangement, for diagrammatic purposes, illustrates the unity of the Triune God, while at the same time differentiating between the personal identities of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

                                                                     

The individual Self Compasses show that Trinity members relate through rhythms of communication and communion, the same way that they call human beings to relate to one another and to the Trinity. If one only looks for it, the Scriptures from Genesis to Revelation pulse with examples of God as a supremely innovative agent, brimming with creative motivation and action. Conceptualizing God’s personality as three Self Compasses within a larger circle of the divine self does not imply that God is containable, but rather implies an interpersonal selfhood that allows for infinite variations of self-expression and interpersonal exchanges among Trinity members who are nevertheless one God.

God’s inscrutability lies primarily in the fact that no one can predict what the Lord will say, think, or do next, other than in the compass sense that whatever God does will not contradict the health and wholeness of his being.

The larger circle encompassing the Trinity portrays the mystery of God’s diversity-in-unity, a circle that is not a physical barrier, but rather symbolizes the one God who is all in all. The back-and-forth arrows connecting each Trinitarian member to the others indicate how each Person exists in everlasting rhythmic presence to the other two, empowering the exchange of ideas, conversations, and emotions within an overarching essence of love, expressed through caring self-transcendence that respects, delights in, knows, and wills the highest good of one another.

Some such encounters between Trinity members are recorded for our benefit in Scripture. At Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan River, the Father says, communicating his own point of view and self-identity, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” He is not talking to himself the way a person might self-reflect, but actually addressing the Son with sincere words that convey the depth of his love for Jesus. At the same moment, the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus, anointing him with power for ministry, and then drives him into the wilderness where Christ must stand alone for a season, firming up his identity as the Son while learning to rely completely upon the Father and Spirit in preparation for his public ministry.

 

Compass psychotheology asserts that this dynamic interplay of the three Persons who are one God has always distinguished God’s essence, and will always characterize God’s relationality (theologians call this the immanent Trinity, meaning what God is outside of human history). Most importantly from the human perspective, this interplay creates a trustworthy basis for the Trinity presence as infinitely caring and intentionally creative dialogue partners across the temporal span of human history (the economic Trinity, which means God’s self-revelation in space, time, history, and personality).

Now note how the Trinity diagram focuses on the phrase “I AM.” Of all the names attributed to God in the Bible—the Lord of Hosts, the Lord God Almighty, the Holy One of Israel—there is none more revealing than “I AM,” for when God reveals this name to Moses (Ex 3:14), and Christ applies this name to himself (Jn 8:58), God means that his existence as the “I AM” transcendent Subject is the ultimate ground of being that renders all else contingent and temporal.

Finally, notice how the “I AM” of each Trinitarian Person fully indwells the others, showing the interpenetration of freely willed devotion, each Trinity member’s identity so secure, so engaged in self-transcendent love, that there is no existence apart from being one God.

In other words, each Person of the Godhead does not consider self-identity and autonomy something to be grasped at or competitively sought, but rather as foundational to adoring, cherishing, and actualizing the uttermost fulfillment of one another.

The Trinity indwells one another non-invasively and non-competitively, generating the perpetual glory of being one God, as Jesus explains: “I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (Jn 17: 21-23).

For more, read:

TRUSTING IN THE TRINITY: COMPASS PSYCHOTHEOLOGY APPLIED