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 

 

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!